Tell the Machine Goodnight. Katie Williams
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Have you ever even touched a cow? Carter had recently asked her. She’d looked so confused. Why would I touch a cow? she’d said. That was his mother all over, and his father with his tatty books of Sudokus. But that wasn’t Carter. Carter had made it into a top B-school, made it out of a lingering childhood pudge, and, in quick succession, scored Angie and a job at Apricity. From there it had been up and—to Carter’s simultaneous astonishment and vindication—up some more. Carter considered himself a self-made man, not that it’d been easy when he’d been given such shit materials to work with.
CARTER AND THOMAS FINALLY MET at the spring team-builder in Napa. The “TB,” everyone called it. It was supposed to have been just Carter’s office at the Napa TB, but then two days before go-time, Santa Clara’s TB had fallen through (a foible with the required waiting period for hang-glide certification), and it was decided that the two TBs should merge.
“It’s a regular TB outbreak,” Carter said to Pearl, who someday was going to laugh at one of his jokes.
In reply, Pearl coughed. Carter couldn’t tell if she was continuing the TB joke or if she simply had a tickle in her throat. They were standing in a Napa winery tasting room. He tried and failed to catch her eye, but she’d turned her head, so he could only see the back of her neck. She’d cropped her short hair even shorter than before; now the ends curled around her earlobes. He wanted to tell her it’d looked better long, but he’d wait for the right moment so as not to offend her. Pearl swished her wine and spit in the barrel.
The spit barrels were the only things Carter liked about the wineries, which made the flimsiest attempts at refinement—the sommeliers’ blouses a shiny acrylic, the words Tasting Room in big brass letters over the door, the branding absolutely everywhere. At the last one, they’d been selling polo shirts with the winery’s name embroidered over the tit. “Something-or-other & Sons.” Carter didn’t understand why you would wear that on your chest unless you were either the Something-or-other or one of his sons.
He was already regretting the wine tour, which had been whose idea? Not Carter’s. Owen’s? Izzy’s? Not Pearl’s. Pearl had, in fact, tried to get out of the TB, something vague about her teenage son. Carter had told her no dice. After all, wasn’t he leaving Angie alone with their baby daughter, and she barely three months old? The TB was only two nights, he’d told Pearl. Required.
At this point in the afternoon, it was certainly feeling required. The group was at its third winery, and the grapes, both literal and figurative, were withering on the vine. There’d been a campaign in San Francisco that year asking people to drive north and support the wineries, which were struggling because the weather had become too hot to harvest the traditional grapes. Instead of Pinot Noir, the wineries were now bottling something approximate and calling it, with a wink, El Niño Noir. Carter called it Pi-not Noir. (Pearl hadn’t laughed at that one either.) The new wine tasted thin and sweet and awful, like the saliva of someone who’d been sucking on a grape lollipop. Pi-not.
By the middle of their fourth, and final, winery of the day, Carter wasn’t sure if he was disappointed or relieved that the Santa Clara office had yet to show up. He posted himself by one of the barrels, watching his employees swish and spit. He kept an eye on Pearl, the only one out of the group sticking to white wines. He wanted her to try a red. He wanted her teeth to stain purple and for her not to know it. Why couldn’t she so much as smile at him?
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