Was that why my every breath seemed to offend him? Maybe that or the fact that I was shit at everything we’d done so far. Bottling the wine was no different.
Having a hard time holding the bottle steady under the spout with my shaky limb was just the beginning of it. Afterfinallysettling into a groove, it was confusing having to keep the dark bottles organized by wine type.
At one point I started stockpiling two groups, one for whites and one for reds. I thought I’d done a really great job, only to have Paulo come in and wail like I ran over his cat. “You sloppy girl. Do you even know which is which?”
I’d wanted nothing more than to come back at him for calling me ‘sloppy’, but that was only before I realized that, damn. I, in fact,didn’tknow which group of bottles were reds and which were whites. I had been trying to go fast and make up for the time I lost from my hurting hand.
Shit.
He made me pour each group out into different buckets and rebottle them by hand and funnel this time all while preaching to me why“attention to detail matters”in the thick accented Italian sort of way.
And even after all this, we still didn’t move out of the cellar of doom.
Next came the corking. Which was now officially a sore subject. I promise I’d been watching carefully, meticulously even, as Paulo demonstrated how to use the (very un-injury-friendly) corking device. That didn’t seem to matter much though when I’d somehow managed to shatter not one, not two, butfourbottles in the process, cutting my hand at least once and sending Paulo into a dramatic dizzy spell no more than thrice.
When he called Mattí like he was some sort of mediator, my brother had calmly told him to sort it out, which resulted in Pau angrily reteaching me the corking routine at an agonizingly slow pace.
The whole thing went something like this:
“Patience, girl. I swear you have zero—”
“No, watch me again.”
“Youmustpay attention. Every single bottle is individual. It requires an individual piece of your attention—”
“Yes!”
“No!”
“Gentle, girl! You have the hands of a boorish brute!”
The tongue lashings continuing on until even the rush of air before he started talking made me wince.
And finally, after labeling the bottles wrong, cutting myself on at least one more glass shard, and possibly earning an enemy for life by asking Paulo if he thought French wine is better, I was out of the cellar. I was sweaty, my arms throbbed, and I don’t think I’d ever appreciated the salty smell of the Seaside air quite so much then after being cooped up in that stale cellar all day.
Until I was told my next task.
“Your brother calls them‘early incentives’or something. I call it giving away perfectly good stock, but pssh.” Paulo often liked to trail off his sentences with sounds instead of words, I was learning. I imagined “Pssh”this timemeant something like‘but he’s paying for all my startup costs, so I’ll listen to him even if I think he’s young and crazy’.
I had to say, it was truly interesting to see people having so much faith in Mattí. If nothing else came of this horrible wine-covered day, at the very least I’d garnered a newfound appreciation for the respect my brother earned from others just by believing in people… And giving them huge influxes of cash of course, but that came with the territory. Still, he held theirdreamsin his hands. And they trusted with them. Screw the elementary school Iguana,thatwas real responsibility.
“Think you can handle it?” A voice said, cutting through my thoughts.
I blinked my attention back to Paulo. “What?”
A pop to the back of the head is what that slip in attention earned me. “What did Ijusttell you about attention, huh? I said we must deliver gift boxes to those who have pre-purchased—or something or other. We have twenty-two. The rest have been shipped before you descended into my store.”
At least he saiddescendedand not the other way around, like I’d crawled my way up from Hell or something.
Nodding, I wiped my sweaty hands on my jeans. “Deliveries, yeah I can—”
I stopped, pausing as I realized something. Mattí had dropped me off earlier. Meaning, I was waiting for him to pick me up.Meaning, I didn’t have a car to make deliveries in. I told Paulo as much and he just shrugged, saying that was okay. Wondering why that wassuddenlyokay when absolutelynothingI’d done all day had been okay, I stuck close behind him as he walked out the store. My curiosity was quickly put to bed when Paulo came around the front carting a little green moped with a helmet hanging off the handlebars.
My eyes narrowed.
For the most part, I enjoyed fast things. I enjoyed racing things. I enjoyed fun. But something told me that carting gift boxes back and forth around a town that wasn’t big but also wasn’t that damn small either with a broken hand was not going to be all shits and giggles. That coupled with the fact that the little moped could only hold one twelfth of the deliveries I needed to make, and I officially wished I was back in the dusty cellar.
With great effort (and twelve separate back-and-forth trips later), I was pulling back into the store just in time to see my brother had returned.Thank God.
