Slowly but surely, the store began making money instead of losing money, but I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t sleep easier if we were just a bit more comfortably in the black. Or if I said I didn’t have flickers of resentment that while my dad had left the shop to all of us—Lily, Caleb, and myself—my siblings have been off busily chasing their dreams, while only I fought to preserve Dad’s.
It grates more than I want it to.
But I wasn’t the only one who practically grew up here. I wasn’t the only Cooper kid who did homework on the little table in the back corner, who spent early teenage mornings restocking before the store opened, who could recite the difference between dry and extra dry champagne long before I could legally drink it. And all of three of us had been in the hospital room during Dad’s last days when he’d requested that we carry on his and Mom’s legacy.
But those flickers of regret and resentment are just that—flickers. Like I said, making the best of what I’m handed is my superpower, and I’m proud of what I’ve achieved. Proud most of all that in addition to the pretty journals, rose-gold staplers, and cute cocktail napkins, the most popular items are the paintings we sell in the little “art corner” I set up.
My paintings.
In fact, while one of the customers is getting a rundown from my employee Robyn on the nuances of Franciacorta in our Italy section, the other two are in the art corner, gushing over one of my more recent works—a leopard-print martini glass with a sassy red lipstick mark on the rim. Originally, I stuck with mostly champagne-themed prints. But they sold so quickly I decided to try painting all types of wine, not just sparkling. Then cocktails. Then fancy coffee, with the foam shaped into little Empire State Buildings, as many of our customers are tourists looking for NYC souvenirs.
That each new idea for a painting seems to sell better than the last is a point of pride and frustration, mainly because the operation of the shop leaves me with little time for painting.
Carlos’s flowers still cradled in my arm, I head toward the cash register, where a sixty-year-old woman is reading one of the historical romances she’s never without.
“Thank God,” she says, not looking up from her book as I reach for last week’s bouquet, which has seen better days. “Those other ones were starting to smell like rot.”
“Which, clearly, you fell all over yourself trying to remedy,” I say good-naturedly.
She peers at me over the top of her purple-rimmed reading glasses, then slowly removes them, letting them rest against her impressive bosom, held in place by a hot pink chain.
I tilt my head and point to her right ear. “Is that a rabbit’s foot?”
She flicks the fuzzy red thing with a coral nail. May Stuckley has always been a cacophony of color and unique fashion sense. She’s also the closest thing I have to a mother, almost as much a part of this store’s legacy as my actual mother, and one of the most important people in the world to me.
“Rabbit’s feet are lucky,” she informs me.
“Then why only one?” I ask, since her left earring is a glittery pineapple.
“The asymmetry suited my mood,” she says, putting an ancient-looking bookmark with a little tassel into her book about an earl and his bride. “How was Rachel and her little one?”
“Good and adorable,” I answer. “Everything okay here? Thanks again for opening.”
May shrugs. “I didn’t, really. She was already here,” she says, “lowering” her voice to a whisper that’s somehow louder than her usual voice. She tilts her head in the direction of Robyn, who’s still going on about the pinot bianco grape.
“I hear that tone. I’m ignoring that tone,” I say over my shoulder, heading toward the back to swap the wilting flowers for the new ones.
“You don’t like her either,” May mutters.
I swallow a sigh at the familiar refrain. I don’t dislike Robyn, though I swear, the woman sometimes acts like it’s her life’s mission to ensure that I do. Robyn Frank was my dad’s last hire before he got sick—a sommelier I expect he hoped would be the ticket to ending the store’s struggles. I’ll grant that the woman knows her stuff when it comes to sparkling wine. Not just your basics, that cava from Spain is the best bang for your buck and that only sparkling wine from the Champagne region of France should actually be called champagne. Robyn takes it to a whole other level. She knows the flavor differences between a chardonnay-forward sparkling and a pinot noir–forward sparkling. She knows the different types of soil, the flavor effect of a vine’s location on a cliff, what happens to a grape in the sun, and a host of other things that I honestly do not give a fig about, but some of our customers seem appropriately impressed.
She’s brilliant. She can also be difficult and condescending.
I enter the “cave” at the back of the store. My parents called it that for as long as I can remember because it’s windowless and constantly cold for the sake of the wine inventory that’s not fancy enough to warrant a spot in the refrigerated wine locker, but still needs to be kept at fifty-five degrees.
I’m still hot from my walk, so the blast of cold air is welcome. I drop the old flowers into the trash—May’s right, they do stink—and rinse out the crystal vase. It’s got a fairly decent sized chip from when eleven-year-old Caleb thought bouncing a golf ball off the counter in a wine shop was a good idea, but I’ll never get rid of it.
I don’t have many memories of my mom, and those I do are a little foggy. But I do remember her painstakingly arranging yellow flowers—her favorite color—in this vase every week. Using the same vase makes me feel close to her, even if I like to change up the flower colors a bit more than she did.
The flowers don’t need much arranging—Pauline is a genius like that, creating “plop and drop” bouquets that look good without any fussing. I admire the gorgeous flowers once more as I carry the vase back out into the shop. All three customers have left, and May’s disappeared, so it’s just Robyn, who makes a very big show of putting away the enormous wine tome she’s reading before giving me her attention.
She’s the type of woman who’s in her late twenties but looks older—on purpose, I’m pretty sure. She always, and I do mean always, wears a black blazer over a white button-down, paired with black slacks. Even in the middle of summer. Her straight brown hair is cut to her chin, and she once informed me she has it trimmed every twelve days, precisely, to maintain “the line.” Completing the look is her trademark brownish-red matte lipstick that somehow emphasizes the fact that she never smiles.
I sense that she’s gearing up for a complaint and try to beat her to the punch. “Any takers on the Franciacorta?” I ask, knowing that spreading awareness about the excellent Italian sparkler is one of her pet projects of late.
Robyn shrugs. “He said he’d be back later to pick up a bottle.”
I feel my heart sink a little bit. They never come back later to pick up the bottle. I wish I could say that losing one customer doesn’t matter, but even though the store’s better off than it was a year ago, we can’t afford to let our few customers leave empty-handed.
“Some ladies bought your cocktail picture,” she says. “I had to ring them up, because May decided to take an early lunch.”