A Delicate Finish Read online

  JEANETTE

  BAKER

  Table of Contents

  Begin Reading

  Connecticut ● New York ● Colorado

  Table of Contents

  A Delicate Finish

  Copyright Notices

  Other Books by Jeanette Baker

  Acknowledgements

  Authors Note

  CHAPTERS

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Copyright Notices

  JEANETTE BAKER

  A Delicate Finish

  Copyright © 2007, 2012 by Jeanette Baker

  Int’l ISBN: 978-1-62071-004-3

  ISBN: 1-62071-004-8

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic means is forbidden unless written permission has been received from the publisher

  All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.

  For information address:

  Author & Company, LLC

  P.O. Box 291

  Cheshire, CT 06410-9998

  This eBook was designed by iLN™

  and manufactured in the United States of America.

  Other Books by

  JEANETTE BAKER

  Chesapeake Tide

  Chesapeake Summer

  This Irish House

  The Delaney Woman

  The Lavender Field

  Witch Woman

  To learn more about Jeanette and

  all of her books please visit:

  www.JeanetteBaker.com

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank everyone at Clos Pepe Vineyard and Winery who educated me in the “business of wine making.” “Their detailed and fascinating descriptions of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay grapes from vine to table were invaluable. I could not have managed this book without them.

  Clos Pepe is a family-owned operation set in the heart of Santa Barbara County, Southern California’s fledgling wine country. Of Clos Pepe’s twenty-eight vine-planted acres, twenty-four grow Pinot Noir grapes and four grow Chardonnay. Each year the winery produces tiny quantities, between eight and fifteen barrels, of exquisite Estate Pinot Noir and about four barrels of equally fine Chardonnay, aged without the use of new oak. I was particularly impressed with their reluctance to use pesticides, and modeled my fictional DeAngelo Vineyard on theirs.

  I would also like to thank my long-suffering friends and fellow writers, Patricia Perry and Jean Stewart, who frequently left their own work on back burners to painstakingly go over mine; my agent, Loretta Barrett, a constant and enthusiastic supporter of my goals; Valerie Gray, my editor at MIRA Books, for her lovely sense of humor and her belief in building authors; my husband, Stephen Farrell, because he reads every word I write and tirelessly explains the ever-unfolding mysteries of the computer; and a very special thank-you to June Quirk, a kind and generous lady, who fed and housed me from September through June while I wrote this book.

  Authors Note

  DeAngelo Vineyards is a hundred-year-old fictional estate winery and vineyard set in the Santa Ynez Valley in Southern California. In reality, grape growing is only about forty years old in Santa Barbara County and, at the time this book was written, there were only two estate vineyards, Firestone and Fess Parker. The Santa Ynez River Watershed supports three reservoirs and three dams built between 1920 and 1952.

  None of the reservoirs is operated on a safe-yield basis, and therefore reservoir water users rely on other sources to meet demands at times when the reservoir cannot deliver. Cachuma Reservoir is the major water supply source for the towns of Santa Ynez, Los Olivos, Ballard and Solvang. Because it is not enough, remaining demand is met through surface and groundwater extractions. Vintners are dependent upon underground wells. Capturing a water supply is a continual problem in Southern California. Earthquakes are also common. However, it is highly unlikely that a crack in the dam would produce a significant change in the water table.

  Jeanette

  CHAPTERS

  One

  Francesca DeAngelo wasn’t a praying kind of woman. She had her own personal arrangement with God. It went like this: she wouldn’t ask for anything unless it was absolutely necessary but, when she did, He better damn well come through. Over the years this had worked for her quite well, with one major exception.

  She climbed down from the tractor seat, walked back to where the spray rig was connected and bent down to examine the attachment. Pulling off her gloves, she wiped the nozzle free of wet sulfur. Then she clambered back up into the cab and, holding her breath, tried turning over the engine.

  “Please, please, don’t die on me now,” she muttered. The motor coughed back into life and once again the bulky machine rolled forward. Maneuvering the vehicle between rows of Syrah vines, she looked back over her shoulder hoping to see a dusty cloud of sulfur pouring from the rig. Nothing. The machine was still jammed.

  Setting her teeth, she turned off the engine and climbed down to check the nozzle once again. Everything looked normal, everything except that it wasn’t working. Pushing her protective goggles to the top of her head, she gazed out over the burlap-dry hills on one side of the valley and the lush green grapevines on the other, tilted her head back to consider the position of the sun and swore like a field hand. When things went south, they went with a vengeance. She kept her voice low, a habit she’d acquired around her son, Nicholas. He was eight years old and a sponge for four-letter words.

  It was late spring in Santa Barbara County. The valley between the San Rafael and Santa Ynez Mountains where the twelve-hundred-acre DeAngelo Vineyards nestled was still damp and misty even though it was high noon, perfect mildew weather. Francesca had absolutely no liquid assets to repair her rig, a grape grower’s only defense against crop-destroying mildew. The weather had simply not cooperated. Because of a cool spring aided by the La Nina weather pattern, the vineyard would produce a thinner crop of Chardonnay this year and an even thinner crop of Syrah. Those annoyances she could manage. Every vintner faced weather conditions and mechanical problems. A short summer meant adding sugar to the wine. A long one meant an early harvest. A broken spray rig or linchpin meant paying interest to the bank until the profits rolled in. It all went with the territory. This was not one of those times when divine intervention was necessary. This was no more than an ordinary setback.

  What Francesca couldn’t think about without a serious knotting of her stomach was the county’s newest adversary, Grape Growers Incorporated, the Wal-Mart of the wine industry, building a world-class winery in her valley. GGI meant bankruptcy for family vineyards. DeAngelo Winery, with its vines stitched into gently sloping hillsides and its flatlands with excellent drainage, would be among the first to fall. A weak harvest wouldn’t help matters. Unless the spray rig was repaired q
uickly, mildew would form and she would lose three-fourths of her grapes. Then she would be in serious trouble.

  Francesca would never call herself bitter. Her lip curled. Bitterness followed in the wake of disappointment and disappointment came when expectations didn’t materialize. She’d given up on expectations long ago. She barely remembered what it was like to want something so badly she could think of nothing else, the time when she’d first negotiated with God, promising that if He granted her this one and only wish, she would never ask for anything else again. God listened and, very soon after, Jake Harris asked her to marry him.

  Seven years later, Jake gave up on her, the marriage, the vines, their six-year-old son, Nicholas, and took a position as winemaker for a vineyard in Napa County. She still couldn’t pinpoint exactly when the relationship began to sour. It had happened suddenly, without warning. One minute they were happy and the next they weren’t. They’d had a fight, not a major one, certainly not the worst they’d ever had, but for some reason it was the most important one.

  Jake had packed up his suitcase while she’d gone into town for fried-chicken strips, his favorite, to appease him. “It just isn’t working,” he said calmly, before walking out into the rainy night. He forgot the chicken strips, or maybe he hadn’t really wanted them in the first place. Maybe it was just an excuse to get her out of the house so he could gather his belongings and leave.

  She remembered the odd timbre of his voice and the way the back of his head glowed like a silver orb in the rainy night and the way her ribs ached because she thought about him so much. Mostly she remembered the chicken strips rising into her throat and filling her mouth before she vomited the contents of her stomach into the toilet.

  In the blink of an eye, she’d gone from Francie Harris, wife, mother and half of a successful wine-making pair, to Francesca DeAngelo, single-parent vintner struggling to make do.

  As far as Francesca was concerned, God owed her. He broke their bargain, freeing her to resume asking for favors once again. After all, a marriage should be worth quite a few favors. At first she prayed for a successful harvest and enough income to pay the help and her bills. Later, she added a few more items to her list, items like the evolution of the perfect grape to add to her Pinot Noir blend or enough profit from the year’s harvest to pay off her bank loan for the new winery. Lately, she’d prayed for the demise of Grape Growers Incorporated. She wouldn’t pray for the broken spray rig. It was too far down on the list. She would figure out something else.

  The familiar ring of the lunch bell brought with it a new set of problems. Julianne, her mother-in-law, would have to be told about the faulty rig. She would wonder why the spraying had stopped. And, as usual, she would step in with the offer of a loan. If Francesca didn’t accept, the tension in the house would be thick as the unfiltered must from her red grapes.

  She sighed and turned toward home. It wasn’t that she didn’t appreciate her mother-in-law. The problem was that Julianne’s generosity had created a debt Francesca couldn’t possibly repay. She walked down the hill between leafy vines that soon would be thick with plump Chardonnay grapes. Her footsteps slowed as she reached the porch. She heard Nick’s chattering and his grandmother’s bubbly return laughter. Francesca’s resolution faltered. She was ashamed of herself. Where would Nick be without Julianne? Where would anyone be without her?

  Intent on her thoughts, she almost didn’t recognize the truck parked in the gravel driveway. When she did, her charitable thoughts vanished and she struggled with her temper. Living with Julianne required tolerating her son. Other ex-wives stood in their doorways, sentinels barring their personal lives from the men who no longer had key privileges, smiling benignly, waving goodbye to their children on alternate weekends. Not Francesca. Jake Harris not only had key privileges, he knew every intimate detail of her refrigerator and her medicine cabinets. She didn’t like it, but she couldn’t exactly tell Julianne that her own son wasn’t allowed to visit, not when the woman had bailed her out of more than one harrowing situation.

  A whirl of brown limbs and blond hair shot out the screen door, nearly knocking her down. Francesca reached out and grabbed the back of her son’s T-shirt. “Not so fast, young man. Where are you going? It’s lunchtime.”

  “Gran told me to tell Danny and Cyril to come right away. Dad’s here and lunch is ready.”

  Francesca released her hold on the shirt. “Is he staying for lunch?”

  “Uh-huh.” Nick smiled happily. “Then he’s taking me fishing. I gotta go, Mom.”

  “Cyril and Danny heard the bell,” Francesca said. “They’ll come if they want food.”

  Nick was down the porch and across the lawn before she’d finished the first sentence.

  For the second time in just as many minutes, Francesca felt like cursing. It wasn’t right that she felt so uncomfortable in her own home. She opened the screen door and stepped inside, glancing into the hall mirror. Her reflection lowered her spirits even more. She was definitely at a disadvantage. For reasons she refused to analyze, she didn’t want Jake to see her looking work-stained, dusty and stinking of sulfur, never mind that he’d seen her this way every day for seven years. She would have walked quickly past the kitchen and run up the stairs to her room, but Julianne spied her before she reached the landing.

  “Frances,” her mother-in-law called from the bottom of the staircase. “I was worried that you wouldn’t take a break. Thank goodness you’re sensible.” Her voice changed. It was brighter, more artificial. “Jake’s here.”

  Slowly Francesca turned and walked back down the stairs, following Julianne into the large, sunlit kitchen.

  Her ex-husband sat at the table holding a mug of coffee in his left hand. His right arm was tied in a sling. Although his face was paler than usual, the blue eyes and thick, corn-colored hair were the same. Francesca’s stomach tightened.

  “Hello, Frances,” he said coolly.

  She nodded. “It looks like you had an accident.”

  He shifted and she saw that his leg from the knee down was cased in plaster. “My God,” she said involuntarily. “What did you do to yourself?”

  “The brake cable on the tractor broke,” he said briefly. “I was behind it. I hope you don’t mind that I dropped by without calling first.”

  “I invited him for lunch,” Julianne said. “I said you wouldn’t mind, Frances.”

  “This is your house, too,” replied Francesca quickly. “You don’t need to ask me when you want to invite someone for a meal. I’ll just go upstairs and change.”

  “Change?” Julianne’s forehead wrinkled. “Are you done for the day?”

  “The spray rig’s jammed. Nothing’s coming out. I’ll have Cyril check it out, but I think we need a new one.”

  “Won’t that be expensive?”

  “I’ll look at it,” Jake volunteered. “Maybe I can jimmy something to get you through this spraying.”

  “Don’t worry,” Francesca said breezily. She would not discuss money in front of Jake. “I’ve got it covered. Don’t wait lunch on me. I may be a while.”

  Once she was safely upstairs with the door of her room closed and locked behind her, Francesca turned on the bathroom shower and stripped off her clothes. Not until she was under the warm spray did she allow the gamut of emotions that Jake Harris inevitably called up to wash over her. Her heart still raced and her breath came too quickly, but she was safe behind locked doors and the comforting heat and deafening stream of water from the showerhead.

  She’d always believed that pain had its own statute of limitations. Two years was long enough to recover from a divorce. All the books said so and there weren’t many she hadn’t read. By now she should be happily dating and on the road to a new and better romantic relationship. Why then did the mere sound of Jake’s voice on the telephone bring on the air-light feeling in her stomach that she associated with childhood nightmares and oral reports and, when she was very small, losing her mother in crowded places?
<
br />   Francesca rinsed the shampoo from her hair and applied a healthy handful of conditioner, working it from roots to ends. She eyed her razor, ran her hand up and down her legs and decided against shaving. Then she rinsed herself clean and stepped out of the shower. Wrapping her hair in one towel, her body in another, she pulled out her makeup bag and sat down on the floor in front of the full-length mirror.

  “Mom?” Nick pounded on the door. “Gran wants to know if you’re eating with us.”

  Francesca frowned at herself in the mirror. Was that line between her eyebrows new? “No, I’m not.”

  “Why?”

  She relaxed her forehead and sighed with relief. The line was gone. “I’m going to the bank. I’ll get something on the way.”

  “Dad’s here.”

  “I know, Nick. I’ve already spoken to him.”

  “We’re going fishing. Do you want to come?”

  “I can’t,” she said patiently. “I’m working.”

  “You said you were going to the bank.”

  Francesca sighed, stood and crossed the room to open the door. She pulled Nick into her arms, regretting, not for the first time, the loss of his baby roundness. At eight years old he was all jutting angles and flat planes, with legs and arms so shadow-blade thin she wondered how they could support him.

  “Going to the bank is working, Nick,” she said, bending to bury her face in the warm sweatiness of his neck. “Now, go make your grandmother happy and eat lunch. Don’t be too hard on your dad. He’s already broken enough bones.”

  Nick pulled away and studied her seriously. His eyes were like hers, a warm velvety brown, but everything else came from Jake. “How come you don’t go anywhere with us anymore?”

  Francesca’s heart ached. “Oh, Nick. You know that Dad and I are divorced.”

  “Don’t you like Dad anymore?”