“It didn’t?”

She looked at him in silence. She didn’t know what else to say.

Ross stood. “I better go.”

Eliana followed him down to the foyer. At the doorway she put her arms around him and pressed herself into him. He held her. Their partings had lost their awkwardness, but now they seemed more difficult each time.

“Same time tomorrow?” Ross asked.

She looked down. “I’m sorry. I’m so flustered. What day is tomorrow?”

“Thursday.”

“No, I need to get ready for the vendemmia feast. You’re still coming, aren’t you?”

“I was planning on it.”

“Good.” She leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek. “Sleep well.”

“Good night. I’ll see you Sunday.”

She shut the door behind him and leaned against it, thinking about a life with just him.

CHAPTER 20

“D’amor non s’intende che prudenza ad amore.” One who tries to unite prudence and love knows nothing about love.

—Italian Proverb

“I had never supposed a woman could be so lovely.”

—Ross Story’s diary

The caterers from the restaurant Osteria di Rendola arrived Sunday at one o’clock. They pulled their three-wheeled Ape truck up to the side of the building, threw open its doors and began carrying large platters of food to the kitchen on the top floor of the winery. The vendemmia feast was a thing of beauty. The antipasta included mushroom-and-mint focaccia bread, pheasant salad with grape reduction sauce, fig and walnut bread with Tuscan ham, chicken liver-Vin santo pâté crostini and wild bitter greens omelette. There were two kinds of soups: tomato and bread, and corn meal and chestnut. For the first plate there was cannelini bean and ricotta lasagna, flavored with rosemary, and from the grill porcini mushroom caps with grape leaves, roasted pork ribs with wild garlic and black pepper and Sangiovese wine-marinated Chianina steak. There were three kinds of dessert: grape focaccia, chestnut flour crepes with chocolate mousse, and chilled Sangiovese grape-and-peach soup.

The guests, the vineyard and winery workers, began arriving three hours after the caterers. They came by automobile, bicycle and scooter but mostly by foot, dressed in their Sunday best; the older men wearing hats with the musty dark wool suit coats that they had worn for decades, their women plodding silently beside them. Once at the winery, they tediously climbed the steps to the top floor, where the salone was prepared for the feast. There they divorced themselves from each other’s company, the old men gathering in a pack at one end of the hall while the women gathered in the kitchen, where they found ways to busy themselves, helping the caterer stir sauces or spread pâté across crostini.

The young men came dressed in leather jackets or sports coats and collared shirts unbuttoned to their abdomens, with young ladies on their arms and imperious smiles and cigarettes on their lips. The young people congregated in their own section of the hall.

There were five long banquet tables brimming with food and large demijohns of wine, Merlot and Sangiovese, from the previous harvest.