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  To Alex, Brian, and Dad

  Acknowledgments

  First off, I need to thank my fans for buying this book, even though it took me forever to write it. When my father died in July 2013, I was beyond heartbroken, and never thought I could write again. He was (and is) the voice in my head. The hole in my heart will never be completely filled. But I did write again, and I thank you all for your patience and support.

  Next, I need to thank some ladies who, when I said I wasn’t sure I could ever write again, just weren’t having it. To Kim Whalen, my agent, and Jennifer Weis, my editor: thank you for standing by me and not letting me quit. Even though I tried. Twice. (Frankly, I’d have fired my ass a long time ago.) You both had way more faith in me and my work than I had in myself, and I cannot put into words how life changing that turned out to be.

  Finally, thank you to my friends and family who helped me get through losing the first man in my life: Brian Smith, Alex Gruenenfelder, Patrick Bishop, Quinn Cummings, Cormac Funge, Lila Funge, Jeff Greco, Jeff Greenstein, Brian Gordon, Dorothy Kozak, Blake Masters, Missy Masters, Laurie Lehman, Marcelline Love, Nancy Redd, Carolyn Townsend, and (again) Kim Whalen: You took care of me in the weeks and months afterward in quiet and profound ways: making me tea, forcing me to eat, driving me places, singing “Oh Danny Boy,” taking long walks with me, immediately picking up the phone in the middle of the night when I accidentally called, and coming to his funeral. I treasure you to a degree that would make your eyes roll. You made me feel loved and cared for at a time when I had absolutely nothing to give, and if weren’t for you, I would not have moved on to write this book (or done very much else for that matter). At the time, most of you had already lost a parent: which is, to quote Missy, “The shittiest club in the world to be a part of.” I will never be able to repay you—I will try like hell to pay it forward.

  And as always, thank you, Jenn, Haley, Declan, Maibre, Rob, Carol, and Janis, and to all of my wonderful extended family and in-laws.

  Oh! One more “Thank you!” to Brittany Ann Albaugh, for my wonderful title.

  Prologue

  HOLLY

  It is early evening, and I am at our dining room table with Jessie and Nat, pouring a flight of wines for us to taste. Nat has a pad of paper in front of her (how retro!) and has just crossed off another suggestion from her list. “Okay, Holly’s idea, ‘Once Upon a Wine,’ is out, as is ‘The Vintage Point.’” Nat looks over at Jessie as she continues, “You also killed my idea, ‘Que Syrah, Syrah.’”

  “Because we’re not serving only one type of wine,” Jessie pipes up defensively.

  “Which is the same reason you didn’t like ‘Don’t Get Me a Cab,’” Nat says as she crosses out another line on her page.

  “No, I just found that one to be a passive-aggressive snipe about my taste in wine.”

  “I don’t think it was passive…” I think aloud.

  Nat continues reading from the elimination round. “Holly made a face at ‘Wined-up Dolls.’ And ‘It’s Ireland Somewhere’ doesn’t even make sense—they don’t make wine in Ireland. Next.”

  My face lights up. “How about ‘Corkscrewed’?”

  “We are not putting the word ‘screwed’ in the name of our bar,” Jessie tells me firmly.

  “Why not? People will want to go there either because they already feel that way…”

  “Too dark…” Nat says, shaking her head.

  “Or they want to get—”

  Jessie shuts me down with, “I’ll give you a thousand dollars not to finish that thought.”

  I shrug, finish pouring a Meritage from the Central Coast of California, then watch quietly as Nat and Jessie take a minute to stare into space with writer’s block.

  Some days the Muse not only refuses to visit, she texts you to say she went to Cabo for the week.

  “‘Pinot envy’?” I ask.

  Nat winces. She absentmindedly runs her fingers through her shiny, dark brunette pixie cut as she stares off into space, thinking.

  Jessie eventually snaps her fingers. “Oh. How about ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place’?”

  “You want to name the bar after a short story about the inevitability of death?” Nat asks, mildly horrified. “Why don’t we just call it ‘We’re All Gonna Die. Everybody Drink’?”

  Jessie’s eyes widen. “Wait. That’s what that story’s about?”

  “Yeah. Remember, the old man sits in a corner by himself getting drunk, and the young waiter with the hot wife waiting for him at home just wants to call it a night, and the middle-aged guy is all pensive because he knows he’ll be the old man one day.”

  Jessie looks crestfallen. “Crap. How depressing. See, this is why we shouldn’t read the classics at sixteen. No one should take AP English until they’re thirty. How about ‘Grapes of Wrath’?”

  Nat narrows her eyes at her. “Honestly, would you ever go into a bar with the word ‘wrath’ in its name?”

  “I would before I’d go to one with ‘screwed’ in its name,” Jessie counters. “‘Grape Expectations’?”

  “Do you want to know what that book’s about?” Nat asks in an almost threatening tone.

  “I’m gonna say no. ‘Waiting for Merlot’?”

  “I am seriously going to make you take an English class.”

  A bit later …

  “‘Something Fabulous’?” I throw out.

  Nat juts her chin back and forth quickly, debating. “It’s, like, it’s good, but not great. I’ll date that name, but I won’t marry it.”

  “Oh! ‘Nice Stems’?” Jessie suggests.

  Nat begins doodling a flower on her pad. “We’re a wine bar, not a florist. ‘Hollywood and Wine’?”

  “We’re in Echo Park, not Hollywood,” I point out.

  And we’re back to thinking.

  And a while after that …

  “‘Eternally Grapeful’?” Jessie suggests. “‘Who’s Drinking Gilbert Grape’? ‘Dinner Is Poured,’ ‘Wine Girls,’ ‘Wine Notes,’ ‘Quit Your Whining,’ ‘Winenot’? Snickers!”

  “Snickers?” Nat repeats. “You want to name our place after a candy bar?”

  “No, I’m getting snickers from both of you,” Jessie snaps. “If I were to name the bar after a candy, obviously it would be 3 Musketeers.”

  Nat opens her mouth, but Jessie shuts her down before she can speak. “And don’t tell me what that’s really about, because no, I’ve never read it, and the only thing I know is, ‘All for Wine and Wine for All.’ And if you tell me they all die at the end, I’m just going to get upset and have to eat some Snickers.”

  Nat shakes her head. “Seriously. Next time you get the urge to watch Bravo, promise me you’ll crack a book instead. The line is—”

  “Wait,” I tell Nat. “I think Jessie just came up with our name.”

  “I did?!” Jessie blurts out happily, her face glowing. “Oh, yay!
Good for me! Which one was it? It wasn’t the Gilbert Grape one, was it? Because actually I hate that one.”

  “‘All for Wine, and Wine for All.’ No matter who you are, and what you like, we will find a wine for everyone.”

  And, with that, we finally had our name.

  Now all we needed to do was get the sign made, get it out on social media, finish redoing the ladies’ room, move in the rest of the furniture, teach those two how to use a cash register, and pick some wines for opening night.

  Three months earlier …

  Chapter One

  NATASHA (NAT)

  9:58 A.M.

  Man, I love my job!

  Not very many people can go to work every day feeling like this is exactly where they are supposed to be. As a kid growing up in San Diego, I had always dreamed of being a TV writer. And now, at thirty-two, I am the head writer for one of the top-rated game shows of the season. I even won an Emmy last year.

  How many people can say they are excited to get out of bed in the morning? On tape days, I don’t even hit the snooze button once.

  I am standing at the judges’ table on the set of the game show Million Dollar Genius! feeling fantastic in my new purple cashmere sweater. (At the beginning of a tape day, most people on the crew wear a sweater or a jacket, because the lights have not heated the place up yet, so the set is beyond freezing. I’ve been on sets in August watching a two-hundred-pound cameraman shiver in a wool peacoat.) I’m sipping a large vanilla cappuccino made especially for me by the craft services guy (who also made me my favorite bacon-and-cheese burrito earlier; gotta love tape days—Free food!) and am going over a few questions with our host, Cordelia Mumford, a beautiful former CNN reporter who accidentally got into game show hosting, and my producer, Marc Winslow, a handsome Brit who accidentally got into game show producing.

  The contestants are still squired away in a soundproof greenroom in back, but we keep our voices low so that the audience can’t hear us as we hunch over the table, poring over our scripts.

  “Okay, we switched out the six-hundred-thousand-dollar question in this game so that we didn’t have Kafka as the answer twice in the same week,” I whisper to Cordelia. “Here’s the new question.” I point to a pink paper square that has been glue-sticked onto her white script, which she silently reads.

  “As long as the answer is never Kardashian, I’m a happy camper,” Cordelia quietly jokes.

  I chuckle, then continue. “And by the way, for the million, it’s the South Sea Bubble, not the South Seas Bubble. If they say ‘Seas,’ we’re going to have to rule them wrong.”

  “Frankly, I think if they know the name of a market bubble from another country three hundred years ago, they deserve a million dollars,” Cordelia tells me.

  “That’s because you’re not from England,” Marc, who’s from London, politely tells her in his perfectly lilting English accent.

  “No. That’s because I spent my college days getting drunk and under an assortment of frat boys and football players. Far better use of one’s time,” Cordelia counters playfully.

  “Yet here you are, the maven of American trivia,” Marc says, rather flirtatiously.

  “I know. Life’s weird,” Cordelia says, lightly folding her script in half and pulling away from our table. “Did I tell you that I got invited to the White House?”

  “That’s awesome,” I say, surprised. “I didn’t even know you were a fan of the president.”

  She leans in to me to cheerfully confide, “I’m so not. Plus, I was in the middle of a transcontinental move that year and couldn’t even figure out where my polling place was.” Then she walks to the middle of the stage and breaks into a huge smile as she booms to the audience, “Thank you guys so much for coming! We are going to have a great time today! Isn’t our warm-up guy Jerry amazing?!”

  Marc and I take our seats as judges while the contestant coordinator escorts the first three contestants to the stage. Cordelia walks to her podium, then stands patiently as the makeup artist presses her face with a powder puff and does “last looks,” which is exactly what it sounds like—the last look the makeup person gives before Cordelia is ready for the camera.

  I forget about work for a second to clear my mind, look around the room, and savor the moment.

  There is no better feeling than being on a set right before a show begins. When all of the hard work is done: the writing, the rewriting, the arguing with your nerd staff about whether or not the average American knows the difference between the national debt and the national deficit, or explaining that Jean Patou was a French parfumeuse, not the inventor of pâté à choux pastry.

  That moment when you get to just bask in the glow of a happy audience, a crew filled with people who worked their butts off to get to where they are, and that rare feeling of being exactly where you’re supposed to be, working on something you’ll want to be remembered for at your funeral.

  Okay, that last point may be a bit dark. Let’s just say rest home. I’ll be proud of Million Dollar Genius! at my rest home.

  I smile at Marc next to me, and rolling begins. The first assistant director announces to the crew, “And we’re on in…!” He puts up his left hand and fans out his five fingers, “Five!” then ticks back one finger at a time, “four … three!” and then he goes silent as he folds down his ring finger for two. Then one. Then he points his index finger toward the host.

  “Welcome to Million Dollar Genius!” Jerry Winters, our show’s announcer, belts out in his smooth baritone voice as Marc slips me a sheet of paper. I open it with a serious look on my face, and read:

  You look so bewitching in that sweater. It makes your olive skin glow. It’s taking all of my self-control not to slide my hands under it right now. And that red lipstick? I want traces of it smeared all over my body from your kisses.

  I try to suppress a smile as I earnestly scribble a note back:

  Well, the only way your suit would look better is if it were beside you in a heap on the floor.

  I fold the note and pass it back to him. Marc opens it to read. No smile, just a stern note back:

  Meet me at the top level, northwest corner of parking lot two at lunch.

  Oh, yeah. There might be one downside to my job. Small detail. Hardly worth mentioning, really. I’m kind of, maybe, sleeping with my boss.

  Chapter Two

  HOLLY

  8:00 A.M.

  I want to quit my job.

  Actually, that’s not true. I love my job—when I’m actually working. I’m an actress, and there is nothing more fun than being paid to spend the day flying around the set in a harness, or being outfitted by a costume designer in a seven-thousand-dollar sequined dress, or looking across a table at a love-struck George Clooney, who asks you to pass the salt.

  But today my job is to get a job. Which sucks. Always, always, always. I wish I could be like that actor who said every audition is an opportunity, however short, to practice your craft. I’m thirty-two years old and have been working for fourteen years. I’m done. I’m ready to (a) start fielding offers or (b) win the lottery and retire.

  I start today’s round of auditions at six (fucking) A.M., because audition #1 is at eight A.M., but in Santa Monica, a city west of Los Angeles. I live with my roommate, Natasha, in Silverlake, which is a good hour from Santa Monica even in the best of traffic conditions. Add drizzling rain, the usual frazzled commuters, and two lane closures for road work, and one must leave the house two hours early.

  As if that weren’t bad enough, it’s for a commercial for a pharmaceutical where I have to look like a scientist, and where I’ve been told to “dress the part.”

  You tell me how not to look like an ass when you show up to a job interview in a white lab coat. (The same lab coat you’ve worn to at least twelve auditions, and one very weird second date.)

  I don’t know why the trend lately, but I’m half Asian, half Caucasian, and I seem to be getting audition after audition for “scientist” and “doct
or.”

  Okay, I totally know why the trend. And the stereotype totally pisses me off. Although I suppose one advantage of being in my thirties is I’m now the smart scientist type. Once, in my twenties, a director gave me the most back-handed compliment when he said, “With your straight, black, ‘shampoo commercial’ hair, and porcelain”—(read: half-white)—“skin, you’re like an approachable geisha.”

  Yeah, as opposed to all of those stand-offish geishas.

  Anyway, a little before eight, I make my way to the ad agency, which is on the third floor of a mirrored building that looks like all of the other mirrored buildings in the area. I sign in at the reception area to let them know I’m there and try to pretend that I don’t see twelve other Asian women, all dressed in lab coats, silently rehearsing their lines.

  The receptionist hands me the sides, which is what we call the pages with the actor’s lines on them. On the top of the first page is a word: XKLGGENZS. Judging from the rest of the script, I’m guessing that’s the name of the drug they’re selling. I resist the urge to ask to buy a vowel.

  I sit down on a white pleather sofa and read through the script. The first page is for a younger actress, who will play Sarah, my afflicted patient. What she is afflicted with, the script will not say.

  My part, on page 2, starts out innocuously enough:

  INT. LAB—DAY

  JULIA, a handsome woman, older, approachable, tells us in her authoritative voice …

  JULIA

  But now, we women have options.

  Then page 3 scares the shit out of me. Because over a shot of four beautiful young women laughing over cocktails (Sarah and her friends), I (the phony doctor) have a voice-over to warn consumers:

  JULIA

  (v.o.)

  Side effects include drowsiness, short-term memory loss, decreased libido, stroke, depressed mood, dry mouth, tinnitus, and death. Pregnant women should not take Xklggenzs. If you have thoughts of suicide, please stop using Xklggenzs and consult your doctor immediately.