Valley Fever Read Online Free Page B

stomach was full of muscle, the way it is with some men who spend their lives digging up the stumps of old vines and planting new ones. He wore blue cashmere V-necks, even in the summer. His shoes were all work boots. Recently he had started dating his manicurist, much younger than he was, and from Visalia. Mother didn’t like her. Mother said, “All the sluts come from Visalia.” Mother missed Aunt Jane, who just after her fifty-fifth birthday bled to death in her bed from the last stages of bone cancer. Everyone’s always got cancer in Fresno.
    It was dark out; my room was a box of stale heat. There was the echo of laughter from the kitchen. Uncle Felix and Dad and Anne were having a bottle of wine.
    â€œThere she is,” Anne said.
    â€œHow do you feel?”
    â€œI feel all right.”
    â€œWould you like me to kill him?” Uncle Felix asked.
    â€œWhat time is it?”
    â€œI mean have him killed.”
    â€œNo, but thank you, Uncle Felix.” Uncle Felix had walked the two miles to our house in the hot evening. He liked to walk.
    â€œPast dinner,” Dad said. “But no one’s eaten dinner.”
    â€œI’ve eaten,” said Uncle Felix.
    I opened and closed the pantry door: five-gallon jars of raisins and dried mint and bay leaves and walnuts. I opened and closed the refrigerator.
    â€œThis always happens to Ingrid,” Anne said.
    â€œIt doesn’t always happen to me.”
    â€œFive years ago, Fourth of July, at Newton’s parents’ house in Cornwall.”
    Five years ago, on the Fourth of July, essentially the same thing had happened: I had moved from New York to London to live with Newton Greene, a floppy-haired English political consultant I’d met at a dinner party in New York, and shortly after I’d moved, during a weekend at his parents’ house in the country, he told me he thought we’d made a mistake. “That was one other time,” I said.
    â€œI’ll make it look like a car accident,” Uncle Felix said.
    Dad was quiet. He patted my arm. “You want a vodka?” he said. He got up to pour me a vodka.
    â€œWhy don’t you come back to Fresno and marry Wilson?” Uncle Felix said. Wilson was Uncle Felix’s nephew. He did the accounting for Uncle Felix and my parents and a couple of other growers in the valley.
    â€œWilson needs to find a nice Fresno girl,” Anne said.
    â€œIngrid’s a nice Fresno girl,” Uncle Felix said.
    â€œLet’s leave Ingrid alone,” Dad said, handing me the vodka. He’d poured it over grapes from the freezer.
    â€œIs this how you guys are drinking vodka now?” I said.
    â€œBe happy we’re drinking vodka at all,” Anne said. Among farmers in the valley, it’s a complicated thing to drink anything but wine. The back of my parents’ deep bar cabinet still had a bottle of cognac given to them the year they got married, and bottles of Canadian Club and Beefeater they’d bought, naively, for parties they’d given twenty-five years ago.
    â€œIt’s a conspiracy to use the grapes,” said Uncle Felix. “Those are my grapes you’re eating.”
    â€œYou don’t buy the Thompsons,” I said.
    â€œI do,” said Uncle Felix.
    â€œHe does,” said Dad. “Uncle Felix is making wine you’d be embarrassed to drink.”
    â€œI’m not embarrassed to drink anything,” Anne said.
    â€œI remember,” said Dad.
    â€œWhat kind of wine, Uncle Felix?”
    â€œThe Australians, the Chileans, the Italians are beating us at low-priced wine. With grapes we can grow here. Grapes your father grows.”
    â€œYou’re going to make cheap wine?” I said. “Cheaper than before?” Uncle Felix’s wine went for eight or nine dollars a bottle. He had a huge operation, in vineyards and in wine. The wine part of the business had grown so much in the past twenty