Page 5 of Rock the Chardonnay
It sounds easy, and I grin with them in solidarity. But inside, my stomach is like an empty pit.
I don’t have people to fill the voids in my life. I have temporary hook ups to scratch the itch, and people I work with, acquaintances I call friends. But the last people who had truly known me live here, in St. Olaf, Wisconsin.
And I am in no way prepared to see them again.
CHAPTER 3
Declan—Now
“Alex!” I slather peanut butter on one slice of wheat bread and my mom’s homemade raspberry jam on another. “We have to go!”
“School doesn’t start for two more weeks, Dad!” he calls down the stairs.
He’s going to wake up my mom. That’s exactly what she needs while she tries to convert the guest cottage into a vacation rental property.
“I know that.” I wrap the sandwich with reusable beeswax-lined cloth and place the whole thing into a lunch box. “But we have to get to the fairgrounds to set up the tasting tent. I promised your grandparents. May I remind you that you love them more than me.” I raise my tone on the last sentence, hoping it carries to my nine-year-old son’s increasingly selective hearing.
“He also loves me more than you.” Ciaran waltzes into the kitchen wearing nothing but boxer shorts. “Did you make breakfast?” He reaches for the blueberry bran muffins I made, but I snatch the plate away.
“These are for my kid. Get your own breakfast.”
“You are way too uptight,” Ciaran says. He yanks open the freezer and pulls out a container of frozen fruits and veggies. He carries this to the blender and dumps the contents in. “You need to get laid, man. Josie left two years ago.”
I fill up two water bottles with ice, rolling my eyes. Getting laid is not a possibility. We live in a town where there are no unmarried women my age, at least none I haven’t known since we were in diapers together. “Who am I going to have sex with, Ciaran? Maddy Olmstead?”
“She may be in her sixties, but she looks like she’d be a beast.” Ciaran pours almond milk into the blender, covers it, and hits the smoothie button. “I’m pretty sure she and Opal are together, though.”
“I’m a single dad. What am I supposed to do?” I finish packing the lunches and water bottles into my backpack.
“Do what other single parents do. Let me and the ‘rents watch the squirt, who honestly is old enough to watch himself, and go to Chicago for the weekend to dust off your Tinder.”
“Do you learn to speak in code at search and rescue?” I stick a mug under the drip from the coffee machine. “And nine is not old enough to watch himself.”
Ciaran elbows me out of the way to grab the sugar. “You’re not that old, dude. You know what fucking Tinder is.”
“Language, boys.” Our mom, Zoe Foster, walks in carrying a laundry basket filled with clean sheets. “You’re both over thirty. Can you not act like you’re three? Ciaran, how’s the cottage? Is it ready for guests yet?”
“Yes, Mom. It’s filled with all the bougie shit you wanted.” Ciaran pours his purple-colored smoothie into a glass.
Mom’s eyes narrow with exasperation. “It’s not bougie. It’s tasteful. That Remodel Your Home and Life seminar your dad and I went to, down at the VFW, recommended the blackout curtains and said everyone is doing heated bathroom floors and towel racks. Especially here in Wisconsin. I think I want them for this house, too, if the rental property starts paying out.” She drops the laundry basket by the sliding glass doors that open onto the backyard. “Declan, do you have everything packed for the festival tasting booth?”
“Got it all in the truck out back.”
She pats me on the cheek as she walks by me. “That’s my responsible boy. Where’s Alex?”
“Taking his time!” I call upstairs. Breakfast. The kid needs breakfast. I have the muffins for him, but I take the cereal from the cupboard and two bowls from the drawer beside the sink. Just in case he decides he doesn’t like blueberries today.
Footsteps pound down the stairs, far heavier than any sixty pound child should sound. “Dad!” Alex barrels into the room, grabbing the cereal box from me as he rushes past. “Tell me what I can do to earn more screen time during the week. I need to be able to Minecraft. I can’t just play on the weekends. What can I do?”
I hand him the almond milk. “Emancipation.”
Alex screws up his face, looking so much like Ciaran when he was nine and being a tool. He inherited his mother’s blond hair, and somehow his uncle’s stubborn streak. “I don’t know what that is, Dad.”
“And that is exactly why you can’t have more screen time. You need to read actual books.”
Ciaran snickers into the dregs of his smoothie. “You sound like such a teacher, Dec.”
“I am a teacher. Even when I’m helping out with the family business during the summer.”