The grapes are ripe. I see it from the car, before I see the house, in the color of the slopes above the Napa Valley. My father would have read this week. He's been dead for nine days, and the grapes don't know it.
Helene is already in the rows. Where else would she be.
She is my father's widow, far too young for the word, and I have spent two years deciding what to think of her without ever managing to. She works the way he did, secateurs in one hand, a bucket at her hip, and she doesn't look up when I reach her. “You're late for the harvest,” she says. “Not for the funeral. For the harvest.”
“I'm here for my half.”
“Your half is still on the vine.” She cuts a bunch and holds it out to me. The grapes are gold and cold, and when I take them her fingers are rough against mine in a way I hadn't imagined. “Taste it. Then tell me what you want to do with it.”
I taste. It is the best fruit off this slope in a decade, and I know it, and she knows I know it.
We work the row in silence until the light slants. She doesn't ask about the years I stayed away. I don't ask why she stayed. At the end of the row she stops, wipes her forehead with the back of her wrist, and says, without looking at me, “He talked about you every day. Every single day, Matteo.” Then she hands me the second pair of secateurs, his, still sharp, and waits to see whether I'll take them.
