The Plum Wine Bet

I moved to Alder Creek on a gray Tuesday in March, thirty-four years old, freshly divorced, and carrying everything I owned in the back of a rented van that complained the whole way up the hill into town. The job was a data analyst position at the university's sleep lab, which is part of the research hospital, and I had accepted it mostly because it was far away from my old life and the pay was decent. My marriage had ended the way a carton of milk ends, not dramatically, just slowly, in the fridge, until one day you open it and think, well, this is done. So I drove four hours east and started over, and the first thing I noticed about Alder Creek was the convent, this enormous old stone place with a walled garden that turned out to be famous in the county for its plums.

My first morning at the lab, I got lost twice in the corridors of the research hospital before a round-faced woman with a clipboard intercepted me and said, "You must be Susie, thank God, Jerome's been pacing like a new dad. I'm Siobhan, I'm the assistant, I basically run this place while pretending I don't."

She was twenty-nine, grew up right here in Alder Creek, and talked the way water talks coming over stones, constant and cheerful. She walked me down to the monitoring room, which was dim and quiet and full of machines that blinked in a way I found weirdly soothing, and that's where I met Jerome Meyer for the first time.

He was thirty-eight, tall, a bit rumpled, with reading glasses pushed up into his hair where he'd clearly forgotten them, and he was calibrating an EEG cap with the kind of patience I usually only see in people defusing things. He looked up and said, "Ah, the analyst. Susie Calloway. Welcome to the quietest building in the hospital, we measure people sleeping, which means we spend most of our careers whispering." He shook my hand with both of his, which shouldn't be charming but was.

Siobhan rolled her eyes at me in a friendly way. "Ten years he's been here," she said, jerking a thumb at Jerome. "Never married, keeps bees somehow, I don't ask, and makes his own plum wine in his flat above the bookshop. You'll hear about the wine within a week, everyone does."

"Siobhan," Jerome said mildly, not looking up from the cap, "you'll frighten her before she's even plugged in a monitor."

"He's supervisor," Siobhan told me, ignoring him entirely. "Best boss I've ever had, and I'm only saying that because he keeps a jar of sweets on his desk like he's expecting children, except we're all grown adults with degrees."

I laughed, and Jerome looked up then and smiled, and I remember thinking, oh no, in that little way you think it, the way you think it about someone and immediately file it away because you've got a morning of onboarding to do. He had a nice face, is what I'm saying. Calm. The kind of calm you trust.

* * *

By the afternoon break I had learned that the lab mostly ran overnight studies, that Jerome supervised the techs, that Siobhan knew every shortcut in the building, and that the break room kettle took eleven minutes to boil, which Jerome said was a scandal and Siobhan said was character. We were all three of us crammed in there when Jerome went to the little cupboard above the sink and came back with a bottle of something dark red and a single small glass.

"Plum wine," he said, pouring a thimbleful and holding it out to me. "From the convent garden, actually. The nuns sell fruit to anyone who asks nicely, and there's a groundskeeper there, Saul Hong, who's been keeping that garden for fifteen years and grows the best plums in the county. I make the wine myself. It's the second year of the batch, which is when it stops being ambitious and starts being good."

"You don't have to," I said, taking the glass anyway. "You really don't have to ply the new hire."

"It's not a ploy, it's hospitality," he said. "And you look like someone who could use a small, honest pleasure on a first day."

The wine was sweet and dark and a little tart at the back, and I drank it too fast and then made a face about it. "Okay," I admitted. "That's dangerous."

"Right?" Siobhan said. "I got drunk on that stuff at Jerome's Christmas thing and sang karaoke. There are videos. He's never watched them, he's too polite, but I know they exist."

"Fresh starts," Jerome said, settling onto the counter across from me like we had all the time in the world, which on a break we sort of did. "Siobhan mentioned you've just come to town. What did you leave behind?"

I could have given him the polite version, but the wine was warm in my chest and Siobhan was already nodding along like I owed her the story too. "A marriage," I said. "Twelve years, ended last year, no drama, no screaming, just two people who turned into flatmates with a joint account. I'm thirty-four and I moved four hours to a town I'd only just arrived in because I wanted to be somewhere the past hadn't happened yet."

"Oh, well done," Siobhan said, and meant it.

Jerome turned his glass by the stem and said, "I've never married, so I can't claim the expertise, but I've watched a lot of people sleep for a living, and I'll tell you the one thing that's true in both professions. People get better when they stop fighting the night. You can't force sleep and you can't force a life, you just make the conditions decent and let it come."

"That's beautiful and also the nerdiest thing anyone's ever said to me," I told him, and he laughed, this low easy laugh, and I thought again, oh no, and this time I didn't file it away quite so neatly.

* * *

On Friday afternoon, the week having gone well, Jerome appeared at my desk with his hands in his pockets and a look like a man about to ask a favor of the planning committee.

"There's a thing I do most weekends," he said. "Canoe on the river. It's quiet, there are herons, and the convent garden is visible from the water, you can see Saul out there among the plum trees. I mention it because Siobhan can't come this Saturday, she's got her nieces, and the canoe has, ah, one paddle."

"One paddle," I repeated.

"Tradition," Siobhan called from across the room, not even pretending to work. "It's a cooperation exercise, you take turns, it's very romantic, I mean very logistical."

"It is logistical," Jerome said, with dignity, and then his mouth twitched. "Would you like to come? Completely no obligation, the water's slow this time of year."

I thought about my empty flat and my four-hours-away past and said, "Yes. I'd like that very much."

Siobhan made a noise like a kettle achieving boil, and Jerome turned red to the ears, and I went back to my data smiling at the screen.

Saturday came up bright and cool, the kind of morning that makes you glad you own one decent sweater, and I met Jerome at the boathouse at nine with a thermos of coffee and a paper sack of pastries I had bought mostly to feel useful. The canoe was green and old and patched in two places, and there, sitting in the bow like an heirloom, was exactly one paddle.

"So the one paddle thing is real," I said, and he had the grace to look faintly proud of it.

"It's real. Two paddles is wasteful, three is showing off. You sit front, I sit back, and we take turns depending on which side the current is being difficult about. It's slower, but you actually talk to each other, which is the whole point."

"That's beautiful and also the nerdiest thing anyone has ever said to me," I told him, and he pointed out I had used that line before, and I said a good line deserves reuse, and he laughed his low easy laugh and handed me the paddle.

He was right about the slowness, and he was right that it was the point, because with one paddle between us there was a lot of passing it back and forth and a lot of leaning, and