Phần I
"He's been doing it since March," Sam said.
They were in the lab off the new fermentation hall at six in the morning, a small white room full of beakers and glass cylinders and the sour smell of fermenting juice. Sam was running the morning numbers: sugar, acid, temperature, a dozen tanks, the way he had every harvest morning for twenty years. He didn't look up from the hydrometer.
"Since the diagnosis," he said. "Two, three nights a week. The first time, I found him on the catwalk at four in the morning with his hand on the hatch. I thought he was having a stroke." He wrote a number on the board. "The doctor says it's a groove in the record. Something he did once, so many times, or so hard, that it's the last thing to go."
"He says just till morning, boy."
"I know what he says."
"Who's the boy, Sam?"
Sam floated the glass hydrometer in a cylinder of purple juice and watched it bob. Twenty-four point two. Ready to press.
"The bolt squealed," he said, instead of answering. "The first few times. It was rusted. It made this scream, like an animal, and it woke him up out of it and he'd be standing there on the catwalk not knowing where he was, terrified." He set the cylinder down. "So I oiled it. That's all. So he could do it quietly and go back to bed."
Claire looked at her brother. At his big, careful, sunburned hands.
"You've been taking care of him," she said. "All by yourself."
"Somebody had to." He still didn't look at her. "You want to know who the boy is, ask the old man in the morning. He'll tell you it's the Holloway kid. He's said it a hundred times. Walter's boy was always sniffing around Seven." Sam picked up the clipboard. "Grant. He's locking up Grant. Every night. For twenty years. In a tank that's been empty since 2006."
He walked out to the press.
Claire stayed in the lab and looked at the numbers on the whiteboard, in Sam's square, sloping hand. Tank. Brix. Acid. Temperature. Date.
And she thought of Rafael Ortega standing in this same room - the old version of this room - every morning of her childhood, writing numbers in the harvest log. Pressing hard. Because the log had carbon paper. Three copies, white, yellow and pink. White for the winery. Pink for the bank. And yellow -
Yellow for the cellar master. To keep.