A young man comes to live with his older aunt, cousin, family friend, whatever, and is introduced to a wine merchant. He winds up driving for the wine merchant and eventually learning the wine business. There's a lot more to it. A coming-of-age story, and I can't remember much more except that I liked it. Anybody have any ideas?
I think you are looking for 'Growing up with Beth' by artie. unfortunately not on this site now.
If you go looking through history be aware he used both ~artie and silli_artie when posting on ASSTR.org.
As far as I can remember, there only ever was one story by Artie on this site. He deleted everything on his own site (which was hosted by AssTr) but left the one here - and the SciFi stories on GMW's site - alone.
It is, it's a great story. So how to find it?
Links to his stuff have been posted to the Forum before, including a mirror which was a subdirectory under stuff.greenberg.org but was also deleted years ago.
Then a couple of dates:
- he deleted his AssTr site around January 2012.
- the greenberg.org stuff was deleted not long after the link was posted here.
Bear in mind that gwb (Growing up With Beth) was completed years earlier.
The Wayback machine is your friend!
Presuming it is "Growing up with Beth," it is a great story as most of Artie's were. Fortunately, I saved most the ones I enjoyed. Not that I am reminded of it, I think I will reread it.
The version that my non-google search engine shows up only has 12 Chapters. The full story has 16.
What *is* useful is the link to author's home page, not because there is anything there but because you can use that as input to the Wayback Machine.
I checked the end of the last chapter of the version I assume you have (mc) against chapter 12 of the original version and they were the same. It was not just reordering deckchairs on the Titanic, you are missing chapters 13-16.
That is the last line of Chapter 16.
Chapter 12 finishes with "She laughed and held my hand in place for a moment, then moved it down to her waist and started the car".