The bottle sat in the wine fridge for almost ten years. Blue lights, room for a dozen, the kind that looks classy in the corner of a dining room. Mark bought it the year he made regional manager. Told everybody it was an investment.
For a few months Carol checked the temperature more than she needed to. After that it just became furniture you learned to walk around.
Every time I came by, she'd point at it.
"We're saving that one."
For what, she never fully said. The promotion was already years behind them. There was talk of an anniversary trip that turned into a kitchen remodel instead.
The first time I saw that bottle, their daughter Reagan still needed a stool to reach the sink. Now she crossed the kitchen without looking up, thumb never leaving her phone. Mark's hair had gone gray at the temples, not all at once, just enough that one Sunday I noticed and couldn't remember when it happened.
Friday night, I stopped by after work. Takeout containers stacked on the counter, chicken strips going cold under a film of grease, ranch cups tipped over and pooling. The dishwasher ran loud enough that Carol had to raise her voice to ask if I wanted a beer. Down the hall, their youngest was screaming about a charger like the house was on fire.
Carol wiped barbecue sauce off the table with a paper towel in one hand, dug through a junk drawer with the other, looking for something nobody named. Then she stopped. Looked past the mess toward the corner, where the fridge hummed its low blue light like it had every night for ten years.
"Honestly, if we don't drink that thing now, we never will."
Mark didn't argue. He walked over, pulled it, and set it on the counter next to a stack of paper plates. The cork came out with a sound too small for how long they'd waited on it.
Carol looked at the bottle a second. "I genuinely forgot what we were saving it for."
I laughed. Reagan glanced up long enough to ask what was funny, didn't wait for an answer, went back to her phone. Half the good glasses were still dirty, so we drank out of whatever was clean — a coffee mug, two juice glasses, one wine glass with a lipstick mark on the rim that hadn't quite come off in the wash.
It tasted like heat. Like it had sat too long in a fridge that ran a little warm, gone soft and flat in a way that wasn't unpleasant so much as tired. Nobody said anything about that. Carol took a sip, made a face that wasn't disappointment exactly, more like recognizing an old photo of yourself.
The bottle they opened wasn't the one Mark carried home the year of the promotion. Neither of them were the people who'd bought it.
Halfway through dinner Carol leaned back, looked at the empty bottle standing next to the ranch cups.
"We should've opened this sooner."
Nobody answered. The dishwasher clicked into its next cycle. Down the hall the crying started up again, something about the charger still, or something new, hard to tell anymore. Reagan came through, took a chicken strip off Mark's plate without asking, and disappeared back into her room.
Mark reached over, not really thinking about it, and poured what was left into Carol's mug.
© Jake Ruse — The No B.S. Wine Letter / Austin Texas Wine Society. All rights reserved.