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At the thought of my company, where I willnotbe spending the next two weeks, I feel an uncomfortable surge of disappointment. If not downright unease.
Archer leads me down a gravel path I barely noticed when I sleep-walked from my car to the café. He gave me directions and said he’d meet me here. “Get a bite to eat if you want, and I’ll be there by seven,” he’d said.
A forest-green golf cart sits parked in a small area shaded by live oaks. Archer slides onto the white seat and gestures for me to join him. I’ve barely pulled my legs in before he whips the thing into reverse and turns it out of the driveway. He points vaguely with his left hand while his right hangs over the top of the steering wheel, spinning it easily when we need to turn.
“Down that way is all sauvignon blanc grapes. They’ll be ready for harvest first.” I follow his hand motion to row upon row of staked grapes, their star-shaped leaves shading the fruit beneath. Mostly, it looks like neat rows of greenery, and I marvel at how different it is from my life at work.
“I can’t believe you’re a farmer now,” I say without thinking. I know Archer is positioned to take over Buttercup Hill fromhis father, but in all the years he’s talked about his job running a billion-dollar business, I’ve never come up here and seen it. Now, looking around, it’s abundantly clear that he’s in charge of something that looks a lot more like gardening on a mammoth scale than sitting in board rooms, which I do all too often. I can’t help feeling a little bit envious.
“Pretty much,” Archer says. “Except for the part where I don’t actually pick the grapes or graft them onto new plants to make this whole thing happen.” He swings an arm wide to demonstrate the expanse of it.
“Still, you can be out here, looking at these vineyards every day. That must be nice.”
He casts me a side-eye while swinging the golf cart down another smaller lane. He points at a lake we’re approaching. “It is nice. I’m still in my office way too much, but that’s changing as I take on more of the primary winemaking job.”
“So your dad isn’t doing any better?” A while back, he told me about his dad’s dementia, making it clear I was the only one he trusted with the information. I haven’t told a soul, and I recall hearing Archer’s voice break when he told me how painful it is to watch his father’s memory begin to fail.
Looking down, Archer shakes his head. “It’s advanced to Alzheimer’s. We had to file a legal thing to take control of the company. He doesn’t even understand what we tell him half the time. That’s how much he’s already slipped away.” He clears his throat when he chokes up.
I look at his profile, but he’s already swallowing down the moment and inhaling a deep breath. Archer is as stoic as his father.
I remember Kingston Corbett visiting Archer, and the man terrified me. Even when he was ordering wine for a couple of underaged kids and treating us like adults, I still feared he justmight pound a fist through the table if the server forgot our breadsticks.
It’s hard to imagine such a man crippled by a disease that eats away at his mind.
“Jesus. That’s a lot.”
Archer hits the brakes, and the cart pulls to an abrupt stop beneath a stand of olive trees. Tipping his head, he gestures for me to follow as he hops out of the cart. We walk to the edge of a small lake, about a hundred yards across, where ducks float lazily on the surface of clean, dark water dappled with water lilies. I hear the croak of frogs on lily pads, but I can’t see them.
“It’s a lot. And I’m a winemaker, suddenly.”
I have no idea where he’s taking me, but I follow him down a grassy path that wraps around the lake. He hasn’t bothered pointing out any landmarks so far, which gives me the sense this tour is more for him than for me.
“Is that gonna be okay for you?” Based on what I know of Archer, he’s never wanted to follow in his dad’s footsteps. Back in school, we both had big dreams of starting companies, running them according to new principles no one had thought of, and retiring young and wealthy. None of that spelled working for his dad or inheriting a business where he didn’t have a say.
Archer shrugs, and his shoulders don’t fall fully. He walks, hunched as though protecting himself from a nonexistent force of wind. “Eventually.”
Tipping his head, he indicates a bench on the far side of the lake. We head there in silence. I decide not to press for more details. Mainly because I’m not really in the mood for sharing details about my own business disaster.
Archer has other ideas. We sit, and he swivels to face me. “So what happened? I read the stuff online, obviously, but it doesn’t sound like you. Did you have some kind of breakdown or what?”
I feel glad I grabbed my half-full cup of coffee before leaving the café because it gives me something to do while I stall. After a long sip, I shrug. Maybe it qualifies as enough of an answer in bro-speak.
“Tell me,” he says.
I close my eyes and can hear myself ranting when someone caught me in a moment of irritation after a meeting I hated. Our investors were goading me to lobby for lower standards on carbon emissions so AstroTech could be a polluter and still make ungodly profits. I always left these meetings feeling a little dirty after the wining and dining and pressure to put profits above everything.
My pent-up frustration turned to recklessness when someone stuck a phone in my face outside the restaurant after lunch. “When are we going to Mars?”
It was an innocent enough question, one I’ve been asked a hundred times, but something in me snapped.
“We have no business trying to explore other planets if we can’t take care of our own. I’ll shut down the whole space program at AstroTech if it means being part of the solution instead of the problem. I’d do it in a heartbeat.” They were the right words, even if I’ve suffered the gut-punch of people’s reactions every day since.
“I lost my cool.”
Archer elbows me in the ribs. “Sounds unlike you. So you just fucked up like the rest of us?”
Not liking the way those words sound, I whip my head around and shoot him a stony look. If I leveled that death stare at the people who work for me, the conversation would be over. Not with Archer. Which is probably why he was the one I called when my company’s publicist told me to get out of town and lay low.
