"I'll be goddamned. Cricket? Is that you?" It took Jorge several seconds to register the nickname as his own. The last person to call him Cricket had been deceased for over a decade and no one else would dare. He sat his glass on the table and turned his torso towards the speaker. A willowy red thing squinted down at him in perfect skepticism. She might have been a Pleasant but Jorge couldn't be sure. She bit her lower lip uncomfortably and something in the gesture triggered Jorge's memory.
"Jules?" Her face relaxed into a smile. Jorge stood as she waddled over, so awkwardly feminine that it was almost funny. He remembered then what a tomboy she had been as a child. Even tarted up and twenty years older, she still could not have attracted him less. When she wrapped her arms around him, all he could think was that she was thin enough to be snapped in half.
"Just look at you! I swear, there must be a portrait somewhere aging in your place," she bristled. Jorge pulled away from her gently.
"Quite," he said. Across the table, Donna cleared her throat. "Juliette Capp, you remember my sister Donna? And this is her husband, Sean Wallace."
"Capp-Torrence, actually and of course. Enchanted." Juliette extended her hand to Sean who kissed it rather than shaking it, visibly unnerving her. Donna leaned back in her chair, pinching her glass by the stem as though a temporary amnesia had untaught her how to hold red wine.
"Don't just stand there, pull the woman a chair." Donna crossed her legs at the knee, her perilously tight skirt riding upwards. Jorge swallowed his annoyance and busied himself with Juliette's chair, having long ago learned not to challenge Donna on her choice of attire. Jorge forced Juliette's chair towards the coffee table as she sat down, thinking neither of the chair nor the woman in it. Donna, on the other hand, was gazing straight through Juliette with seemingly predatorial attention.
"So what brings you to Pleasantview, darling? Adventure holiday? Vacationing amongst the salt of the earth?" Jorge kicked his sister under the table but did not look up to gauge her reaction. Instead, he offered Juliette a glass of wine by way of gesture towards the bottle. She shook her head to decline.
"Goodness, no. My husband sent me here on errand. The Tellermans are soliciting us for financial backing. They're reviving the old Fiorello Vineyard." With that, Donna took a sip from her glass and choked. Jorge peered at his sister, whose hair had fallen into her face with the impact of her cough. He knew what she was thinking. Kelly's body was scattered for over a kilometer across that vineyard but the news did not disturb him. He had been expecting to hear as much for years, ever since that Goth woman married into the Tellerman family. Why they hadn't decided to farm that land sooner, Jorge did not know. The silence that followed was too heavy for Jorge to lift. Juliette shot furtive glances between the assembled company. "It's shocking, I know but according to J.L., the land is still arable and Isabella owns it as part of the Mortimer Goth estate. Personally, I always believed the urban legend that old man Fiorello salted the earth just to spite his daughter but there you have it."
"I live at Arbormoor Manor." Jorge spoke evenly but there was a disconnect between the words that he spoke and the thought behind them. He lived at Arbormoor Manor. Kelly died in the Fiorello Vineyards. Juliette laughed as though she were coming to some realization.
"Oh! Of course. How stupid of me. Hope you won't mind having a new neighbor out there in the woods," she said.
"I always assumed the state owned that land," Sean interjected, scratching his knee.
"Oh, no. Dr. Goth bought the vineyard from Isabella Fiorello for pennies right before she died. The old lady practically gave it to him. Told him he was a damn fool. J.L. showed me their correspondence over lunch the other day." Jorge stared out of the window behind Donna's head, losing himself in the bleak white backdrop of the sky. He thought of the farming industry moving in on that muddy expanse of land where his wife had been found in pieces. The thought conjured up precisely nothing within him. His heart was as empty as a snowdrift.
"Why would Mortimer Goth buy a vineyard and just let it rot?" Donna traced her collar bone as she spoke, intently watching Jorge for what, he couldn't tell.
"No one knows. Rumor has it that he offered it to Adriana Lothario but that she turned it down," Juliette said.
"I believe it," Sean mused. "People used to say that he had been in love with Adriana. Married Bella Bachelor just because they looked alike." Juliette sucked her teeth, tilting her head to the side.
"Oh rubbish. He loved he wife. Do you remember how he turned the entire state upside down looking for her when she went missing?" she said. Donna rolled her eyes.
"You mean the way that he constrained the townsmen into indentured servitude just to find one runaway housewife?" Jorge reached forward to refill his glass, sensing one of Donna's townie rights speeches on the horizon. Juliette wound her necklace around her fingers.
"Forgive me but last I checked, the townsmen were and are the workforce. What aught Mortimer have done? Monopolized your law enforcement agencies? She was only, as you say, one runaway housewife." Jorge spat his wine back into his glass rather than inhaling it as he laughed. He didn't agree with Juliette-- Far from it-- But people did not often stand up to the hailstorm that was his elder sister.
"Are you honestly going to sit there and legitimize a human rights violation that put one out of every twenty townie men in Pleasantview in jail for no real reason?" Donna was fuming. Her cheeks were nearly the color of her hair. Jorge supposed that she was inches away from wringing Juliette's neck.
"Townsmen do not have rights. They have privileges that are granted to them as the residents deem fit. In Veronaville, we find it increasingly necessary to cut back on what the townsmen are allowed. We have handled them with far too much care in recent decades and it is beginning to backfire. They are getting organized and staging demonstrations. You mark my words, they'll be bombing Hidelton Square before too long." Sean cleared his throat.
"Demonstrations are for students and anarchists. Not hardworking townsmen. It's unheard of," he griped.
"I hope they burn Amhurst to the ground." Donna took a swig of her wine. Juliette pursed her lips in anger but instead of furthering the argument, she clasped her hands tightly in her lap, turning to Jorge.
"Well, I certainly didn't stop to talk about wineries and politics. How is your son doing, Cricket?" Her tone was falsely cheerful. Jorge sat his glass on the table.
"Sons and they are both doing well. Thank you for asking." Juliette looked as though she tasted something sour. Perhaps she was remembering that Kelly was townie-born. Or perhaps she had heard that Jorge was sleeping with his governess. Or perhaps both.
"Your mother is positively beside herself over your little Malcolm. He's a partling. He aught to be doing his upper school studies at Ethelden," Juliette said. Jorge smiled at her just slightly.
"Macaulay needs the duel influence of the Temple and my sainted mother like the townsmen need their privileges revoked."
Donna caught her brother's stare. She squared her shoulders and tipped her head back, building a defensive wall with her posture.
"Maybe you should ask your son what he wants," she said. Jorge knitted his brow in confusion. If the world was on fire, Donna would have saved a stranger before she saved their mother and yet there she was, suggesting that maybe Cully should be sent home to live with her. Worse-- That maybe he wanted to be sent home to live with her.
"Macaulay is a child. He isn't allowed to have an opinion."
Donna shrugged her shoulders as though she did not agree but would not belabor the point.
"Veronaville has nothing to offer him." Jorge spoke more to satisfy himself than his sister. Donna leaned back in her chair and uncrossed her legs.
"Perhaps you're right," Donna said. She then turned to Juliette. "And when did say that the Tellerman family would be breaking ground?" Jorge's stomach writhed. Was he denying Cully the only opportunity that he would have to escape Jorge's personal ghosts? Juliette folded the fabric of her dress in her lap, curling it around her fingers.
"This spring," she said simply. Donna rose her glass in a toast.
"To their harvest," she said.
