“Asshole,” Oakley muttered. “I made him pull over into the mud so we could pass.”
“Probably going to have to go pull him out in a minute,” Trance admitted. “We’ve gotten so much rain lately that everything is just a big pile of mush.”
Oakley shrugged. “Those hoity-toity wine goers are annoying.”
My lips twitched as we walked around a corner and into a massive room that had such tall pine ceilings that at first, I could do nothing but stare.
My manners flew out the door as I got a load of the wall of windows that surrounded us on two sides.
“Holy shit,” I breathed. “This place is breathtaking.”
“Thank you,” I heard Viddy, the woman that had insinuated herself into my life lately, say.
I looked down with twinkling eyes to see Viddy viciously chopping up some carrots.
“Hello,” I said to Viddy. “Happy Mother’s Day.”
Viddy stopped chopping, turned, and promptly burst into tears.
Trance sighed and moved toward his wife. When he got there, he quickly disarmed her of her knife, and then pulled her into his arms.
I looked over at Oakley, who looked sad for a few long moments.
She turned to me and said, “Mom’s too rude to say thank you, apparently.”
Viddy laughed and wiped her eyes, followed shortly by almost catapulting her way toward me.
She had me in her arms moments later as she said, “Thank you so much for saving the girl who made me a mom.”
I hugged the woman back who was more like a mom to me than my own mom was.
“I don’t regret even a second of it,” I informed her. “How are you?”
She pulled away and lightly patted my chest before saying, “I’d be better if assholes didn’t drive up my driveway and try to run over my dogs.”
Trance grumbled something over by the halfway chopped carrots.
A hesitant knock at the door had Trance leaving us and heading that way.
It was a couple seconds when we heard the ‘I’m stuck’ from a cultured male voice. Then Trance’s reply of ‘call a wrecker’ before he closed the door.
Viddy started to snicker as Trance rounded the corner of the kitchen rolling his eyes, but his phone was already in his hand.
“Yeah, hey, Leroy. This is Trance. When you get a call about a stuck car out at my place, can you give us an hour before you come out? We have a small get-together on the way out, and I want to make sure all our people can get here first before you block the driveway trying to get him out,” Trance said into his phone.
Something else was said on the other end of the line before Trance replied with, “Have a good one.”
That task done, Trance walked back to the cutting board and picked up another chopped piece of carrot.
“Let’s finish this, and then let’s go outside by the pool. Daddy just bought me some new outdoor furniture for Mother’s Day. It’s so comfortable. I could literally sleep on it all day long.”
***
Two hours later, the party was in full swing, and yet again, there was another unwanted visitor.
“Watch this,” Oakley whispered on the cushion beside me.
I looked over to where Oakley was gazing and winced when I saw Viddy march up to the car that’d just sped up into the driveway as if they owned the place.
She leaned down into their open car window and let them have it.
Needless to say, the car left at a much more sedate pace than it arrived.
“I hate them.” Viddy glared at the woman that was currently making a U-turn in her driveway. “When the kids were younger, and we had more parties out here with the club, people would come flying down this driveway looking for that stupid winery.” She curled her lips. “Almost nailed Ford. I about lost my shit that day.”
I would have, too.
“I’ve actually charged them for coming down here, too,” she admitted. “I put up a ‘pay here’ honor system type lockbox. They had to collect a ticket and drop in five bucks to park. Then we redirected them to the road and sent them on their way to the winery with signs. But we got in trouble for that one. It was great while it lasted, though.”
“We didn’t get in trouble. You did,” Trance said. “By me.”
Viddy shrugged. “True.”
“Have you called the winery about the sign?” I wondered. “If they just moved it twenty feet past your driveway, then people wouldn’t even give it a second thought. They’d turn down the road that was meant for them to.”
“Oh, we’ve called,” Trance muttered. “They tell us to go talk to the state since the state was the one responsible for putting up the sign.”
“Why not just knock it down or something?” Ford asked. “I’ve offered.”
“Because I don’t want y’all to get in trouble doing it when it’s just a stupid sign.” Trance sighed.