Perfect
soppingwetpanties
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, merchandise, companies, events and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
All characters are 18 years or older.
Sometimes people are surprised where and when they find perfection.
Present Day -- Napa Valley, California
Dark storm clouds were gathering to the west over the Mayacamas, a coastal range of mountains separating Sonoma and Napa Valleys. It was mid-March, and heavy rain was forecast to continue for the next week. There were some mudslides in the hills above us, and our irrigation pond was spilling over into a seasonal creek. The creek, which ran the length of our twenty planted acres, was already a swirling mass of muddy water that threatened to overflow its grassy banks and flood the vineyard.
Libby, our eight year old rescue border collie, seemed to be the only member of our family that was overjoyed at the prospect of more rain. She surveyed the perimeter of our fenced estate every morning, and during the rainy season would wade through the wet marshland, her immaculate black and white coat turning a dirt brown, with clumps of grass wedged between her toes. She usually slept in my parent's room, and was forbidden from jumping on the bed, but muddy paws on my mother's favorite quilt betrayed last night's visit. Libby was pacing in front of me, ears perked high, waiting for the command to follow me as I started my usual morning trek through the rows of dormant grapevines.
She sprang forward as I gave the familiar curl of my fingers signaling permission to follow. Even though she was technically Mom's dog, I trained her as a pup and her first loyalty was to me. She was instantly by my side in her heeling position, wagging her bushy tail as if it was a metronome marking time for our brisk pace. I loved Libby as a sister. It would have been a tough pick if I was forced to choose between Libby and my brother Chas.
Chas was named after my famous great uncle, the one that purchased Greenleaf Estates in the late 1960's with the winnings from a successful night at the poker tables. I was told by the family's elders that my brother had many of the attributes of his namesake, including his passion for money, fast women, and faster cars. At twenty-eight, he was one of the eligible bachelors in Napa Valley, a scion of our famous Napa Valley family, a family known for a large wine estate that consistently produced high scoring and critic pleasing cabernet sauvignon. He was the face of the future of our winery, and its multimillion dollar brand, and was often seen in his late model Ferrari with a rotating group of women that cycled through his busy social calendar.
I did give him credit for being the visionary behind the lower cost consumer version of our pricey estate cabernet, using purchased grapes from Paso Robles. The Paso cabernet production topped 200,000 cases annually, and was easily our top seller. It wasn't our glamour brand, but it drove half the profits of our family owned business.
I'm Chas's older sister, Jamie (my parents thought I was going to be a boy and picked out this name, and liked it so much they used it even though I turned out to be a girl). Where Chas craved the spotlight, I'd always craved having my fingers sunk deep into the dirt ... the Napa Valley dirt that produced our flagship wine. I've also wanted to carry the flag for the company, and made no secret of my feelings to lead. However, I was viewed as a longshot at best for the head position that my father had occupied for more than forty years. My father was already a legend in the valley, starting his winemaking in the 70's with pioneers such as Robert Mondavi,
André Tchelistcheff (BV), Warren Winiarski (Stag's Leap) and Jim Barrett (Chateau Montelena). He was a larger than life figure, and had always been my role model as I carved my own way to the top of the wine profession.
Samuel was Dad's given name, the name of his great uncle, but he eschewed his first name in favor of his middle, David, so all of his good friends called him David, but his business acquaintances would often call him Sam. Mom called him Dave.
I was a farmer like Dad. I was happy being out in the vineyard at four a.m., in the dark and cold, under the glare of portable floodlights, helping the picking crew during the harvest, while my playboy brother was just rolling in from a night of partying at some new hot spot in Napa. I never shied away from hard work, starting at the bottom rung of the corporate ladder, a cellar rat washing barrels and hosing off sorting tables for sixteen hours a day. I worked my way up to Assistant Winemaker, with a staff of forty, and was responsible for both the production facility and the tasting rooms. Time was a precious commodity for me.
I had a reputation for demanding perfection, and it was a reputation well-earned after I took the lead in making our 100 point 2015 cabernet reserve. That perfect score put me in the Napa Valley winemaking elite. It's been hard living up to my own high standards. Late nights most of the time and no sleep at all during the harvest. But it was worth the effort, despite the cost to my personal life, or what was left of it.
My father retained the title of Chief Winemaker, but it was common knowledge his title was in name only, since I'd been in that captain's chair after Dad suffered a mild stroke about two years earlier. He'd pretty much recovered, but for a slight slurring of his speech and bouts of momentary muscle weakness. Dad tried to be with me as much as he was able, but he usually started to tire after about four hours of work, so I would take him back to the house in one of our ATV's so he could take a nap after lunch. Sometimes he would call me to retrieve him after his afternoon siesta and sometimes he was content to stay with Mom, who would happily boss him around her two acre rose garden.
Mom was actively trying to convince him to retire. She was worried about his health, and also worried that they'd miss their best years together, with him whiling away the hours in the vineyard or the production facility instead of with her. Wine ran in his veins, just as it did for me. He was always ready to go in the morning. He loved to walk in the barrel room with me, sampling the previous year's harvest, and trying to guess with me which barrels would be headed for the exclusive reserve.
Everybody loved my mother. There was always somebody in the kitchen with her, sitting at the oversize farm table, drinking from a fresh pot of coffee and eating coffee cake she'd made that morning. Dad always brought along a slice of coffee cake wrapped in a napkin when he hopped in the ATV with me at six a.m. My mom baked all the time, and it was a wonder she was able to retain her figure with all the cookies, pies and cakes that came out of her ovens. She was as outspoken as they come, and was always dispensing advice, or her opinion, solicited or not. She retired early from her job as manager for the town of St. Helena, and focused most of her considerable energy on her one grandchild, aptly name Elizabeth after my mother. Lizzy was then five, and lived with us along with her mother, and my little sister, Emily.
I don't want to hog this story with a full description of what I believe are Emily's issues, but suffice it say she was the princess of the family, and was always my Dad's favorite, so she always got her way. Her manipulative personality convinced Mom and Dad that her then husband Derek could be trusted with our company's finances. Derek was Emily's second husband (and now ex-husband), and most people, including Mom and Dad, believed the Derek absconded with $10 million of family money. After the divorce, Derek moved to Naples (not Italy but Florida), with his new wife, a twenty-five year old British model with garishly large fake breasts. He was the company's Treasurer until a week before $10 million was siphoned out of the company's offshore bank account -- an account that Derek set up. No one was able to trace where the money went, and of course Derek denied any involvement in the theft [ed. note -- see the story
Grand Cayman
for an account of what really happened to the money].
Chas was a big fan of Derek's, and the extra millions of monthly cash flow coming from the new product line caused there to be a pleasant problem, namely too much cash and no place to put it. Derek came up with the idea of an offshore captive insurance company and funding it with the company's rainy day fund. Of course after the money disappeared Teflon Chas claimed that it was Dad who endorsed Derek's fraudulent scheme.
My family was a living soap opera, I guess including me, which gave me plenty to think about during my solitary walks through the vineyard. I pulled the lapels of my well-loved Carhartt coat together to fight off the stiff breeze that whipped the rain into sheets, stinging my face with ice cold droplets. I lowered my head and forged ahead towards the area where one of the vineyard workers had spotted a break in the deer fence. Sure enough, a portion of the fence was crushed by a deer that had gotten trapped in our property. Deer are all muscle and no brains, and this one, probably a large buck, had rammed the fence until it collapsed. I used my phone to take a picture of the damage and texted it to our vineyard manager, Manuel. I was confident the fence would be repaired by the end of the day. Manuel never let anything linger in his in box, and a broken deer fence was a priority repair.
Libby had already stepped gingerly around the tangled metal, and I followed her carefully traced path, trying to avoid the sharp exposed ends of the shattered fencing. I continued my walk in the rain, watching for the small rivers of mud that were flowing across the path. My mind wandered again to the teasing from Dad the previous night over my unmarried status, and my unintended celibacy over the past few years.
I was over thirty and unmarried. I hadn't had a date in as long as I could remember, and wasn't interested in marriage. My passion was wine. I guess I didn't think about men that much. Besides the casual boyfriends in college (at UC Davis), and the rare dates I'd squeezed in after work hours, there wasn't much male companionship for most of my adult life. It's not to say I'd missed it. I didn't. I'd spent so much time mucking around the vineyard with my father and our work crew that I considered myself one of the boys. Ironically it was Dad, not Mom, who bugged me the most about having a boyfriend, and eventually getting married.
My reverie was disturbed when I heard a low pitched hum coming from the direction of the main cellar building. There was an aging set of pumps working full-time to expel water from the storage cellar that was located in a small natural depression surrounded by our vineyard. Dad picked the spot for the large stone building because the soil was too wet to produce a quality wine grape. Dad figured when he tunneled into the hillside that he'd just pump out the water during the rainy season, an assumption that was correct during a normal year but was unquestionably faulty during the current deluge. There were three pumps total, but having just one out of commission would pose a big problem.
