going to start the contest! Whose team are you on, Aunt Gina?” Mia tugged excitedly at her arm.
“I—”
“Hey,” said Fredo expansively. “Why don’t you show Josh the ropes, Gina? Be a team?”
“But—”
“Oh, I think that’s a good idea,” Frankie said seriously. “You have very big feet, Josh. That’s important because the team that squashes the most juice out of the grapes in two minutes wins.”
“Frankie!” Gina protested. “Talking about the size of someone’s feet isn’t good manners.”
“That’s okay,” Josh said quickly because of the way Frankie’s face fell as a result of this rebuke. “I know my feet are big.”
“This grape-stomping is a tiring thing,” Mia grumbled. “You have to stomp and stomp and stomp.”
“It’s time for me to be out of here,” Maren declared with a half laugh. “I have to help in the kitchen.” She hurried off toward the entrance to the wine cave, where people were bringing out food.
Gina was trying to melt into the crowd, but some of her family members pushed her forward. “Go ahead, Gina. Go on,” they said.
Rocco dragged Josh along with him to the platform. “You can’t fully experience crush unless you stomp the grapes,” Rocco insisted, and next thing Josh knew, he was rolling up his pantlegs and his shoes were being collected by one of the Tonys, to put in a secure place where they would not be spattered with grape juice.
“I didn’t ask for this,” Gina said helplessly as they faced each other in one of the grape-filled barrels, which was barely large enough for two people to stand in. “I tried to get out of it.” She was so close that he could smell the heady fragrance of her cologne over the scent of the grapes.
“I’m glad you weren’t successful,” he murmured so that no one else could hear, and she glared at him.
“Okay, wait for the sound of the bell, and then you have two minutes to demonstrate your stomping skills,” instructed the person in charge, who Josh recalled was Gina’s brother-in-law and Mia’s father, Nick. “The idea is to crush as much juice from the grapes as you can. When I ring the bell at the close of your round, we measure the juice. The team that provides the most juice wins.”
“Wins what?” Josh asked Gina in a low tone.
“A bottle of wine, what else?” she said. She had hitched her short skirt even higher so that an expanse of creamy thigh showed.
“I’d like something more than that,” Josh muttered, and Gina’s eyebrows flew sky high.
Nick, who did not hear Josh’s remark, cleared his throat. “All right, contestants. On your mark, get set, go!”
The accordions struck up a frenzied melody. Gina said through gritted teeth, “Okay, Corbett. Move.” She’d done this before; he hadn’t. But he did his best, hating the way the grapes felt as they oozed up between his toes but liking the way Gina couldn’t avoid touching him as they jumped and squished and stomped and in general threw all decorum to the wind. Mia was right; this wasn’t easy. He grew tired long before the bell rang to signal the contest’s close, and when it did, he tried a sagging maneuver in Gina’s direction in the hope of bodily contact, but she was already stepping over the side of the barrel.
A hurried consultation ensued while the grape juice from each of the twelve barrels was measured, and then Nick declared, “The winners—Rocco and Jaimie!” Jaimie, who wore a silver tongue stud and had been pointed out earlier by Rocco as one of his cousins, accepted the bottle of wine and acknowledged the applause of her relatives with an exaggerated bow.
“You came in second,” Nick said to Josh as Frankie ran up and slapped him an exuberant high-five. “Where’s Gina?”
Josh gestured toward the crowd. “She’s wandered off, I guess,” he said.
“You did okay for your first time,” Nick said. “Here are a couple of T-shirts. See that Gina gets hers, will you?”
As a new group of contestants climbed into the barrels, Josh looked down at his feet. They were purple. So were all the other previous contestants’, but they didn’t seem to care, so why should he? He scrambled down from the platform and took off in pursuit of Gina, whose ash-blond hair was highly visible near the food-laden tables. He caught up with her as she was piling barbecued ribs onto a plate.
“Here,” she said, unceremoniously shoving the plate in his direction.
“Nick said to give you this,” he said, handing her the T-shirt.
She afforded him a grudging smile as she tossed it over her arm. “Thanks, Josh. Second place isn’t bad, you know, for your first grape-stomping experience.” Her gesture encompassed the abundance of dishes on the tabletop. “Please help yourself to the food. There’s Aunt Dede’s special penne-and-artichoke salad. She’s a caterer here in the valley and my mother works for her. Also, Claire—she’s Uncle Fredo’s daughter—made her prize carrot cake, and you might want to try that.”
Josh set the plate of ribs aside momentarily so that he could roll his pantlegs down. Gina caught sight of the purple stains on the fabric.
“Uh-oh,” she said with a grimace. “I’m sorry about your pants.”
“Don’t be. It’s nothing a good dry cleaner can’t fix.” He picked up the plate and helped himself to Aunt Dede’s salad.
“Try the bruschetta,” Gina said as they moved past the layered salad, the marinated mushrooms, the artichoke pie.
“Hey, Gina, did you make your special mussels-and-tomato fettucine?” Rocco called from a table at the outskirts of the group.
“Not this time. Too busy,” she called back.
“Aw, that’s too bad. I’ll let you sit with us, but only if you promise to invite me over for it soon.”
Gina glanced up at Josh. “Do you mind hanging out with Rocco? Or have you had enough?”
Which was how Josh found himself part of another amiable family group. He met Gina’s vivacious cousin Bobbi, who said she’d served in the Peace Corps, and her husband, Stan, who owned a chain of fresh markets. He met Albert Aurelio, a salt-of-the-earth type who had married into the Angelini family and was now chief financial officer at Vineyard Oaks. When Josh’s plate was empty, he returned to the buffet table for more food and found Maren putting out bread and rolls that she’d baked herself, and later he listened with rapt attention as Gina’s cousin Carla, who was unmarried, talked animatedly about her career in public relations with the local winegrowers’ association.
“Are you the one who made the carrot cake?” he asked her. “It’s the best I’ve ever tasted.”
“No, that was Claire. She’s over there—the tall one with the long earrings. Don’t worry,” Carla said with a laugh. “No one could get all the Angelinis straight right away. A lot of people have the same name—for instance, Big Tony and Little Tony.”
“I met them playing
