The Wine Tour Favor

*This one came from thinking about how debts between old friends can get very interesting when there's chemistry that never got resolved. Hope you enjoy the wine and the mess. Thanks for reading.*

Wanda Rowe showed up at my office door on a Thursday afternoon holding a bottle of wine like it was a diploma, and I knew right away that I was in trouble. She was forty now and I was forty-one, and we had not seen each other since a conference in Denver eleven years ago, but she still had the same way of standing in a doorway like she owned the building and was just letting you live there. She was wearing a green blazer and jeans, which is not what most people wear to visit a sociology department, but Wanda was never most people.

"Saul Greer," she said, tilting the bottle so I could read the label. "You look exactly like a man who owes me nothing and is about to owe me everything."

"Wanda. What are you doing here."

"I was in town setting up a tour, and I heard through the grapevine that you finally made associate professor, so I figured it was time to settle the score from grad school." She stepped past me into the office and set the bottle on my desk, right on top of a stack of midterms, because that was always Wanda's way with other people's things. "You don't remember the score, do you. Of course you don't. You buried it somewhere in that big grey head of yours and called it professional growth."

I did remember the score, actually. We had met when we were both twenty-two, first year of grad school, and for about three years we had competed over everything, grants, journal placements, seminar seats, the attention of one very old professor whose name I will not put in print. And then one night at a department party, when she was twenty-three and I was twenty-four and both of us had drunk somebody's homemade plum wine, she kissed me in a stairwell and then told me the next morning that it had been a tactical error and we should never discuss it. We never discussed it. We also never quite stopped circling each other, right up until she dropped out to start a food and wine tour company and I stayed in the slow lane and became the kind of man with a stack of midterms on his desk.

"So the score," I said. "What is it, exactly."

"You wrote a letter for me two years ago when the county board was going to yank my permits. Don't argue, I know you did it, your former student works in the clerk's office and she has a big mouth." She sat down in my visitor chair and crossed her legs and looked pleased with herself in a way that made me want to argue anyway, just on principle. "You saved my season, and I don't pay debts with a thank-you card. I pay them with an experience. Saturday night. You and your wife. Clear your evening."

"I have a wife," I said, which was a stupid thing to say, since obviously I knew I had a wife, but the way she said you and your wife made my brain do a thing.

"I know you have a wife, Saul. I'm not asking you to a duel. I'm asking you to a tasting." She stood up and pointed at the bottle on my desk. "That's a preview. Drink it with dinner and tell Savannah to wear something she likes. I'll text you the address." And then she was gone, down the hallway, heels going like a metronome, leaving my office smelling faintly of perfume and ambition.

I want to tell you that I thought about it calmly over dinner that night, but I didn't. I put the bottle on the kitchen table and Savannah picked it up before I even got my coat off, turning it in the light, reading the label twice.

"This costs more than our car payment," she said. "Who died."

"Nobody. Wanda Rowe came by my office." Savannah is thirty-nine, a graphic designer who works from our kitchen table, and she had heard about Wanda roughly four hundred times over the years, always in the tone of a man describing a scar. She set the bottle down slowly and looked at me the way she looks at a client brief that turns out to be interesting.

"Your Wanda. The stairwell kiss, tactical error Wanda."

"I don't know why you always lead with the kiss."

"Because it's the only part of the story with a plot." She opened a cabinet, took down two glasses, and set them next to the bottle without asking me if I wanted any, which is one of the reasons I married her. "So what did she want. Is she in town. Is this a thing where I finally meet the rival, because honestly I've been waiting nine years for this and I want to know if she's taller than me."

"She's about your height, and she wants to repay me for the permit letter I wrote her."

"You never told me you wrote her a permit letter."

"Because it was boring. Board of commissioners, zoning language, four pages of it. Anyway. She wants to take us out Saturday. Some private tasting thing her company does. She said to tell you to wear something you like."

Savannah leaned against the counter and looked at the wine again, and I could see her turning it over the same way I had been turning it over all afternoon, the suddenness of it, the expense of it, the fact that Wanda Rowe did not do anything without a reason she had rehearsed twice.

"A private tasting," she said. "Like, a restaurant thing."

"She said after hours at a place downtown called Vinaria. Her and her assistant running it personally. She said we'd understand the rest when we got there."

"Well, that's a normal sentence and not at all cryptic." Savannah poured two glasses and pushed one across the table at me and sat down across from it, holding hers up to the kitchen light. "Saul. Do you want to go. Really. Because if some old part of you needs to beat her at wine, I would like to know now so I can plan my Saturday accordingly."

"I think she needs to beat me at something. That's the whole dynamic, it's never been anything else."

"Uh huh. And what did you say when she asked."

"I said I'd clear my evening, basically. She's very hard to say no to. She was hard to say no to when we were twenty-two and she's gotten better at it since."

Savannah laughed and drank, and told me that was the most honest thing I'd said all week, and that yes, we would go, and that she already knew what she was wearing, which was a lie, because she spent the next two days quietly cycling through everything in the closet while pretending not to.

Saturday came and we took a cab downtown, because Savannah is sensible about that sort of thing even when she's excited, and Vinaria turned out to be a narrow wine bar off the square with a black awning and all the lights off except one in the back. Wanda met us at the door in a rust-colored dress and hugged Savannah first, which I have decided was a strategic move, because Savannah came away from it smiling.

"You must be Savannah. He wrote me exactly one email about you, thirteen years ago, and I have thought about it more than is normal." She turned and waved a hand at a tall man in a dark shirt who had come up behind her carrying a tray of glasses. "This is Dorian, my assistant, four years and counting, and the only employee who hasn't quit out of fear. Dorian, these are the Greers."

"Saul Greer," Dorian said, shaking my hand with a grip that suggested he did this with everyone and meant nothing by it. "Wanda talks about the grad school years like a war documentary. I feel like I already know you."

"Only the battles she won," I said, and Wanda laughed like that was the funniest thing anyone had said all year, which was her way of filing my little jab away for later.

She led us through the empty bar to a back room I hadn't known existed, low light, one long table, six chairs, and a lineup of bottles on a sideboard with paper bags over the labels. Savannah looked around and whispered to me that it felt like being let into a museum after closing, and she was right, it did.

"Now," Wanda said, taking the head of the table while Dorian started pouring, "here's how tonight works. Dorian and I pour, we talk, you drink, and everything is curated, including the conversation. But before we start, since you're both adults and I don't like surprises I haven't personally arranged, I'll tell you the honest shape of the evening." She paused, and looked at each of us, and I watched Savannah sit up a little straighter in her chair. "Dinner first, wine throughout, and then, if everyone at this table says yes out loud, we'll get to the part of the menu I don't publish. I owe your husband something he's owed for a long time, and I intend to pay it in full, with interest, and with witnesses."

Savannah looked at me over her glass, eyebrows up, and I realized my mouth was open.

Savannah closed my mouth for me with one finger under my chin, which she does when I'm being slow, and said, "We're listening," and that was the end of it, and Wanda clapped her hands once and told Dorian to bring the first flight.

Dinner came out in stages, small plates that Dorian set down without ceremony, and the wine moved with it, and I will admit that for the first half hour I forgot to be suspicious because Wanda is genuinely good at this. She talked about oak and soil like they were old coworkers of hers, and she made Savannah laugh twice with stories about tours she had run, the couple who proposed in a vineyard ditch and the man who tried to smuggle a wheel of cheese home in his suitcase. And through all of it she kept looking at me across the table with that same expression she had worn at twenty-two, the one that said she was three moves ahead and enjoying the fact that I knew it.

The third bottle came out with a paper bag still on it, and she poured a dark, almost purple red into our glasses without asking what we thought, because she knew what we thought, she always had.

"Syrah," she said, setting the bottle down and putting her hand flat on the table