Kimme picked up her cellphone from the desk and saw from the caller ID it was him. She stared hard at his name, looked away and exhaled and then back. She had ignored his call yesterday; she knew she might as well answer this one.
“Hi Dad.”
“I need a favor, Kimme.”
She bit down lightly on her lower lip, “Really nice of you to call, Dad. What’s that – oh, I’m well, thanks for asking.”
Speaking slowly, he said, “Oh come on, don’t start with that attitude, little girl. You know I’d ask.” He could be so patronizing.
“Right. Let me guess, you’ve been arrested for tax evasion and you need me to come to Miami and bail you out?”
He laughed, “I’d never get caught, you know that. I’m smart enough to hire the best scumbags around to complicate things and no minimum wage IRS flunky will ever figure out what I owe.”
“OK, then you got some twenty-year-old pregnant and you want to introduce me to my new mom?” Her real mom, probably all of twenty herself in the picture on her desk, smiled at her. She hit him with that one especially for her.
“I didn’t know you had such a low opinion of me, Kimme. How about this, rather than you continuing to make disparaging guesses, why don’t I tell you why I called?”
“Actually, I kinda like doing this. Can’t we just keep going, Daddy?”
But now he had taken control of the conversation. “I need you to travel to my 50th reunion in Ionia with me.”
With a million guesses, Kimme wouldn’t have hit on that. Was he kidding? Not likely. He was a lot of things – agelessly handsome, crafty, and as smooth as any pickpocket – but he was no kidder. He didn’t waste his precious time.
“Are you serious? You want me to chaperone you to your high school reunion? In Ionia? OK, Dad, ok, tell me why? Why the hell would you go? All you’ve done since I can remember was badmouth that place.”
“Same reason everybody goes – curiosity. I want to see if my guesses about people were right after fifty years. See if the football stud ended up doing road construction and reliving ‘the big game’ every weekend over cheap beer. Maybe see some ugly ducklings who look better now than they did then. I’m surrounded by women here who use every trick they can to fight off gravity. I doubt many of my high school classmates can afford the best plastic surgeons, so maybe I’d see ‘graceful aging’, if there is such a thing.”
“But not to show off the money and the tan, right?”
Without a trace of anger that she could detect he replied, “You know Kimme, I don’t need this. I need my daughter to come with me to a reunion. Will you do it for me, baby?” She knew he couldn’t be goaded into anything. He had always been this way, but she still felt it her duty to try. For her sake. And her mother’s.
Before she could answer, he added, “And of course I’ll pay for everything.”
“No Dad, if I’m going, I’m paying my own way. Got it?”
“Hey, just trying to make the decision easier. They can’t pay a winemaker in Santa Barbara that much.” And then, for the first time in a while, he surprised her. “Kimme. it’d mean a lot to me if you’d go. I need your help if I’m going to go.”
Disarmed, Kimme lost the will to continue her barrage and quietly replied, “Let me check the schedule around here, and I’ll get back to you. When is it?”
“Two weeks away, August 17th, but I’ll probably need you the whole week to get here, there and back to LA.”
“Alright, I’ll let you know.”
Two years ago she would have said no without worrying about coming up with a reason. After all, traveling with him meant spending several days with him, and that would violate her strategy of dealing with him only in small doses. But things were different now.
She could think of at least one good reason not to go. A few hotter days here and there in the summer months, rains that came unexpectedly in the usually dry August, or the descent of fires across the valley as had happened last year, could all push harvest timing around quickly. Leaving the grapes at a time like this could be disastrous, like taking a walk on the beach when steaks are on the grill.
There was nothing else on her calendar that would stop her from going, since she blocked out August, September and October each year for the harvest. She could make this excuse if she wanted to, even though she knew the reality. The sparkling grapes had already been harvested and based on the weather this year and the condition of the grapes, no one expected harvest until mid-September or later. And Paul could probably handle any emergency.
Paul was the owner of Lillian Lewis Vineyards. In some ways, he was the quintessential rich guy. He made his fortune in the energy business and decided to pursue his passion for wine, but what made him different was the way he did it. Rather than collecting ten thousand ridiculously expensive bottles, he started his own winery. Paul had no interest in just lending his fame to a 750ml bottle. He wanted to make memorable wine, so he learned the business from the bottom up. He planted and cultivated the first vines, tasted grapes alongside Kimme to understand when to harvest, learned blending techniques to produce the varietals, and visited restaurants and retailers to push his wines. And whenever possible, Paul was pouring tastes and talking to guests in the tasting room.
Kimme decided to talk to Paul, half hoping he would say she shouldn’t leave at such a critical time. Either way, a face-off with regret was coming, but she figured if someone was going to be disappointed, it shouldn’t be a man she respected as much as Paul.
He wasn’t in his office when she stopped by. She left a note and an hour later he poked his head through her doorway.
“Morning Kim,” he said in his baritone South Texas voice.
Kimme looked away from the weather report she had been reading on her computer screen and up at him. “Hi Paul. I’m guessing you were out in the fields. What did you think about the Chard grapes?”
“You were right, they’re still on the bitter side. Probably a month or six weeks away, you think?
“Yeah, about. Hey, I wanted to bounce something off you. My dad asked me to go somewhere with him in two weeks, probably gone for a week. It’s not good timing. I’d understand if you don’t want me to be gone.”
His eyes narrowed as he said, “You want me to say no?”
She hesitated with her answer, “I’m not sure what I want you to say, although no is probably easier for me to deal with.”
“You know Kim, I’ve known you for six years and in all that time, the only thing you ever told me about your dad was that your mom divorced him. The way you said it says a lot.”
“There’s not a lot else to say. We’re cordial but not close, mostly by my choice. He tries to stay in touch and I-”
Paul pulled a chair out and sat down. “You know I had a falling out with my daughter when she was, I don’t know, about twenty-five. For a long time, things were just barely cordial between us. She was mad and I didn’t like getting blamed for something I didn’t think was my fault and that’s how things were for years. But as I got older, we both started seeing that there wasn’t a lotta time left to decide if we wanted to try and talk things out. I called her first and, well, she wasn’t interested in talking, but we eventually worked through it.”
Kimme knew their situation wasn’t the same because Paul was a different man than her father.
“I know what you’re thinking, things are different with your dad and you, and maybe they are. But what’s the same is he’s all the family you got. And whatever happened between your mom and him happened a long time ago. I think you should give him a chance. I think you should go.”
Kimme unlocked eyes with Paul and looked down at her desk. Now she didn’t see that she had any choice, because not going would be like telling Paul he was wrong. And she would have to lie to her dad, although that was a lesser consideration.
She looked back at Paul, “You sure? What if something happens here?”
“It won’t, and if it does, I’ll be calling you, Kim. You can count on that,” he said with a wink and a nod.
So now she was going.
———————————-
Kimme made her flight arrangements to Miami before she texted him to let him know she was coming. She decided to let him pay her way to Grand Rapids, Michigan and back; after all, she was doing him a favor.
Two weeks came and went, and she boarded the plane out of LAX bound for Miami. Six hours to kill. During the flight she started and stopped two books and a movie on her iPad without investing any real time or attention in any of them. She was thinking of the typical daughter duty to her father. She knew he would hate that word, duty. Duty is obligation, repayment, and expectation. Duty is what you do for the weak, and she was about to do her duty for her old man, another phrase he wouldn’t like. But she also thought about what Paul had said about making amends before it’s too late. Did she care about that? There was no way for her to sort that out yet, she had been trying for two weeks. She would make that decision later.
She had decided it was best for her to spend one night in Miami before going on to Michigan to break up the flights, so she was headed to his condo in Key Biscayne. After leaving the Uber outside his building, she paused before going in, looking up at the nine stories and knowing his condo was on the top floor, of course. She felt nervous but didn’t understand why. It wasn’t like she hadn’t seen him recently. He was in L.A. last year and they had dinner. This felt different, like there was an expectation this time. She knew she had better push that feeling aside because nothing had really changed.
She knocked on his door and waited and was about to knock again when it opened. There he was in the stereotypical Miami outfit – white Capri pants with a pale sky-blue shirt, barefoot. Even at sixty-eight, his hair still had a healthy dose of his original black mixed in with the distinguished gray. He was almost flawless, other than the sunspots just below his hairline on his forehead. He was Miami.
While he held the door open with his left hand, he reached out with his right and took hers, drawing her to him. “Oh, it’s good to see you, little girl,” he said as he wrapped his arm around her back and hugged her. “Let me get your bag, honey.”
“Hi Dad. How are you doing?”
“Me? I’m great, great. How was your flight?”
She examined him closely. A quick glance from anyone would tell you this is a man who lived the life. But she had history to compare him to. His voice still started in a strong, confident place, but she noticed how it softened the longer he spoke. His eyes, bluer than his shirt, met and held hers and would have looked completely normal to most, but as she looked into them, she was counting the seconds between his blinks.
If she hadn’t been to his condo before, she would have needed some time to take it all in. The expensive furniture and art. The floor to ceiling windows, at least fifteen feet high facing east to the Atlantic Ocean shoreline. The white tiled floors. “The reward for applying yourself every day to what you do”, that’s what he called it. The place was immaculate, you wouldn’t even know anyone lived there.
He led the way to her room, and she put her bags down then followed him back to the living room. He had already opened a bottle of Screaming Eagle, knowing her preference for California wines, and he poured them both a glass and they sat, he on a couch and she in a chair to his left. They talked for an hour. He was worse than the last time she had seen him, now that she knew the signs to look for. His speech was slower than before, and his face frequently held a blank expression, until he caught himself and forced his mouth open and into a smile. Whenever she asked about him, he gave short, nondescript answers and kept trying to turn the conversation to her, the winery and Santa Barbara. The veneer of her dislike began to peel away in the face of his diminishment.
Kimme needed to try to sleep. Even though it was only 8:00 in her time zone, it was late here and they had a flight to catch mid-morning the next day. They retired to their rooms and Kimme laid down to rest, listening for his movements in the next room.
As she laid across the still-made bed, she remembered how they had gotten here. How he had chosen another over her mother, not out of love but out of opportunity, and not of a desire for permanence with the other woman, but out of a lusting for the temporary. The overnight change in a child’s world from the family rituals – dinners, bedtime stories, walks around the neighborhood – to separate lives with a mother this day and a father the next, both too busy when their lives were divided to keep up with the daily routines. The divergent paths of their three lives; his into monetary nirvana and the excesses it brought; her mother’s into devotion to daughter and work, ignoring her own needs; and Kimme’s into bitter defense of her victim mother. He was suffering now, but her mother had suffered too, until God decided she had suffered enough and ended it.
Fatigue from the long trip soon took over and she fell asleep, on fine linens to the sound of waves gently rolling over the white sands.
______________________
She woke around 7:00 and wandered out to the living room to find him sitting in a chair that faced directly towards the ocean and the sun, which was now just above the horizon casting a beam of sunlight directly across the water towards them. “Have you been up for a while?”
He must not have heard her come out of his room because her voice caused him to turn quickly in her direction. “Morning honey. Yeah, a few hours. I’d like to say I rise so I can catch the sunrise every day because that sounds romantic.”
“But untrue?”
“It’s a fringe benefit of waking up early every day. Hey, there are fresh berries and croissants and coffee in the kitchen, help yourself, ok?”
“Do you want anything?”
“No thanks, I’m just going to shower and finish packing. I have a limo picking us up at 8:30.”
Kimme grabbed a croissant, strawberries and a cup of coffee and walked out to the patio to eat. She couldn’t linger too long, but it was breathtaking, the sights and sounds and smells of the ocean. This city would be paradise, if it weren’t materialistic and pretentious and fake. Kimme had started calling Miami “Saltwater City” after her first visit here; it seemed like the need for conspicuous consumption never ended in this town, just as drinking saltwater made you thirstier than you were before.
After a quick shower and repacking of her bag, she stepped out of her bedroom and found him already dressed, packed and ready to go. It was 8:20; he was ready. On time is late. She could hear him thinking it.
“Do you need help with your bag, Dad?”
“Nope, I got it. Let’s head down. I’m sure the limo will be there, and it doesn’t hurt to leave early; traffic to the airport can be a bear sometimes.” He brought a single, rolling bag, and managed it through the hall and into and out of the elevator. Just as he said, the limo was waiting, and the driver loaded their suitcases into the trunk and brought them to curbside check in at the airport.
He climbed out of the back of the limo and started looking along the sidewalk, apparently spotted what he was seeking and walked away from Kimme.
Kimme caught up to him and they approached a uniformed airline employee standing behind a wheelchair.
“I’m James Moore. I believe that chair is for me,” he said.
TO BE CONTINUED…
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