The Corkscrew Lesson

I turned forty-three on a Tuesday, which is nobody's favorite birthday, let's be honest. Wednesday would have at least given me an excuse to be grumpy at work. Tuesday just felt like a Tuesday that had gotten ideas above its station.

I woke up before Marge, which never happens. She's a horse trainer, and horses get her up at five whether she likes it or not, but that morning she'd set an alarm for later because, she said, it was my day and I should sleep in. So there I was at six a.m., forty-three years old, lying in bed listening to her breathe and thinking, well, is this it?

Not in a bad way! Marge and I have been married fifteen years and I'd marry her again tomorrow, no hesitation. She can back a horse trailer into a space I'd swear doesn't exist, and she laughs at my jokes, even the bad ones, especially the bad ones. But I'd been a sommelier for twenty years and married for fifteen of them, and somewhere in the back of my head a little voice kept asking whether I'd actually done anything. Anything at all. I'd never even left France, if you can believe that. A wine expert who's never tasted a Barolo in Piedmont. My colleagues think it's charming. I think it's embarrassing.

Marge rolled over at half six, looked at me, and said, "You're awake. Birthday boy. Forty-three!"

"Forty-three," I agreed.

"Do you feel different?"

"I feel like someone who set his own alarm by accident and can't prove it."

She laughed and kissed me, and I thought, see, this is good, this is enough, stop being restless, Cain. And then the little voice said, sure, but when's the last time you surprised her? And I had no answer, so I got up and made coffee as a man avoiding a question.

* * *

Here's where the day went sideways, in the best way.

I finished work at four. Marge had texted me a list of errands, which I thought was odd, because Marge does not text lists. Marge texts thumbs-up emojis and photos of horses. But the list said pick up bread, pick up the dry cleaning, pick up a bottle of the 2009 for tonight, and I did all three, feeling very organized, very settled, very forty-three.

I was walking back to the car, bread under one arm, wine in a bag in the other hand, when Stu stepped out from between two parked vans like a man in a bad spy movie.

"Cain! Hey! Cain."

Stu owns the lumberyard out past the ring road. We've been friends seventeen years, ever since he came into the restaurant to buy wine for his daughter's wedding and tried to haggle with me. Who haggles with a sommelier? Stu. That's Stu.

"Stu, what are you doing downtown? I thought you had a delivery."

"Change of plans. Big change of plans. Listen, I need a favor. Huge favor."

"What kind of favor?"

"It's for Marge," he said, and I should have known right there. He held out something folded and black. "I need you to put this on."

"It's a blindfold, Stu."

"Is it? Can't tell from here. Put it on."

"Stu, I'm holding bread."

"Give me the bread. Give me the wine too, I'll guard it with my life. Come on, Marge asked me herself. You want to disappoint Marge on your own birthday?"

That's cheating and we both knew it. I handed over the bread and the wine, tied the blindfold, and let him steer me into his truck like some kind of hostage with a baguette.

"Where are we going?"

"You are blindfolded, Cain, that is the entire point of the exercise."

"I can hear where we're going, that's how hearing works."

"Then stop listening."

We drove for maybe fifteen minutes. I heard the ring road, then gravel, then the specific crunch of Stu's yard, which I'd recognize anywhere because I've stepped on that gravel at three of his barbecues. He parked, came around, took my arm.

"Watch your step. Okay. Wait here. Don't peek."

"I cannot peek, I am blindfolded, that is the entire point of the exercise."

"That's my line. Get your own material."

I stood there in the gravel, forty-three years old, holding nothing because Stu had taken everything, even the bread. I heard a rustling, a hissed argument somewhere off to my left, someone shushing someone else, and a sound I can only describe as a forklift being started and immediately killed.

"Stu? Is there a forklift involved in this surprise?"

"NO," said about eight voices at once.

Then Stu pulled the blindfold off, and the yard lit up. String lights everywhere, strung between the stacked timber like the lumberyard had gotten dressed up for church. Picnic tables pushed together. A grill already going. And a karaoke machine, a full karaoke machine with a microphone and everything, set up on a pallet, and about fifteen people yelling "SURPRISE!" including Marge, who was standing front and center with the biggest grin I have ever seen on that woman's face.

"Happy birthday," she shouted, and came at me at a run.

I dropped the blindfold right there in the gravel and caught her. "You were home this morning. You kissed me. You said happy birthday in bed like a normal person."

"I can lie in bed AND plan a party, Cain. Multitasking. Fifteen years of practice."

"Did you text me that errand list?"

"Stu wrote it. He thinks I text in complete sentences."

"I was being thorough," Stu called from the grill. "Also the bread's in the truck, you're welcome."

There were maybe twenty people. Coworkers from the restaurant, some of Marge's barn people smelling gloriously of hay, Stu's wife, a few neighbors. And one woman I half recognized, tall, dark hair, standing by the karaoke machine with a microphone already in hand like it was welded there.

"Cain." Marge grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the tables. "That's Claudette, she sings at the bar on Route Nine, the one we went to for your fortieth? She's doing the music tonight."

Claudette waved the mic at me. "Happy birthday, wine man. I remember you. You ordered the cheapest thing on the list and then apologized to the bottle."

"That's not... okay, it was a Tuesday, I was tired."

"It's a Tuesday now," she said, grinning, and popped a small speaker onto the pallet. "And tonight, everyone sings. That's the rule. Stu paid me in lumber."

"He paid me in lumber too," Stu's wife said darkly, from the grill.

"IT WAS GOOD LUMBER," Stu said.

Marge handed me a plate and piled it with sausage before I could object. "Sit. Eat. You're forty-three, you get to be fussy tomorrow."

I sat. I ate. Claudette started with something slow and actually good, and I thought, well, this is nice, this is genuinely nice, maybe the little voice will shut up for one evening.

Then Stu handed Claudette a second microphone, and I learned that they had prepared a duet. Together. For me. With choreography.

"Oh no," I said.

"Oh yes," said Marge.

"No, no, no. Stu cannot sing. Stu, tell her you cannot sing."

"I can sing," Stu said, wounded.

"You sang at my wedding. In 2010. There is footage."

"There is no footage."

"There is footage, Marge's cousin has it, it's on a memory stick labeled Stu's Crime."

"Then tonight," Claudette announced, striking a pose against the timber stack, "we create NEW footage!"

The music started. Stu began to sing. I laughed so hard I pulled a muscle in my side, and somewhere in the middle of it, watching my wife wheeze into her hands and Stu pointing at the sky for no reason at all, the little voice in my head went quiet for the first time in months.

Which is, of course, when the fight started.

The fight, in a record nobody asked for, was about ABBA.

Claudette wanted to do "Dancing Queen" as the finale. Stu wanted "Fernando." I don't know why Stu wanted "Fernando." I don't think Stu knew why Stu wanted "Fernando." But by the time I noticed, he and Claudette were standing nose to nose by the karaoke machine, each holding a microphone like a dueling pistol.

"Fernando is a SONG, Claudette. It has a narrative arc."

"It has nine verses and a key change that hurts dogs! It's his BIRTHDAY, Stu, you give a man Dancing Queen on his birthday, that's the law!"

"The law? You want to talk law? You got PAID, Claudette. In lumber!"

"Three boards. You paid me three boards and one of them was warped."

"It was RUSTIC!"

Marge leaned over to me and murmured, "Should we do something?"

"I've been a sommelier for twenty years. I de-escalate cork incidents. This is above my training."

And then Stu, God help him, grabbed the songbook out of Claudette's hand, and Claudette grabbed it back, and Stu grabbed it again, and the songbook, which was older than both of them combined, went flying apart in the middle like a pigeon hitting a window. Pages everywhere. Actual chaos. Someone's cousin tried to pick up a page and Stu stepped on it, and the cousin said a word I won't repeat, and Stu's wife turned off the grill with the finality of a woman closing a bank branch forever.

"I'm going home," she announced.

"Baby, it was a PAPER problem..."

"I'm going home, Stu."

And that was the domino. Marge's barn people left first, nodding politely, taking sausages in napkins like it was a funeral buffet. Then the neighbors. Then my coworkers, who know me well enough to know when a party has achieved its final form. Within ten minutes the yard was just me, Marge, Stu, Claudette, the grill, and roughly four hundred songbook pages drifting in the gravel like sad snow.

Claudette and Stu were still going at it, but by now it had the tired quality of two people who mostly like each other and just need an audience to be angry in front of.

"You ruined my finale," Claudette said.

"You ruined my FERNANDO."

"I'll ruin your Fernando permanently if you don't hand me that microphone stand."

"You know what? Fine. FINE! Take the machine! I'm driving my wife home! HAPPY BIRTHDAY, CAIN!"

"Happy birthday, wine man," Claudette said, meaner than the words deserved, and followed him toward the parking area, still arguing about lumber as they went. Her car started. His truck started. Two engines, two argument engines, fading off in opposite directions.

And then it was quiet.

Not party-quiet. Actual quiet. Just the string lights humming, the grill ticking as it cooled, and Marge and me standing among twenty people's worth of abandoned picnic tables with a karaoke machine still plugged in, blinking at us like it expected an apology.

"Well," Marge said.

"Well," I said.

"Fifteen years of marriage and I've never seen a party die that fast. That might be a record. Do you think that's a record?"

"For Stu's yard? Definitely. His barbecues usually only die of natural causes."

She laughed, that wheezy laugh from earlier, and sat down on a picnic table bench, and I sat next to her, and we looked at the wreck of my birthday like a couple surveying a flood.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"For what?"

"The fight. The pages. Stu. All of it. I wanted to give you one good night, Cain. One night where you walked in and people were happy to see you and you didn't have to pour anything for anybody."

"Marge. It was a good night. I laughed so hard I pulled a muscle. Feel."

"I'm not feeling your pulled muscle in a lumberyard, we're not animals." But she was smiling. "Still. It ended with a songbook murder."

"Everything ends. It's the whole..." I stopped, because I'd spotted something in the gravel near my foot. A gift bag, tipped over, one of maybe six that had been sitting on the end table. Someone's gift, abandoned in the retreat, handle flattened, tissue paper sticking out like a tongue.

"Oh, we can't leave that," I said, and picked it up.

Inside: a bottle of red, no card, and a corkscrew. Not a corkscrew, actually. THE corkscrew. The fancy one, the waiter's-friend style with the hinged double lever, heavy in the hand, the kind I sell at the restaurant for more than I'd like to admit.

"Somebody gave you a corkscrew," Marge said. "To a sommelier. That's like giving a horse trainer a... horse."

"A saddle, maybe."

"A saddle. Sure. Open your present, birthday boy."

So I did what any professional with twenty years behind a wine list would do. I held the corkscrew, looked at the bottle, and froze.

And Marge noticed. Of course she noticed. She's been watching my hands for fifteen years.

"Cain."

"Hm?"

"Why did you just stop moving?"

"I didn't stop, I'm assessing."

"You're gripping it like it's a snake. Cain. Wine man. Sommelier of twenty years. Can you use a corkscrew?"

Here is where I confess something to you, reader, that I have confessed to nobody in two decades of employment. I looked at my wife. I looked at the corkscrew. I put the worm to the cork at what I believed was a confident angle, twisted three times, and gouged a hole in the cork the size of a thumbnail while doing absolutely nothing useful to it.

"Cain."

"I've always had someone else do it," I burst out. "At the restaurant! There's always a junior somm, there's always a waiter, there's always SOMEONE, and I open the rare bottles at the table because I'm the face, and the face doesn't do the mechanical part! And at home we buy screw caps because I told you they were better for