The Shortest Way Home

by Miriam Parker

  The woman who ran that library was the woman who changed my life. Her name was Mary Ellen O’Neill and she had gone to the University of Iowa and studied English. She had a master’s in library science and had lived in New York City. She had worked in book publishing, in library marketing, and at Barnes & Noble and the New York Public Library. She had coached me through applying to college and, in the summers after my sophomore and junior years, in what to do about getting a job in the city. She taught me about letter writing and networking. “The best thing you can ever do is to learn to write a great letter,” she said. “I didn’t learn until I worked in publishing, but I’m going to teach you now.” She made me write sample letters to her throughout the semester expressing my interest in a variety of careers that she described to me. Then she taught me how to scour the university alumni databases for contacts. She proofread my letters. And she bought me a glass of Champagne when I got the job at Tiffany’s as the assistant to the chief marketing officer.

  * * *

  —

  Books had always been my escape, so I was frustrated that at this moment, when I could have used one, I couldn’t get Tana French to carry me away. But maybe this wasn’t a time for avoidance; maybe I needed to focus on the place I was trying to escape into, the people around me, to see if I could belong here. I gave up on the book and concentrated on my wine. I looked at all the folks sitting at the bar and tried to figure out who was a local and who was a tourist, a better game than Unhappy Couple, at least for this moment. There was a look to the locals—they moved a little slower, were dressed a little more comfortably. They glowed a little bit brighter.

  I wondered how long it would take William to get home, shower, and come back to meet me. Was it better for me to be there when he arrived? Or to arrive after?

  Alexis brought me a coffee and a scoop of mango sorbet. The sorbet was cool and tart and the coffee made me sit up a little bit straighter. I asked for the bill, left a thirty percent tip because she hadn’t charged me for most of what I ate, and asked her how to get to Steiner’s. She pointed me in the right direction and I tried to make my most grateful face.

  * * *

  —

  I walked around the corner to Steiner’s, where William was sitting at the bar, clean, almost sparkling actually. He had two glasses of wine sitting, untouched, in front of him. I assumed one was for me. I came up behind him and touched his shoulder, just like he had done to me. He jumped a bit but then smiled broadly when he saw it was me. “Hannah!” he said. “So glad you made it. I already took the liberty of ordering you a glass of my favorite Pinot, other than the one we make, of course. It’s from a winery called Lynmar up in the Russian River Valley. We’ll have to go up there. It’s such a cool part of the area and they’re making the best natural wines right now.”

  “I don’t understand the words you are saying,” I said. “It’s like I need a Sonoma-to-English dictionary. But it all sounds good.” I settled on the stool next to him and took a sip. It was slightly chilled, light, a little bit sweet, like cherries. “Delicious,” I said.

  He nodded. His leg touched mine just a bit and I didn’t move away. “So,” he said. “Tell me about yourself.”

  I shrugged. “I’m pretty ordinary,” I said.

  “I’m sure that’s not true,” he said.

  “I’m from Iowa and then I moved to New York. Now I’m in grad school.”

  “And you must have a background in food and wine? Are you a cook?”

  “I worked in a French restaurant in college in Iowa City,” I said. “Mostly as a hostess.”

  One of my favorite parts about working at the restaurant was the family meal before the diners arrived, when we would test the chef’s specials and tell him what we thought about dishes he was developing. He would pair the meal with wine—not full glasses, but little tastes—so the waitstaff could tell the diners with confidence that the coq au vin did pair well with the Côtes du Rhône, but it went even better with the red Burgundy. He was always tweaking the cassoulet—changing the source of the beans, putting in lamb or leaving it out, varying the number of times he cracked the crust in the cooking process. Generally, we couldn’t taste the difference, but he would declare, “This is the worst I’ve ever made!” or “This is genius! The best I’ve ever made.” We always had a Languedoc red to pair with it. That place, Le Milieu, was my introduction to good food and wine.

  He nodded. “That must be it.”

  “I grew up eating food out of packages.”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “You seem to have overcome it quite nicely.”

  “And you’re going to New York?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Although now I’m regretting it.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because I didn’t know you’d be coming here.”

  “Well, I’m not sure yet . . .”

  “You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t going to stay,” he said.

  I nodded slowly. He was probably right. But I was still a little uncertain. “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s a big decision. I mean, I’m giving up a lot for something I know nothing about. It’s kind of crazy.”

  “I assume your boyfriend doesn’t approve?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “How long have you been together?” he asked.

  “A little less than two years,” I said. “We met at orientation.”

  “It’s your life,” he said.

  “I think he was planning to propose to me,” I said.

  He was quiet. Maybe it was too much to say on a first . . . encounter. Regardless, I could tell that he didn’t like Ethan. But I didn’t want him to say that to me, so I didn’t press it.

  “He’s not so bad,” I said.

  “I don’t need to talk about him,” he said. “Tell me about your family.”

  “My older brother Drew’s the principal of the middle/high school that we went to when we were teenagers. My dad was a truck driver and my mom is a nurse.”

  “A real American family,” he said.

  “I guess,” I said. Growing up in Iowa, one did become proud of being a normal American. Maybe it was the corn. Maybe it was the election focus that seemed to be constantly surrounding us. There was always a politician or a pollster who wanted to ask you a question. My parents had both grown up in Buchanan County. Had fallen in love in high school, and my mom was pregnant with Drew before she was twenty. She had me when she was twenty-one. She was a fun, young mom, almost luminous. But when my dad died, when I was just eleven years old, all of a sudden, she seemed old. So unprepared for life. Drew and I took over. She did make money as a nurse, but we did everything else—we dealt with our own clothes for school, food, entertainment. We watched her be totally overwhelmed.

  I didn’t want that to happen to me. So I had run away from low expectations, to the University of Iowa (which felt far away even though it was only an hour’s drive), and then to New York, to a job that I had gotten through my own networking abilities, and now to California. I had had to educate my mother about what I was doing; even hostessing in a French restaurant in Iowa City was exotic to her.

  When I got the job at Tiffany’s, I also had to explain to her that I wasn’t going to be covered in diamonds. Everything I did was gravy as far as my mother, and even my brother, who had stayed nearby in Iowa, could tell. She didn’t quite understand what I did; she appeared to be glad I was doing it. At the very least, she was glad that she didn’t have to give me an allowance or babysit my kids. Even though she also thought I was an old maid at thirty without any children or a husband. So, it was a double-edged sword, but on the whole, I think she was essentially proud.

  “And you, you’re different. How did that happen?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I always liked to read. I liked movies set in New York. I wanted to live a life like Meg Ryan in You’ve Got M
ail. I also had this librarian friend, Mary Ellen, who helped me. She kind of guided me out of the town, if that makes any sense. And I just knew that after college I wanted to move far away, so I wrote letters to people in New York until I found someone who would talk to me.”

  “That’s inspiring,” he said. “I’ve just been here my whole life. Except for when I went to Los Angeles for college. But that’s not a real place.”

  “Why do you keep saying that?”

  “It’s just not. It’s all about how you look and who you know.”

  “New York is like that.”

  “No, New York is about what you do. It’s about competence. LA is superficial. I was glad to leave.”

  “Did you want to act?”

  “No, but I wanted to write screenplays and I couldn’t break in anywhere, and then my parents needed help; the winery was expanding and they couldn’t do it all themselves. So I came back. But now, I have to take care of myself. That’s why I’m going to New York, to follow my dream. And that’s why I’m so glad you’ll be here to help them; they’re in a bit over their heads, and recently, well, they just seem to be outpaced by other wineries. With you there, I’ll worry less. Plus, you’ll get to live in the winemaker’s cottage.”

  “The winemaker’s cottage?”

  “My mom didn’t show it to you?”

  I shook my head and took the last sip of my wine.

  “Oh, I’ll show you later. It’s the nicest part of the property.”

  The idea of seeing the house together made me nervous—did that mean we were going home together? I quickly motioned to the bartender for another glass of wine. “Isn’t the house a castle?” I asked.

  “It’s not quite a castle, but it is big and drafty and we barely use any of the rooms. It was built in the 1800s by my great-great-great-something-grandfather. There are a bunch of other castles in Sonoma now—but they’ve all been built in the past fifteen years. So fake,” he said.

  “Faux,” I said.

  “Exactly,” he said. “Anyway, we’d all prefer to live in the cottage.”

  “Interesting,” I said. “I’ve always been fascinated by castles.”

  “Well, you’ll have plenty of access to a big house,” he said. “Enough to learn that you don’t really want one.”

  * * *

  —

  At the end of the night, I had him walk me back to my hotel. I didn’t feel ready to see the winemaker’s cottage yet. Even though it had felt pretty electric when our legs had touched in the bar, I had to be careful. He was the son of my soon-to-be boss and I still was in a relationship. I am a good person. This is what I told myself as I walked up to my room, alone, having hugged William quickly on the street and given him a good-bye smile.

  In the morning, I would go back to Bellosguardo and tell Linda that I was staying. I called my mom to tell her, but the call went straight to voice mail; I didn’t leave a message. Same with Drew. I even tried Mary Ellen, the librarian, whom I called occasionally for book recommendations and to chat about life. Then I remembered that it was the middle of the night in Iowa. Time zones. Somehow, the thought of calling Ethan never even crossed my mind. We had never had a conversation like this before, and I didn’t know how. I would tell him when I got back to Berkeley.

  CHAPTER 5

  The next morning, I walked back to Bellosguardo. I felt invigorated. I put on a dark denim A-line shirtdress that I felt looked both professional and casual. As I walked, I gave myself a pep talk: I was making a choice for myself—doing what I needed, not what was the “right” thing to do. I was good enough and smart enough and they would appreciate me working there. It reminded me of the walk I took from my childhood home to the Winthrop library to show Mary Ellen the e-mail from Cheryl Vetter, the chief marketing officer of Tiffany & Co., offering me a job as her assistant. She jumped up and down when she saw the news. She was a little past her prime jumping years, but she said the news made her feel like a kid again.

  As I crossed the now-familiar bridge and approached the ivy-covered building, I noticed the castle peeking out from the hill above. I took another one of my mental pictures; this was the start of my new life. The parking lot was empty, but the tasting room door was open, so I entered the cool, whitewashed room. It was empty, as it had been on my first encounter. This time not even the dog was there. Everett emerged from the office, though, and met me across the bar. I approached and sat down. He ignored me at first until finally, turning around from organizing the bottles in the racks, he asked, “Hello, are you here for a tasting?”

  “I’m Hannah,” I said. “I spoke with Linda yesterday? Is she here?”

  “Who?” he said. His voice was gruff and his hair was messy, making him seem angrier than I hoped he was. He had been so nice to us the day before, or nice to the dog and to Ethan. I hadn’t really interacted with him.

  “Hannah Greene?” I said with the up-speak tone that I knew was irritating to people, especially men, but I couldn’t help it. My boss, Cheryl, in New York, had spent years drumming the habit out of me. I had finally mastered it by the time I got to graduate school, and here it was, slipping out. I gritted my teeth and told myself, Get it together, Hannah. “I spoke with Linda about a job here. Helping with marketing?”

  “I don’t know anything about this,” he said. “We don’t need marketing.”

  “Everyone needs marketing,” I said. How could he not have known that I was coming? I was pretty sure that his wife had very clearly offered me a job. And I had had drinks with his son. Hadn’t they talked about me? I was confused.

  “What are you, some kind of college student?”

  I was flattered he thought I looked so young but wanted to establish my credentials. “I’m in business school, actually about to graduate. I fell in love with your winery yesterday when I was here? You told my boyfriend about architecture? He was the one who didn’t like the dog’s kisses. Anyway, I quit the job I was supposed to do in New York to come up here.” Tears inadvertently came to my eyes. Not the best way to make a first impression. I sniffed them back and tried to sit up as straight as possible.

  “Let me go ask Linda,” he said. “You wait here.” He disappeared through the same doorway from which Linda had produced our celebratory sparkling wine. The dog had apparently been behind the bar, because he appeared and went trotting behind Everett into the back room. He couldn’t be too much of a bad guy if the dog loved him that much.

  Before I had left the hotel room that morning, I had called my Human Resources contact at Goldman, a lovely but intense woman named Helene. I had tried to start off casually, asking her about her family, but she went right to the point: “Why are you calling? You know your start date is May fifteenth, right?”

  “I know,” I said. “I just—”

  “Did you get another offer?”

  “No,” I said. “Well—”

  “Who was it? J.P. Morgan? Citi? HSBC?”

  “It’s actually at a winery in California.”

  “How much are they offering you?” She was sounding combative now.

  I didn’t know what to say. As I was confronting this possibility, it did seem actually insane. “Eight hundred dollars a week,” I said.

  “What?!” she screamed.

  “Plus room and board,” I eked out.

  “I don’t even know what to say,” she said. “I went to bat for you. I told them to choose you over that other girl even though they liked her better. Now . . .”

  This made me mad. As if she was trying to undermine my decision. “Well, now everyone gets what they want,” I snapped. I was almost crying.

  “I honestly don’t even understand what you’re doing. You have the most coveted job and you’re just giving it up?” Her voice had gone up an octave. “For eight—”

  “Yes,” I babbled. “I think it’s the right thing.”

 
“You’re making a huge mistake,” Helene had said and hung up without even saying good-bye. She sounded a lot like Ethan, but angrier.

  When Everett was gone for more than a minute, I started to worry that Helene was right. After we had hung up, someone else from Goldman had called and left a message about me returning my signing bonus. I decided not to call that person back right away. As I waited for Everett I went down the mental path of considering whether I had made a mistake. Maybe Ethan was right. Had I completely ruined my future? What did I know about these people, whom I had just randomly stumbled upon, that I was entrusting everything to them? The Goldman job would “set the tone” for the rest of my career, Ethan said. What if the tone this job in Sonoma set was failure? William had said the winery was in bad financial shape, and I had just given up hundreds of thousands of dollars in potential income to make eight hundred dollars a week and live in a cottage with free wine.

  But I had made a lot of rash decisions in my life—leaving Iowa to go to New York City for a job at Tiffany’s, leaving that totally secure job that sometimes generated free diamonds to go to graduate school in California, even moving in with Ethan very shortly after I had met him. Business school was actually fun; I had liked the strategic and financial side of what Cheryl had done at Tiffany’s; and the projects were creative. So, two out of the three rash decisions had been good ones. Besides, the rash decisions had taken thought, mostly. I wrote letters to successful Hawkeye graduates in New York City throughout my college years so one of them would give me a job when I graduated. After I had that job and decided I needed to get out of New York, I studied for the GMAT for an entire year on my subway ride to and from work. I learned about the top state business schools and how to establish residency in those states so my second year of tuition was lower than my first. I applied to Berkeley. I was organized. Thoughtful. I met Ethan in a bookstore and he took me to Chez Panisse for dinner, and he was better than any other guy I’d ever gone to a fancy dinner with. I gave up my apartment and moved into his almost immediately. That was perhaps not the best move. But if those were rash decisions, this was literally insane: In the course of basically an hour, I had changed everything in my life to work in this winery that I knew nothing about. Ethan’s words echoed in my head. He was right. I was throwing everything I had worked for away on a decision I made when I was a little bit tipsy in a beautiful place.