Vines and Promises: Dust And Memory

The key turned in the lock with a sound like a bone settling, and Sienna Holloway stood on the threshold of Hollowfield farmhouse for the first time in nearly a decade. Dust hung in the slant of late afternoon gold, turning the air into something thick and almost visible. Her hand rested on the warped door, oak gone silver-gray with weather, and she did not step inside right away. She breathed. The scent hit her before any memory could form a name: cedar from the beams her grandfather had salvaged from a collapsed barn in '71, and beneath it, the sour-sweet perfume of oak wine barrels, ghosts of pinot that had slept in the cellar for twenty years.

She stepped in. The floorboards answered with a familiar complaint.

In the parlor, she dropped her single suitcase by the settee and let her gaze travel the room. The wallpaper, ivory roses climbing a trellis of dull gold, had browned above the baseboards where the damp climbed each winter. A reading chair sat angled toward the window, the chintz faded on its arms. Above the cold hearth, a watercolor of the vineyard at first light: rows of vines still black with shadow, the fog lying low in the gullies. Her mother had painted it the summer Sienna turned nine. The glass over the painting had caught a thumbprint years ago, and no one had ever wiped it away.

Sienna crossed to the window and looked out at the vine rows. They ran down the slope in long parallel lines, the canes already bare and tied to the lowest wire. November had stripped them clean. Between the rows, mustard grew in ragged yellow patches, knee-high in places. The sight of it, that mustard, opened something in her chest like a door she had not realized was latched.

She was nine again, or ten, or twelve. The years folded together. Wren Ashford ran ahead of her down the rows, his sneakers kicking up red dust, and she chased him laughing until her side ached. Theo, three years older and convinced of his own importance, walked behind them with pruning shears over his shoulder, telling them they were scaring the birds. The birds were everywhere. They wheeled up out of the mustard in clouds of black and pale gray, and the sky went loud with their complaints. Wren caught her by the wrist and pulled her under a trellis where the grapes hung fat and translucent, fox-red and warm from the sun. He popped one into her mouth without asking, and the skin split, and the juice ran down her chin.

"You'll get caught," she had said.

"By who?" he had said. "Theo?"

And Theo had found them, of course. He had stood at the end of the row with his arms crossed and the shears dangling from one hand, and he had said, with the weary patience of an older brother, "If you two are going to eat the crop, at least eat the good clusters. Those are the table grapes. Mom's going to put them in the salad tonight."

Sienna pressed her forehead against the cool glass of the parlor window. The memory slid away like water through a closed fist. She was thirty-one now, and the mustard still grew in the rows, and there was no one running ahead of her down the hill.

She moved through the house the way one moves through a relative who has just died: careful, respectful, half-expecting to be told she had no business being there. The kitchen smelled of cold grease and dried lavender. Someone had left a bundle of lavender hanging from a beam, brittle now, the color gone to a dusty violet. The enameled range was a pale blue, the kind her grandmother had cooked on, the kind that could outlast the house. On the counter, a stack of mail, mostly circulars, and a single envelope addressed to Eleanor in a hand Sienna did not recognize.

She left the envelope where it lay. It was not her letter. Not yet.

The stairs creaked in the same pattern she remembered, third step from the bottom, eighth from the top. She found her old room at the end of the hall and pushed the door open. The wallpaper was different up here. Tiny violets on a cream ground. Her old bed, a twin, was still made with the quilt her mother had sewn from scraps of outgrown dresses, the patches faded to a wash of rose and sage and cornflower blue. A pine bookshelf stood against the far wall, and on its shelves were the spines of every book she had ever loved between the ages of ten and sixteen: the Wrinkle in Time paperbacks, a water-damaged copy of Jane Eyre, a stack of Baby-sitters Club whose dog-eared corners had softened with rereading. On the top shelf, in the back, a shoebox.

She did not touch the shoebox. Not yet.

Sienna sat on the edge of the bed and the mattress gave under her with the slow surrender of old springs. Dust rose around her, catching the last of the light. Somewhere in the house, a clock ticked, though she had not seen a clock. She listened to it for a long moment. Then she took out her phone and read the message from Eleanor again.

Sienna. The roof leaked. Dad's in the hospital. I can't do this alone. Please.

She had booked the flight within the hour.

Now, in this room that was hers and not hers, she set the phone face down on the quilt and looked at the ceiling. The plaster had a long crack that ran from the light fixture toward the window like the path of a slow river on a map. She had traced that crack with her eyes on summer nights when she could not sleep, when the heat of the valley kept her awake until two or three in the morning, and the only sound was the wind in the vines and the occasional owl. She had counted the branches of the crack the way other children counted sheep. One trunk, three forks, seven endpoints. The numbers had not changed. The girl who had counted them had.

A knock at the front door, three short raps, pulled her upright.

She went down the stairs slower than she needed to. At the door, she paused with her hand on the knob. Through the gap at the threshold's edge, she could see the worn hem of denim and the toe of a work boot caked in red earth.

She opened the door.

Wren Ashford stood on the porch with a coil of garden hose over one shoulder and a cardboard box tucked under his other arm. His face was the same. That was the first thing she noticed, and it unsettled her, the way the wallpaper had unsettled her, the way the lavender had. He had the kind of face that had been finished early and only settled more deeply into itself in the years since. Cheekbones more pronounced now. The line of his jaw sharper. His eyes the color of creek water, gray-green and watchful. He wore a faded flannel with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, and there was a smear of something dark along his forearm. Pruning tar, maybe. Or grease.

"Sienna," he said.

It was not a question. It was not quite a greeting either. It was his voice offering her the fact of him.

"Wren."

She stepped back to let him in. He ducked under the low lintel as he had always ducked, though he did not need to anymore, and set the box down on the table in the entry. He smelled of cold air and woodsmoke and, faintly, of machine oil. He looked around the parlor the way she had looked around it, taking inventory.

"Theo would have come," he said, after a moment. "He asked me to tell you."

Sienna swallowed. "He's at the hospital?"

"With your dad. Since yesterday. Your mom is holding up, but." He paused, and the unfinished sentence hung between them in the dust. "She asked me to bring you these."

He lifted the lid of the box. Inside, nested in tissue paper, were her mother's journals. Sienna recognized the spines, leather-bound, some of them wrapped in marbled paper Eleanor had made at the kitchen table one winter. There were seven of them. The earliest, the smallest, was the one her mother had kept the summer Sienna was born.

"I didn't read them," Wren said. He said it quickly, the way a person says a thing when they want it understood. "Eleanor thought you should have them. She said you'd know what to do with them."

Sienna looked at the journals and did not touch them yet either. She was collecting things in this house she was not yet ready to touch. The shoebox on the top shelf. The letter on the counter. The journals in the box. The watercolor behind its smudged glass. She was standing at the threshold of every one of them, hand outstretched, not closing her fingers.

"Why didn't anyone call me sooner?" she asked.

Wren met her eyes. He did not look away, and he did not soften the truth.

"Because you left," he said. "And we let you."

The clock in the house ticked. The light in the parlor was going amber, then copper. Outside, the vines ran down the hill in their bare and patient rows, and the mustard between them was already going to seed.

Sienna drew a breath. The cedar and the oak barrels had not faded. If anything, in the cooling of the house, the perfume had deepened, settling into the wood of the floors and the plaster of the walls, rising again whenever a door opened or a footfall stirred the air.

She looked at Wren, and Wren looked back, and the room held them both in its old and complicated silence.

Sienna did not go home that night. She did not say so, and Wren did not ask. He stayed for dinner, which was whatever she could find in the pantry that had not gone soft or sour. There was bread. There was a wheel of cheese Eleanor had wrapped in wax paper and dated in her careful block letters. There were olives in a jar with a rubber seal, and a bottle of the prior year's rosé that Wren opened with a corkscrew he produced from his jacket pocket without comment.

They ate at the kitchen table, the same table where Esther had taught her to knead bread dough, where Margaret had braided her hair on school mornings, where Theo had once carved their initials into the underside of the board and then spent an anxious hour trying to sand them out.

Sienna did not think about that. She thought about the bread.

After Wren left, his taillights sliding down the drive like two embers, she washed the dishes. She dried them. She put them back in the cabinet in the wrong places, because she did not remember where Eleanor kept the salad bowls, and she was not ready to open every drawer in the house looking for them.

The house settled around her. It made the sounds old houses make when the temperature drops, the wood contracting in its bones. She heard a shutter tap once against an upstairs window. She heard the clock in the parlor, which she had not known was wound, ticking on without her.

She made up the bed in her old room. The sheets were the same lavender ones. They smelled faintly of the sachets Eleanor tucked between the linens, a scent that had not changed in twenty years. Sienna lay down on top of the quilt and pulled the blanket over her shoulders and stared at the ceiling until her eyes adjusted to the dark and she could see the old water stain in the corner that had been shaped, when she was nine, like the head of a dog.

Sleep did not come. She did not expect it to.

At two in the morning she gave up the pretense. She got up, pulled on the cardigan she had thrown over the foot of the bed, and went downstairs in her bare feet.

The floorboards announced her. She did not try to quiet them. The kitchen was cool and smelled faintly of the cheese. The parlor was dark except for the green pilot light on the old stereo Eleanor never turned off. The house was breathing its long, patient breath.

She went to the study. She had not been in the study since she arrived. It had been Theo's room, in the years before she was born, when he was a boy and the desk was too big for him and he had to kneel on the chair to reach the inkwell. After he left, it had become her grandmother's room. Esther had taken it over the way Esther took over everything, with a quiet and total authority, and she had kept the door shut for the last decade of her life as if whatever was inside was still hers.

Sienna turned the knob. The hinges did not squeak. Esther had oiled them. Of course she had.

The room smelled of paper and dust and the faintly metallic tang of old ink. There was the desk. It was a heavy oak piece, drawer-fronts carved with a simple vine motif, the kind of thing you found in farmhouses that had been in the same family for a hundred years. The leather top was worn pale at the places where someone had rested their forearms for hours at a time. Sienna ran her fingers across it. The leather was cool and a little stiff, and it gave under her hand the way old leather does, like a memory of give.

She did not sit in the chair. She stood over the desk and pulled open the top drawer. Pencils. A letter opener with a wooden handle, the blade gone brown with tarnish. A small brass compass that did not work. A tin of paper clips, half of them bent out of shape. A photograph in a frame, face down. She left it.

The second drawer. More of the same. Receipts held together with a rubber band that had perished and left a dark line across the paper. A small notebook with a floral cover, the pages blank. A deck of cards missing the seven of diamonds.

The third drawer would not open. She pulled. Nothing. She pulled harder, and felt the slight give of a wooden stop somewhere inside the frame.

She knelt. The floor was cold through the knees of her jeans. She ran her hand along the underside of the drawer, where the wood met the frame, and found it: a small brass catch, the kind carpenters used to install in writing desks a century ago. A hidden compartment. She pressed it, and the false front of the drawer slid forward on a hinge, revealing a shallow space behind it.

There was a smell. Cedar. And something else. Lavender. The sachets, again. Esther had tucked one in here, however many years ago, and the scent had held.

There were seven books in the hidden compartment. They were not like the journals in the parlor, the ones Eleanor had kept. These were bound in cloth, soft in the way that only very old and very well-handled cloth gets soft, the color of weak tea. The spines had no titles. The pages were edged in a faint marbling, blue and white, like the inside of a shell.

Sienna lifted the first one out. It was heavy in her hand. She carried it to the chair and sat down, finally, in her grandmother's chair, and she opened the book on the desk in the dark room.

The handwriting was Esther's. She would have known it anywhere. The careful leftward slant, the way the capital E leaned back as if to make room for the rest of the word. The ink had faded from black to sepia in places, and in other places it had bled through from the other side of the page, a palimpsest of years.

The first entry was dated April 3, 1962. Sienna was not born yet. Her mother Margaret was seventeen. The entry was short.

A. sent the usual. I have read it four times. I will put it in the box with the others. The plums are coming in early this year. T. says the harvest will be heavy. I did not tell him about the letter. I am not ready.

Sienna turned the page. Then she turned more. The entries were not every day. They were not even every week. They came in clusters, sometimes three or four in a month, sometimes a gap of six months between them. They were addressed to no one. They were written as if to a confessor, or to oneself, or to the absent party whose initial was the only name Esther would commit to paper.

A. came in the night. Left before the milk. The pillow still had the dent. I did not smooth it. I wanted it there in the morning so I would know it had been real.

T. suspects nothing. Or T. suspects everything, and has made the decision, which is the kind of man he is, to say nothing. I do not know which is worse. I think it is worse to be known and not spoken to. I think I would rather be struck.

I have put the photograph in the linen press. A. will know where to find it. The plums this year are small but very sweet.

Sienna read for an hour. She did not turn on the light. The room was dark except for the faint streetlight that came through the window, and her eyes adjusted to the sepia of the pages until she could read them as easily as if they were printed. Her hands grew cold. She did not put on more clothes. She did not get up to close the window, which had drifted open an inch, and from which a thin cold air was moving across the room.

She turned to a later book. The handwriting was the same, but the ink was different. Fountain pen now, instead of the dip pen of the earliest volume. The paper was thinner.

I told him today. I told him everything. He sat in the kitchen for an hour without speaking. Then he went out to the barn and did not come back until dark. I sat at this desk and I did not move. When he came in, he kissed the top of my head and went to bed.

The next morning he asked me what I wanted for breakfast, as if nothing had happened. I think this is what love looks like when it has decided to stay.

A. writes every Sunday. The letters come in the post with no return address, and I put them in the box, and I read them again on the night before I write back. The handwriting has not changed in thirty years. I do not believe it will.

Sienna sat back in the chair. The wood of the backrest pressed into her shoulders. The room smelled of cedar and lavender and old paper and, beneath all of it, faintly, of the cigar Theo had smoked in this room when he was a boy and thought no one knew. She could smell it because she knew what to look for, the way you can smell your own childhood in a stranger's house if you are unlucky.

She looked at the photograph in her hand. She had not remembered picking it up. It was a small print, black and white, with the deckled edge of a print from the sixties. There were two figures in it, standing in front of the trellis at the side of the house. The grapevines behind them were heavy with fruit. One of the figures was Esther. Younger than Sienna had ever known her, with her hair pinned up and her hand resting on the shoulder of the person beside her.

The other figure was turned slightly away from the camera. Sienna could not see the face. But on the back of the photograph, in Esther's careful slant, was written a single word, and a date.

Beloved. April, 1962.

Sienna set the photograph down on the desk. She did not pick it up again. She closed the book she had been holding, and then she closed the others, one by one, and she put them back into the hidden compartment, behind the false front, in the order she had found them. She pressed the catch until it clicked. She pushed the drawer shut.

The house was silent. The clock in the parlor had stopped sometime in the last hour. She listened for it and could not hear it. The wind had died. The shutter was no longer tapping.

She sat in her grandmother's chair in the dark and did not move.

Headlights swept across the parlor wall, then died. A truck door opened, then closed, and the crunch of gravel came up the path to the front porch. Three knocks, spaced evenly, the way Wren had always knocked since they were nine years old and his mother had made him practice.

Sienna stood. Her legs were stiff from sitting. The chair had held the shape of her grandmother, and now it held the cold where she had been. She crossed the parlor, stepped over the warped floorboard near the door that she had meant to fix since she was twenty-two, and pulled the front door open.

Wren Ashford stood on the porch with a roll of blueprints tucked under one arm and a thermos in his hand. He was wearing a flannel shirt she did not recognize, the sleeves rolled to the elbows, and his hair was longer than it had been in August. There was dust on his boots and a smudge of graphite along his thumb.

You look like you have been sitting in the dark, he said.

I have been sitting in the dark.

He handed her the thermos. Coffee, he said. I stopped at the place on the highway. It is not good.

She took it. The metal was warm against her palm. She could smell the coffee through the cap, burnt and bitter, the way she liked it when she was tired.

Come in, she said.

He stepped past her into the hallway, and she watched him look once at the grandfather clock, once at the closed door to the parlor, once at the narrow stairs. He had been in this house a thousand times, but he always looked at it the way you look at a place you are trying to remember correctly.

I brought the preliminary drawings, he said. For the barn and the winery. I thought we could go over them tonight, if you are not too tired.

I am too tired.

Then tomorrow.

Tomorrow, she agreed.

He set the roll of blueprints down on the hallway table, next to the bowl where Eleanor kept her keys. The bowl was empty. He looked at the empty bowl and did not say anything about it.

I should go, he said.

You should sit down for ten minutes first.

He hesitated. Then he followed her into the kitchen. She turned on the light above the stove, the one that did not flicker, and left the rest of the kitchen dark. He pulled out a chair and sat, and she sat across from him, and the table between them was the same table they had sat at when they were children, doing homework while Esther and his father argued about rootstock in the next room.

The coffee was, in fact, terrible. She drank it anyway.

The barn is the harder problem, Wren said. He unrolled the corner of the blueprint and held it flat with his thumb. The original timbers are black oak. They were cut on the property in 1923. If we keep them, we have to treat them for beetle and reinforce the joints without compromising the structure. If we replace them, we lose the building.

What do you recommend.

I recommend we keep them. I recommend we spend the money. The timbers are not replaceable, Sienna. You can buy new wood, but you cannot buy that wood.

She looked at the line of his jaw in the half-light. He was not looking at her. He was looking at the blueprint, but his eyes were not moving.

My grandmother, she said. She kept journals. In a hidden drawer in the desk in the parlor. I found them tonight.

He looked up.

She did not know why she had said it. She had not planned to say it to anyone, certainly not to him, certainly not tonight. But the words were out, and she could not put them back, and the kitchen was quiet enough that she could hear him breathing.

I found a photograph, she said. In the drawer. Of her with someone. The back of it says Beloved. And a date.

Wren did not speak for a long moment. Then he said, Do you know who it is.

No. The face is turned. I cannot tell.

He set the blueprint down. His hands were still for a moment, then he folded them on the table in front of him.

Your grandmother was a private person, he said. She may have had reasons.

Everyone has reasons.

That is true.

She turned the thermos cap in her hands. The metal had gone cold. She looked at the blueprint, at the careful lines Wren had drawn, at the way he had marked the original timbers in a heavier pencil than the rest.

Tell me about the winery, she said.

The winery is different. The stone walls are mostly intact, but the mortar is failing in the south corner. We have two choices. We can repoint with a lime-based mortar that matches the original, which is slower and more expensive, or we can use a modern Portland-cement mix that will set faster and last longer in theory, but will not breathe the way the original walls breathe. In a wet year, the stone will trap moisture and the interior faces will spall.

What do you recommend.

I recommend the lime mortar. Every time. The original builders knew what they were doing. The modern stuff is a compromise, and the building will pay for it in twenty years.

You sound like my grandmother.

He looked at her. The light from the stove caught the dust on his collar, the line of his throat, the small movement of his Adam's apple as he swallowed.

I sound like your grandmother, he said, because your grandmother taught me half of what I know about this place. The other half I learned by watching her make mistakes.

She almost smiled. She did not quite let herself.

And if I want to modernize the winery for functionality, she said. If I want to put in a proper drainage system, a new crush pad, stainless tanks inside the original walls. Can the building take it.

The building can take a great deal. But every modern convenience you install changes the character of the place. The temperature in the cellar will not be the same. The sound of the room will not be the same. Your grandmother used to say that a winery has a voice, and if you change the walls, you change the voice.

She heard her grandmother say it, in the kitchen, in this room, twenty years ago, while Esther braided her hair at this same table. The memory was so clear it had a temperature.

I am not my grandmother, Sienna said.

No, he said. You are not.

I cannot run this place the way she ran it. I do not have the patience for it. I do not have the years.

You have the years. You are thirty-two.

I mean I cannot stay.

He was quiet.

I have a job in San Francisco, she said. I have an apartment. I have a lease that ends in March. I came back because Eleanor asked me to come back. I came back because my mother asked me to come back. I did not come back to stay.

I know, he said.

I am telling you this because I need you to know it before we renovate anything. If I leave in the spring, whoever takes over this property will have to live with the choices we make now. I cannot make choices for them.

You are making choices for yourself.

She looked at him. He looked back at her, and his eyes were the color of creek water in the early morning, and he did not look away, and she did not look away, and the kitchen was so quiet she could hear the clock in the parlor, which had started again, though neither of them had wound it.

The moment held.

Then she looked down at the blueprint. Her hands were cold.

I will stay through the harvest, she said. I will stay until the renovations are framed in. I will stay until the barn has a new roof and the winery has sound mortar. After that, I cannot promise anything.

That is enough, he said. That is more than enough.

He reached across the table and put his hand over hers. His palm was warm, and his fingers were rough with callus, and she let her hand stay where it was for three seconds, then four, then five. She did not pull away. He did not pull away.

Then she turned her hand over, just slightly, just enough that her fingers brushed his palm, and she let go.

Thank you for the coffee, she said.

You are welcome, he said.

He stood. He rolled the blueprint carefully, tied it with the string he always used, and left it on the table. He walked to the front door. She followed him.

At the door, he stopped.

Sienna, he said.

Yes.

Whatever you find in those journals. Whatever the photograph is. You do not have to carry it alone.

She nodded. She did not trust her voice.

He stepped off the porch. His boots on the gravel sounded like the ticks of a clock that had been running a long time and was not sure it wanted to stop.

She stood in the doorway until his taillights disappeared at the bend in the drive. The night came back in, all at once, the way water fills a room. The porch boards creaked as she shifted her weight. Somewhere in the vineyard, a bird made a sound she did not recognize.

She went back into the kitchen. She turned off the stove light. She stood in the dark with the roll of blueprints on the table and the cold thermos in her hand.

She thought of Esther, young, with her hand on the shoulder of someone whose face was turned away.

She thought of the photograph, and the word Beloved, and the date in April.

She thought of the barn timbers cut in 1923, still holding the roof up, still doing what they had been asked to do.

She set the thermos down. She went back to the parlor. She sat in her grandmother's chair. The clock ticked softly in the corner, measuring out the minutes she had left to stay.