Chapter 10

She came down the path alone. No bridesmaids, no photographer, no lint roller. Ivory silk crepe, seed-pearl buttons, her grandmother's gold hoops, and a small white sugar skull in her left hand that she would not put down for the rest of the day.

She stopped in front of him.

For a long moment neither of them said anything, and the string quartet, to its credit, kept playing something soft and didn't try to be clever.

"You missed my quinceañera," she said.

"I know."

"You missed my graduation. Both of them."

"I know."

"You missed my first harvest. You missed the day I got the job at the winery. You missed-" Her voice finally cracked. "You missed everything, and I was so angry at you for twenty years for something you didn't even do."

"I know."

"Stop saying that."

"Okay."

She looked at him. He looked like a man standing on a bridge.

"I don't know what to call you," she said.

"Anything," Tommy said. "Or nothing. I'll answer either one."

Marisol stood there with her jaw set and her eyes wet and her whole life rearranged in forty minutes, and then she took a breath and said, "Papi."

Tommy Reyes put his hand over his mouth and nodded, and that was the whole reunion, and it was enough.

Up at the tent, Grant Hollis came down the steps. Thirty-one, tall, sunburned across the nose, already in his suit. He looked at his bride, then at the man beside her, then at his mother.

"Marisol," he said. "Do you want to do this today? Because if you don't, we don't. I'll tell two hundred people to go home."

Marisol looked at the lawn. At the chairs. At her uncle Beto, standing forty feet away with his hands in his pockets, waiting to be told to leave.

"Yes," she said. "But first we're doing the blessing."

At 4:20 in the afternoon, on the lawn of the estate his father had helped plant in 1974, Tommy Reyes stood at the head of Block 1 with a bronze plaque at his feet and a linen napkin in his fist and forty small white skulls lined up on the gift table behind him.

He bent down and took a handful of the ground.

"My father said this when we put the first vines in," he said, and his voice carried better than anyone expected. "He said, This ground doesn't belong to anybody. We belong to it. Feed it and it remembers you, even when nobody else does."

He opened his hand and let the dirt fall.

"Marisol Vega," he said. "Delia Vega. Reyes Vineyard, original block, 1974."

Then he wiped his palm on his jeans and held out his arm, and his daughter took it, and he walked her down the aisle he had never been supposed to see.

The reception went long. Beto Vega-Ortiz stayed at the far end of the tent until Marisol walked over and stood in front of him and said, "You have twenty years to make up for. You can start by eating something." And then she sat down next to him, which was not forgiveness, and everyone there understood the difference.

At dusk, when the lights came on and the band started and the guests were dancing, Tommy and Marisol drove the six minutes into St. Helena, to the old cemetery on Spring Street, and found the headstone with her mother's name on it.

Marisol knelt down in the grass in her wedding dress and pulled the weeds out of the base of the stone with her bare hands.

"Mamá," she said. "I'm not going to forgive you today. I might not forgive you at all." She brushed the dirt off her palms. "But I'm going to come back every year and tell you what he's doing. So you're going to have to listen."

Tommy stood behind her with his hands in his pockets and said nothing at all, which was the right thing.

When they got back, the reception was still going. Somebody had folded his canvas jacket over the back of a chair in the shade of the rose arbor, and Biscuit had found it, and he was asleep on it - one clouded blue eye closed, the bent brass R-1 tag rising and falling with every breath, the way it had risen and fallen in that arbor for twenty-one years.

Tommy Reyes sat down on the grass next to the chair and put his hand on the dog's back and stayed there a while.