Five novels.
Written, illustrated, and performed.

Sixto Reyes went out to the Home Block at ten past five, before the light, because he had learned in forty years that a vineyard tells you the truth in the dark and starts lying around nine, when the heat comes up and the leaves roll and everything looks either dying or magnificent depending on where you stand.

He took his samples the way he always did: two hundred berries, ten from every fifth vine, shoulders and tips, sun side and shade, the small hard ones as well as the fat ones, because if you took only the pretty ones you got the number you wanted instead of the number that was true, and a man who does that ends up picking a week early for the rest of his life and never understands why his wine tastes like the inside of a green stick.

By the third week of August the canyon had stopped cooling at night. The heat lay down in the swales after sundown like something exhausted, and Isabel Bettencourt walked the Old Block at ten in the evening in a T-shirt gone stiff with sulfur dust, feeling the ground give back the day through the soles of her boots.

Twenty-two Brix, maybe. Twenty-three in the sun rows. Ten days, twelve if the nights broke.

Ten days, and then the thing her mother had built out of her dying would begin.

The road out of Plymouth had not been repaved since the last time Camille drove it, and the last time Camille drove it her mother had been alive and driving too, ahead of her in the flatbed, one arm hung out the window in that way she had, as if the air were something she was owed. Now there was only the road, buckled at the culverts, and the heat standing over it in sheets, and the almond hulls blown into the gutters like a snow that had given up.

At the top of the grade the valley opened the way it always did, all at once, like a drawer pulled out: the low rolls of gold, the black oaks standing in their own shade, the vineyard rows running down the fall of the land in stitches. From here you could not see what was wrong. From here it looked like money.