what was going on over here.
While Josh was looking elsewhere, Fredo rolled one of his team’s balls, to the accompaniment of shouts of encouragement from his own team and groans from Josh’s team when the second ball rolled close to the pallino.
“Kiss it, kiss it!” cried one of the Tonys, which Josh figured meant that he wanted the two balls to touch. He shot another surreptitious glance toward Gina, remembering with a pang of regret the sweet softness of her lips. He must have been crazy to turn his back on her in Scotland.
“All right,” Rocco said, interrupting his reverie by slapping a ball in Josh’s hand. “Now you.”
Josh, whose mind for the past few moments had been engaged in wistful remembrances of a heather-strewn moor, stared at him blankly.
“Go ahead. We have to bowl until one of our balls is closer to the pallino than the ball that Fredo rolled.”
Josh hefted the ball in his hand and summoned enough bravado to convince himself that this game was a piece of cake. Unfortunately, he slipped as he rolled the ball, and it landed about as far away from the others as it could without jumping the sides of the court.
“You’ll do better next time,” Rocco said before rolling another ball, which edged somewhat closer to the pallino than Josh’s.
Rocco’s team bowled until all balls had been thrown, but not without a lot of good-natured jesting. After that, it was Fredo’s turn again.
“When both sides have bowled all their balls, the side with the ball closest to the pallino gets a point. A point is also awarded for any other ball from that side that is closer to the pallino than any ball rolled by the opponents. Thus, only one team can score in a frame, and that side can get up to four points. The first team to score sixteen points wins,” Rocco told him.
Josh didn’t need long to figure out that bocce was a game of strategy. The pallino could be moved by a shot, so a player often scored by knocking the pallino closer to balls previously rolled by his team. On the other hand, a player whose team already had balls in scoring position sometimes chose to place a ball in front of the pallino to keep it from being moved.
Whenever it was Josh’s turn, he managed to goof up. If he tried to land his ball close to the pallino, it inevitably pushed the pallino the wrong way. If he wanted to keep it from hitting the pallino, it always did. He found that he couldn’t estimate how much a ball would roll from where he stood to throw it, and he tended to throw short. If he didn’t throw short, he overcorrected.
Rocco, on the other hand, was a virtuoso. “Bocce is as simple or complicated as you want to make it,” he told Josh, and then he’d proceed to blow everyone away with a cunning move.
When the game was finally over, Josh realized that he was the one who had virtually lost for Rocco’s team. Even though the others tried to gloss over his many errors, he felt bad about letting the team down.
“Don’t worry, we’re playing two out of three to win,” Rocco said by way of reassurance, which was not at all reassuring to Josh. He looked around, wishing an excuse to bail out would come to mind. But Gina had disappeared, and Mia was hanging over a bench, waiting to cheer him on.
Well, maybe this time he’d give Mia something to cheer about. He forced a halfhearted grin and girded himself for the second game.
Unfortunately, he didn’t play any better in the second game than he had in the first. The only good thing was that now he knew the rules. The third game was a disaster, though his teammates were generous in not blaming their loss on him. Still, by the time everyone dispersed, Josh felt extremely apologetic, not to mention dejected for letting the team down.
“That’s okay,” Rocco told him. “A lot of guys wouldn’t have even tried to play.”
Josh resisted the temptation to invite Rocco and company to play lacrosse. Or hockey. Or water polo, in which he excelled.
Mia jumped down from the bench and ran over. “Don’t worry, Josh,” Mia consoled him. “You’ll get better at bocce.”
“I’m not so sure,” he said, wiping the perspiration from his face with a handkerchief. He was still bummed out from his disappointing performance. He kept scanning the crowd for Gina, but he didn’t see her near the barbecue, the big doors that led to the wine cave or near the group of women she’d been standing with before.
Fredo stumped over, his white hair an aureole standing out around his head. “Come along, my boy,” he said to Josh. “I’ll show you where to clean up.” Josh followed him on a circuitous route along a well-worn grass path past the barbecue, the picnic tables and three or four kids playing with skateboards in front of the winery office.
“You know,” Fredo said as they washed up in the men’s room inside the small tasting facility, which held a bar and a few tiny tables, “it’s not the game that’s important, Joshua. It is the family, and that we play together as well as work together.”
Josh splashed water on his face. “That’s, um, good,” he said. He was surprised that Fredo was treating him as an equal, considering how everyone else deferred to him.
“My father, the first Gino Angelini, always held family to be more important than anything. This is the philosophy that we have let govern our family winery since we started it.”
“When we were in Scotland, Gina talked about her family a lot,” Josh told him. “The other women playing the game never mentioned their parents, brothers, sisters.” He hadn’t, either.
“Yes, that’s our Gina. She is named after my father and her father, too. Gino Junior was my elder brother. He died when Gina was twenty-two.” Fredo dried his hands on a paper towel and then handed one to Josh before clapping him on the shoulder. “Come, Josh. We must join the others. It is almost time for the stomping of the grapes.”
As they were making their way past the winery office, Fredo was distracted by questions from some of the children playing nearby, and Josh stepped to one side to wait for him. After a few moments, someone walked up behind him and gently put a hand on his arm. “Josh Corbett? I’m Maren, Gina’s mother.”
When he turned and looked into Maren’s face, he saw Gina’s delicate features, the same straight nose and high cheekbones. But where Gina’s eyes were dark, almost black, Maren’s were sapphire-blue, and her skin was ivory, not golden like Gina’s.
“I’m happy to meet you,” Josh said.
“And I’m glad to meet you,” Maren said, studying his face for a long moment.
“Aunt Maren, they’re pouring the grapes in the barrels,” Frankie announced as he bounded past.
“Is this the first time you’ve been to a crush?” Maren asked.
“Yes,” Josh said, scanning the group for Gina but trying not to be obvious about it. He spotted her setting food out on one of the tables, her breasts shifting gently against the gathered fabric of her blouse as she leaned over. She looked serenely at home in these surroundings, not at odds and edgy as she had in Scotland. Suddenly, she glanced his way and their eyes locked, stilling her laughter. A breeze stirred the leaves overhead, sending a romantic ripple of sunlight across Gina’s lovely face. In that moment his reason for wanting to come to the Napa Valley became perfectly clear: this trip, he admitted to himself for the first time, had little
