The Last Red

She carries another box up the stairs. Beginning the task of settling her father's estate, alone. The cellar hasn't been touched in years. It is filled with her fathers tools. Odd metal tools from his time in the military fixing planes, seldom-used gardening implements, tubes and carboys for making a few bottles of wine each year. It's the bottles of wine she's moving now, not sure what to do with them but reluctant to let them go to waste. She returns to the cool air, the buzz of the old incandescent bulb that barely casts more than a candles worth of light. In the dark, her foot knocks a bottle onto its side, but the seal holds strong and the bottle doesn't break. It chatters across the concrete, rolling under the narrow wooden shelf that holds its relatives, stopping short against something in the shadow. A small black notebook.

She lifts the notebook from its resting place, and brushes years of dust from its cover. She opens it, turning toward the dim light. Inside, the book bears her grandfather's name; the first in neat black lettering, the last scratched out. She barely remembers him. The following pages hold sketched maps of garden plots, some nondescript list of inventory, perhaps of wines. She never much cared for wine; the first time she tried it she had a terrible headache and gave up ever learning any more about it. She places the notebook on top of her box of wine, and climbs the stairs again. The rest will wait for tomorrow.

She stays in the house that night. For no reason beyond idle curiosity, she pages through the small black notebook. More inventory, now of specific wines. More garden plots. But midway through, the pages are interrupted by brief journals rather than notes. They seem to tell the story of her grandfather leaving Italy with her grandmother, but this isn't the story she knows. The book tells her they left hurriedly. Unwillingly. A black-inked word breaks the peace of the quiet room: vendetta. She reads about the flight from Italy, and the choice of a small Canadian town to hide in. She learns that her last name is a lie. Shortly, the pages return to wine inventory. Another garden diagram. The book is only two-thirds filled.

The next day a woman without a name returns to her father's cellar. As she gathers a few remaining bottles, this time she recognizes one from the notebook's lists. She carries the single bottle upstairs and uncorks it. A last toast to her mysterious grandfather. She was told wine is supposed to improve with age, and surprisingly it is good. Maybe she has found one she could like. She searches for the name of the wine online, and finds that this is a rare vintage. With shock she realizes that this bottle alone would cost five hundred dollars, if not more. She pulls more bottles from the boxes, comparing them with the book and the screen. Each bottle is highly valuable. She realizes that the book's inventories are vague for a reason; the bottles are investment wines, taken from Italy by her grandfather. All together, the cellar's contents would be worth over twenty thousand dollars to the right buyer.

Her father worked for the military fixing planes. He would have been only a child when they came to Canada. How much did he know about his father's past? Why did no one ever tell her? She walks to the kitchen window and looks out at the small garden plot her father kept. It has become overgrown, but on the trellis above the weeds, she can see new grape vines climbing.