He laughed. “I’m sorry I’m laughing,” he said. “But that actually sounds disgusting.”
“It is,” I said. “Or it was, I realized after. Moving to New York after college really helped me see the other side of things. Even in high school, going home with friends to their houses. Because you don’t really know something is weird until you experience other things, right?”
“So true,” he said.
“I mean, you probably thought everyone grew up in castles.”
“Not really.” He laughed. “Sonoma is a pretty diverse place.”
“But you know what I mean.”
He nodded. Our baskets were filled with vegetables. “This is probably too much for salad,” I said.
“We can make a frittata for breakfast.”
I tried not to think too much about breakfast. We needed to make it through dinner first.
He brought the steaks out to the grill while I made salads and mashed the potatoes.
I brought the potatoes and the salads out to the picnic table and sat there with my wine as he tested the beef. “What were your few weeks in New York like?”
“Great,” he said. “I mean . . . hard. But great. My friend’s apartment is small and I was staying on the couch and there was barely enough room for my suitcase. So I just spent the first two days walking. And taking notes. You hear everything everyone says. Fights and first dates and boring conversations and philosophical debates.”
“I kind of miss that,” I mused.
“So inspiring. For screenwriting. I mean, it’s all dialogue. I filled almost an entire notebook with all the things I overheard.”
“Of course they’re not the things overheard in a winery.”
“Some things are universal,” he said. “I never heard my parents fight, but obviously they were fighting for years. I heard some good fights. A woman accusing her significant other of trying to sabotage their relationship via their pet. A woman yelling at her son for stealing money out of her purse to buy pot. I sat next to a couple breaking up at a bar, and then at the next bar, I saw a couple on a first date have their first kiss.”
“Different people?”
He laughed. “Yes, different people. You’re funny.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Sounds amazing.”
“I bet people who live there for a long time get sick of that stuff, but as a first-timer, it was great. LA isn’t even like that. I lived there for four years when I was in college, but the tables are farther apart and people fight in their cars. In New York, there’s nowhere to hide. Even your apartment is too small to have a fight.” He slid the steaks onto the plates that I’d set across from each another. “Bon appétit.”
I served potatoes onto both of our plates and we dug in. After we chewed and made noises that indicated the meal was good, he said, “Did you ever talk to Ethan? After I saw him?”
“No,” I said. “I meant to, but I just . . . couldn’t.”
“So, you’re an avoider?”
“No . . . I mean, I texted him, and he wrote back. But then I didn’t follow up . . .”
“You are.”
We were both silent. There wasn’t really anywhere to steer the conversation after that.
“I think I’m just not quite ready for what he wants,” I said. “I mean, he wants things to be all serious and on a track. And he wants life to be his way. And I’m just not sure of everything yet. The further into the summer I get, the less sure I am.”
“Maybe he’ll be less sure after this summer.”
“New York is his home. I think he gets more sure there.”
“He didn’t look sure when I saw him. He looked bereft.”
“It makes me feel terrible,” I said. “Mostly because I love it here.”
That’s when he got up silently, came around to my side of the table, sat next to me, and kissed me. It was a sweet kiss. Passionate, but doting. It was the nicest kiss I’d ever felt. But I didn’t want a nice kiss; I wanted a great kiss, so I moved closer to him, pressed into him, and bit a little bit on his bottom lip. He bit a little bit back and slid his hand around my back and up the back of my shirt. I got even closer and returned the favor. He pulled back and looked me in the eye. “I feel like we should take this somewhere more private,” he said.
“We have this whole place to ourselves,” I replied.
He unhooked my bra and picked me up, somehow gracefully getting me inside the door. Then he put me down and took my hand and we ran together up to his room, which I hadn’t seen before, but to be honest, I didn’t get much of a look at it because he closed the door behind us and pushed me up against the door, gently but firmly, and kissed me for real. Little bites and all. I groaned and pushed my hands all the way up his back. He lifted my shirt and bra off at the same time and knelt down in front of me. “You are so gorgeous,” he whispered. I almost melted. Ethan had never said that to me. Ever. And I had never, ever wanted Ethan the way that I wanted William at that very moment. I closed my eyes and surrendered to his tongue and his fingers and the feeling that someone who wanted me for exactly who I was, was doing exactly what I wanted him to do. It was like he had always known. How was that possible? I asked as I crumpled to the floor and we crawled together to the bed, starving for each other.
* * *
—
Later, when we were lying in his bed, he wrapped his arms around me. “I just didn’t expect this to happen so soon,” he said.
“I know. I meant to break up with my boyfriend first,” I said.
“No, no,” he said. “I mean, I was thinking about how great this felt, but I was also thinking about my parents. I thought I had a few more good years with them. It just makes you think that you have to actually grow up and get things together. I’ve spent all this time being a kid . . . but I’m thirty years old . . .”
“It’s all going to be all right,” I said, trying to be comforting, but also knowing he was right. “What did Oscar Wilde say? Death must be so beautiful . . . something about being at peace.”
“Peace. They both probably want some peace,” he said. “I hope you’re right.”
CHAPTER 16
William headed to the hospital to see his father and I went down to the tasting room. It was a Tuesday, so the tourist traffic was a bit slow, but Felipe came in to hang with me, and a restaurateur from Austin came in with his wife. I poured him the special selection that we kept just for restaurants. “There are only a few places where you can drink these wines,” I told him. “Here, at a few places in Sonoma County, one restaurant in Los Angeles, and one in Portland. We try to keep things very exclusive for our fine-dining clients.”
He told me that his name was Alan and that he served a lot of steak, so I poured him our single-vineyard Cabernet and a plummy Zinfandel that grew on vines in a section of the farm that had originally been a fruit orchard—plums and peaches—so the Zin had a fruity quality that made it really rich.
Tannin sauntered into the tasting room and begged the wife to pick him up. He gave her kisses and sat on her lap for at least ten minutes, which was kind of a record for him. He would only sit on Everett’s lap that long. Everyone else he got bored with after a few minutes. I smiled at the dog; even Tannin was in on the hard sell. And maybe was a little lonely without Everett around.
“This dog is so sweet,” the wife said as her fingers massaged his head.
“I know,” I said. “He’s a love bug. Can I take a photo of you together for the social media? He has a really popular account.”
“Sure,” he said, posing with the dog while I snapped. “We just came from the coast,” Alan said. “We were at a beach filled with dogs and they seemed so happy. It was called Dillon Beach. Beautiful drive. About an hour from here. You should take Tannin there.”
“I have been to this beach,” Felipe said. “It is very beautiful and I played wi
th dogs who ran into the surf chasing birds.”
“Wow,” I said. “That sounds amazing. I haven’t really explored the area at all. I’ve just been in Sonoma at the winery, and I went to Healdsburg for a sales call. And here, of course. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”
“That’s the thing about being on vacation: You explore. If you live somewhere, you kind of stick to where you need to be.” Alan placed an order for a case of Cabernet and a case of the plummy Zinfandel for his restaurant and I locked the door of the tasting room behind him.
I turned to Felipe and said, “Well, I guess we need to drink this wine that’s open.”
“I think you are right,” he said. He poured us both big glasses of the Zinfandel and we settled ourselves on barstools. “You know so much about all of us,” he said, “but we know nothing about you.”
“Oh,” I said. “I’m an open book. I guess the thing I’ve just been struggling with is kind of coming to terms with myself. It seems like such a privileged problem. But I have all of this pride and I hate dealing with other people’s feelings. I’m avoiding my boyfriend right now—Ethan, he’s in New York, and my mother, she’s in Iowa. I mean, she’s a widow. Why am I so angry with her?”
“In Chile, it is different,” he said. “We live with our families forever. We never want to leave them. We respect our parents; our children live so close to them. We live at home for college. It is much closer. I see here, everyone is always running away. So maybe you are just being an American.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But yesterday William called me an avoider, and he’s right. I am avoiding.”
“Why do you think you are?” he asked.
“I once had a therapist who told me that because my dad died when I was so young, some of my emotional reactions are kind of stunted. I fired that therapist after that session, but maybe he was a little right. But I don’t want to blame my dad anymore. It’s not his fault that he died and it’s not my mom’s fault that she was so sad.”
“You should send all the love to your mother,” he said. “I am sure that she sends all of her love to you, so far away.”
“I should,” I said. “It’s just been so hard for me to forgive. But I’m going to try to work on it.” Tears were running down my cheeks when William walked into the room.
“What’s going on in here?” he asked. He looked like he had been crying too.
“It’s a bit of a pity party,” I said.
“How is Mr. Everett?” Felipe asked.
“It looks bad, Felipe,” he said. “He had a bypass surgery and now he’s surrounded by all these machines and tubes. And my mom just looks tiny. And she’s cold all the time. She’s wearing, like, three sweaters and a scarf. It’s all just unbearable.”
“I know,” I said.
“I just want to crawl into a dark room and stay there for a long time. Maybe all of this will go away.”
“What you need is a distraction,” I said.
Felipe glared at me, like I was just saying I wouldn’t be an avoider and here I was being one.
“I just want to wallow,” William said, collapsing next to me.
“No wallowing allowed,” I said. “And I promise I won’t tell anyone if you have a good time. Felipe won’t either. Listen, there were some people in here before and they told us about this place they went to called Dillon Beach. It’s dog-friendly and a beautiful drive. We should go out there and take Tannin. Felipe went once and said it was nice, right?”
“It was very nice,” he said. “And I can stay here in the tasting room. If you promise not to tweet about it.”
“I won’t,” I said.
“Good,” he said, and went into the office, but not before throwing us a knowing glance.
William looked a little bit skeptical. “I think I went there when I was in high school. It was a little rocky. But Tannin does love the beach,” he said.
“It would be fun to explore a bit,” I said. “Do it for me. I’ve barely seen anything.” I wasn’t much of an exploring type. Even when I lived in New York, I just went to work and back home. Sometimes on a nice day, I would venture into Central Park with a sandwich, but only far enough from the street where I couldn’t smell the Fifty-Ninth Street horses anymore. Since I’d been at Bellosguardo, I’d left the property only to go for short runs around the neighborhood, to go to town for Pilates and Bar Method, plus for an occasional coffee with Celeste. And there’d been that trip to Healdsburg, as well as my local deliveries, but the deliveries were just to restaurants and people’s houses and back. I did like seeing where people lived, especially the houses that were up winding roads and down long driveways. The types of houses you couldn’t even see from the street. We didn’t have that in Iowa.
“Okay,” William said. “Let’s go on an adventure. We could use a break.”
I smiled, gave him a kiss, and stood up. “I’ll go make a picnic!”
William stood up too, put his hands under my armpits, and swung me around. It pinched more than it was fun, but I knew he was trying to perk us both up. He exclaimed, “Let’s go to the beach!”
I ran up to the cottage and packed us a lunch of cheese and bread and berries, grabbed a bottle of wine and an opener and some plastic wineglasses that I’d found under the sink. A sheet from the linen closet would make a perfect picnic blanket. Everything fit into the big picnic basket that I had found in the front closet behind flats of wineglasses. I threw a book in just in case I got bored and headed back down to the parking lot, where I found William in a vintage blue Corvette with black antique car plates, the top down, Tannin on the passenger seat.
“I pulled out one of my dad’s old cars; it seemed appropriate,” he said.
“It’s beautiful!” I said. “I didn’t know he had this! He always drives that beat-up truck.”
“Yeah,” he said. “He has an old Porsche, an Aston Martin, and an Alfa Romeo, but they always break down. This one is more reliable.”
I threw the picnic basket in the back and leapt over the door with joy. Tannin seemed surprised, as if he’d never seen anyone do it before, but I landed with two feet on the passenger seat floor.
“Nice,” William said. “It’s like you’ve been practicing that.”
“I might have had a friend who had a convertible in high school.”
“A friend?” he teased.
“Okay, my brother bought a used Mazda Miata with his lawn-mowing money. It was always broken, but it looked great. And I used to practice jumping into it in the driveway. Haven’t used that skill in a while.”
“You’re eternally surprising,” William said, handing me a San Francisco 49ers cap. “You might want to cover your hair with this. Let’s go see the ocean!”
I sat down and snuggled Tannin up in my lap. Put on my seat belt and made the “engage” signal from Star Trek with my hand.
* * *
—
We headed down 116, which was just windy enough, a different slope of grapes or cows or goats or vegetables at each turn. And the accompanying smells—of fruit, of manure, of jasmine—hit our noses as we went around each bend. We guessed what we would see based on the smells. Every once in a while we were right.
We passed through Petaluma and found ourselves in Tomales just when we wanted to have lunch.
“Do they have tamales in Tomales?” I asked.
“I’m sure you’re not the first one to ask that question,” William said. I stood outside the deli with Tannin while he went in to assess the situation.
“I’ll take two,” I shouted through the screen door. “Even though I packed us a perfectly good lunch.”
He came back out with tacos wrapped in tin foil. “Tacos,” he said. “They look amazing. And thanks for packing a lunch. I’m sure we can have a second meal later.”
We sat on the sidewalk and unwrapped them greedily, pa
rtially because we were hungry and partially because Tannin was assaulting us to try to get the food out of our hands. The tacos were filled with spicy beef that made the top of my mouth tingle and made me want to both inhale them and also savor them. I felt like I couldn’t get enough of this day. I took William’s hand in mine when we were done eating and Tannin was done licking us. “Okay,” I said. “Now we go to the beach.”
It was another windy drive through hills covered in dry grass and rocks, interspersed with grazing cattle. Tannin was interested in the cows and put his paws up on the window frame to get a closer look.
“He won’t jump, will he?” I asked.
William couldn’t hear me because he was blasting John Coltrane and had his window down. I figured Tannin liked us too much to jump and let him continue to put his head out the window and into the breeze.
As we descended the final hill and saw the ocean peeking around the cliffs, it was enough to make us scream for joy. Everything had been so tense up until now. It felt good to just let loose. We yelled our heads off and drove all the way down to the beach, paid the entry fee, and parked the car right at the edge of the sand. We popped out of the car, let Tannin run free, and brought our picnic to the center of the beach. It was pretty empty, which was odd since it was the Tuesday after Memorial Day; maybe it wasn’t the type of spot that tourists visited. Tannin had the time of his life, chasing birds, sniffing piles of kelp that had washed up on the shore. I snuggled into William, plastic cups of wine in our hands as we watched the tide.
“I love oceans,” I said. “They’re scary and beautiful. Kind of like being with you.”
He kissed me in response.
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