Nothing Good Can Come from This by Kristi Coulter

Author:Kristi Coulter
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

The Barn

“You realize everyone thinks we’re a couple,” Mindy says as we leave the Airfield Estates tasting room. “Because you keep saying ‘we.’ ‘We love Viognier!’”

“We do both love Viognier,” I say. “I’m using the English language with efficiency and precision.” Mindy unlocks her SUV, and we each hoist a case of wine into the back. It’s over a hundred degrees out, and I have the unscientific thought that the compressed heat in the car could actually shatter the bottles.

She shuts the hatch. “I’m just making you aware that we sound like lesbian life partners.”

“A lot of women would be proud to have me on their arm,” I say. We turn back to face the strip mall of tasting rooms we’d just come from. “Dusted Valley next?”

At Dusted Valley the pourer offers Viognier right away. “I love Viognier!” I say, and wave a hand at Mindy. “I don’t know what this person likes.”

I love the taste of wine, but I hate wine tasting. For one thing, even though I’m a diligent spitter-not-swallower, it still gets me a little buzzed, and I have no interest in being anything other than a lot buzzed. But I also don’t want to be like those tasters who spill out of limos, all red-faced and loud and looking like the kinds of people who use “hot tub” as a verb. So I’m stuck being me—someone who pretends to like sipping tiny amounts of wine, when really she wants to hunker down, alone, with a bottle.

I hardly ever know what to say about the wine. Generally, my evaluation is that it tastes, you know, good. If the pourer looks expectant, sometimes I’ll grab onto a word from the tasting notes. “Oh, yes, granite!” I try hard to appreciate the subtleties. I want to, desperately. If I learn to experience the whole world of wine in one sip, maybe that will be enough. Maybe I won’t finish the whole first bottle, crack a second, and stumble to bed ashamed. Again.

* * *

Mindy and I are only on this romantic wine jaunt because of a shared refusal to take a predawn plane ride for a day of corporate training. She’s a fearful flier who only sucks it up for better destinations than Kennewick, Washington, and I have a blanket policy against getting to Sea-Tac by 5:00 a.m. for a thirty-minute flight. It is a four-hour drive from Seattle to Kennewick, which allows us to leave at a civilized hour and pass through wine country on our way home.

The Washington climate changes dramatically on the eastern side of the Cascades. It’s much hotter in the summer, with stretches that look like desert. “Except for almost everything, we could be Thelma and Louise,” I remark around Ellensburg as I watch tumbleweeds bounce by.

“Corporate Drone Thelma and Louise,” Mindy says.

We didn’t always feel like drones. When we met six years ago, we were raring to go, the kind of people who would hop on 5:00 a.m. flights without question if that’s what the company asked us to do.

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