The Divorce He Asked For, The Empire I Took Away novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: Old Block

Dex laughs at the assistant who thinks she can make wine, Liesl chains her vineyard gate, sends Coralee off the porch, and learns Dex has locked her notebooks in his lab.

Dex laughed first.

Then he looked around for the crew to laugh with him.

A couple of the younger guys did, because he signed their checks.

"Your vines," he said again. "Liesl, you sell grapes. I make wine."

"You sign wine," Winona said from her bin.

He didn't look at her.

He never had.

"Let me explain it slowly, so the crew understands too." He spread his hands like he was on a stage. "Nobody in this valley buys grapes from an assistant. You have no cellar. No tanks. No label. No crew."

"I have the vines."

"You have fruit that rots on the vine in three weeks." He tapped the barrel head where I'd signed. "Without my cellar, you can't make a drop."

Coralee laughed at that one.

It was the laugh she used at parties when a man said something he thought was clever.

I'd heard it since we were ten.

"Sundown," I said.

I walked back across the gravel toward my own fence.

Winona hauled herself off the bin and came with me, cane swinging.

Behind us the belt was still running and nobody had touched a grape.

"Get back to work," Dex yelled at them. "It's a Friday, not a funeral."

At the barn I found the logging chain Grandpa used to pull stumps.

It was rusty and heavier than I remembered.

Winona held the padlock in her teeth while I wrapped the chain around the Old Block gate.

Three loops.

Then a fourth, because I wanted to.

Twenty Arnott picking bins sat stacked inside the gate, white plastic with DEX ARNOTT stenciled on the side.

I dragged them out one at a time and lined them up along the road.

Winona counted them out loud.

By eleven, my shirt was soaked through and my hands were orange with rust.

"Your grandpa would've done this six years ago," she said.

"I know."

"I'm just saying it out loud. Somebody has to."

She clicked the padlock shut and handed me the key.

I put it on the chain around my neck, next to my wedding ring.

I'd taken the ring off in the barn.

I hadn't decided where to put it yet.

At two o'clock a white convertible came up my drive.

Coralee got out holding two iced coffees, the expensive kind from the bakery in Healdsburg.

Oat milk, two pumps of vanilla.

My order since college.

She'd changed out of the sundress into jeans and a soft gray sweater, my kind of clothes.

Her eyes were pink around the edges.

She'd fixed her mascara for it.

"Can I come up?" she said from the bottom step.

"No."

She came up anyway, three steps, and held out a coffee.

I didn't take it.

She set it on the porch rail beside me.

"Lee, I didn't do it to hurt you."

Nobody had called me Lee since fifth grade but her.

"You sent me a picture of you and my husband at midnight."

"Because I couldn't lie to you anymore. I'm the only one who was honest with you." She pressed her hand to her chest. "And you put my face on the internet. My mom cried for three hours. My boss can't look at me."

"Your boss is my husband."

"He's not going to be your husband."

She caught herself and softened it.

"I mean, it's over between you two. We both know that. I want to help make it clean."

"Clean."

"Dex is going to be fair. He told me in the car." She looked past me through the screen door, into the dark front hall. "There are just some papers he needs from the house. The old ranch files. Your grandpa's stuff."

"Which papers?"

"I don't know, the boring ones. In the study." She smiled at me, wet-eyed. "I could grab them and get out of your hair. You shouldn't have to deal with him."

Grandpa's study was at the end of the hall.

His roll-top desk, his ledgers, forty years of picking tickets in shoeboxes.

Dex hadn't set foot in there since the funeral.

"Cora," I said. "Who sent you?"

"Nobody sent me. I came because I love you."

"Then you'll understand when I say get off my porch."

She blinked.

"Liesl."

"You can walk down the steps. Or I can help."

Grandpa's old dog lifted his head off the porch boards and looked at her.

He didn't growl.

He didn't have to.

Coralee went down the steps backward, slowly.

At the bottom she stopped and her voice changed.

The sweetness drained right out of it.

"You think you're so special because you grew up on dirt. He made that wine famous. Not you."

"Take your coffee," I said, and held it out over the rail.

She didn't take it either.

She got in her convertible and spun gravel all the way to the road.

I poured both coffees into the rosebush.

Then I walked down the hall and locked the study door, and put that key on the chain too.

At sundown the twenty bins were still stacked by the road.

Nobody from Arnott came for them.

At 8:15 my phone buzzed.

Dex.

"FYI. Door codes and the lab are changed. You're off the payroll as of today."

A second text came while I was still reading the first.

"Your seven little green notebooks are in my lab. Locked. Company property, since you wrote them on company time."

Then a third.

"Keep your chain. I'll have your grapes by Labor Day either way."

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