The Shortest Way Home

by Miriam Parker

  “I’ve never had a boss insist that I get drunk before,” I said.

  “It’ll be good for you,” he said.

  * * *

  —

  Back in the cottage, I made a fire. Even though it was September it was starting to be cool at night and I just loved the look and feel of the fire. It was so relaxing, the best feature of a well-appointed cottage. As I sat in front of the fire, warmed by the wine and the flames, I was struck with the sudden need to call my own mother. It was not a need I had felt often, but ever since Ethan and I had broken up and I had decided to stay in Sonoma, I had been thinking about her. Just a few days earlier she had left me her shortest message ever: “Hannah, I love you, darling. I hope you’re okay. Please call your mother.”

  That message had broken me. She didn’t want anything other than to know where I was. How I was doing. So I broke down and called her. She answered on the second ring. “Mom?” I said. “It’s Hannah.”

  “Hannah Greene. As I live and breathe. How are you?”

  “I’m good.”

  “Are you still at that wine place?”

  “I am,” I said.

  “How’s that going?”

  “Good,” I said. “I’ve helped them grow their business and now we’re starting a hotel.”

  “Good for you, honey. I always knew you would make it.”

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  “I was just telling Wendy Iverson the other day at the hospital how good you were doing.”

  This was a new tactic for her, to tell me I was doing a good job.

  “It means a lot to hear that,” I said.

  “I mean, before you were a secretary, but now you make things that people buy.” This was more the mother I remembered.

  “And Mrs. Anderson, she thinks it’s just great. She’s been buying wine at the grocery store to see what you’re doing. She likes the one with the little Penguin on it.”

  “That’s good,” I said.

  “And Gillian and Duncan are both getting As in school. A few Bs. Oh, and that one C. But mostly As.”

  The girls at the hospital. Wine with animal logos. Grandchildren. It brought tears to my eyes. I had been running away so fast from that place, from that life. From her. But she was just someone who wanted to be happy. Who didn’t need a lot to be happy. She was inspiring. She was real. People like Ethan, and I was guilty of it too—we were just making up structures to make ourselves happy, chasing the extraordinary when the perfect ordinary is put right in front of us.

  “I love you so much,” I said. “You’re the best.”

  “You’re my daughter,” my mom said. “I don’t always know what you’re doing, but I love you anyway. And I know whatever it is, you’re good at it. And I admire you.”

  I was silent for a minute because that was the one thing that I didn’t have here in California. I had a job and a passion. But I didn’t have love. The love was back in Iowa, where it had always been. Where I had been running from it. But it was always back there waiting for me. And that, for now, had to be enough.

  “Thanks for being my mom,” I said finally, when I had composed myself a little bit.

  “Thanks for being my daughter,” she said. “I’m sending you a kiss through the phone.”

  I smiled. I knew that she was.

  CHAPTER 25

  The morning of the day of our first guests’ arrival, I headed up to the house to work on the final touches. I opened the kitchen door with my usual flourish. I had been at Bellosguardo long enough to learn that running a business and starting a new one were way more satisfying than strategizing about how to keep a relationship going. I was having way more fun being Business Hannah than being Relationship Hannah.

  I was gleeful and ready to share my excitement about our first guest with Everett, only to find myself retreating back out of the room. He was sitting with Linda at the orange pizza table in the kitchen. They were holding hands and they leaned across the table so that their foreheads touched in the middle. I softly closed the door, but there was no way they hadn’t heard me. I stood outside, waiting for a moment until I heard, “Hannah! Is that you?”

  I reluctantly went back in. I felt like I had walked in on an intimate moment of my own parents. Worse than finding them naked, really, but finding them in a true moment of quiet connection. “Hi,” I said.

  “Hi,” Linda said. She got up to give me a hug. “It’s good to see you.”

  I smiled at Everett, who was still at the table. He was grinning.

  “It’s great to see you,” I said. “What a surprise.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “Well,” I said. “Can someone tell me what’s going on?”

  “I should make some eggs first,” she said.

  “Okay . . .” I said, and settled myself with a cup of coffee at the table, although I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to stand the suspense through the entire process of breakfast being cooked. But there was a newspaper on the table, so I shuffled through that, reading nothing but turning pages nonetheless. Everett focused on the crossword puzzle. Linda hummed a little as she scrambled eggs.

  Finally, the eggs were done; the toast was buttered. Linda settled down with us, placing plates in front of us. There was a sprig of rosemary on our eggs, which had the perfect amount of herbed goat cheese folded into them. I had missed her cooking. “Amazing,” I said, eating too quickly. “Now tell me.”

  “It’s not really a complicated story,” Linda said. “After the party, I felt like I needed to go. And I did. And Evvy left me alone for a while . . .”

  “Granted, I was on my deathbed,” he said, laughing a little.

  “Okay, point taken.” She laughed and patted him on the arm. “I’m glad you survived. Anyway, I was happy, but I was also lonely. And I didn’t really have anything to do. I started inventing projects for myself—painting, knitting, making elaborate soufflés. I did start taking long walks in the mountains, which I liked a lot. I might keep doing that. Anyway, Everett called me and told me that the hotel was really happening. He told me all the work that you had done to make it real. And I thought about it a lot and I knew it was a good idea, but I didn’t say anything. And he just kept calling and telling me about the progress and how you had hired Celeste and Rory, and I think the Rory thing kind of just sent me over the edge . . . Why should Rory be cooking breakfast for guests in my home when I can do it better than he can? So, when Everett told me that our first guest was coming today . . . I came back.”

  “Wow,” I said. “Well, I’m so glad to have you. I mean, I wanted you to be cooking for the guests. You were my first choice.”

  “Thanks,” she said. “I like doing it.”

  “The only problem,” I said, “is that I moved all of your things out of your room, because it has the best bathroom, so we can rent it out for the most.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I understand.”

  “You can pick any other one,” I said.

  “I’ll probably just bunk with this one for a while,” she said, taking Everett’s hands.

  My face must have turned bright red. “Okay, okay,” I said. “Whatever you want. You just talk to Celeste about it. She’s handling the staff. They’ll put your things wherever you need them.”

  “Great,” Everett said.

  “At the end of the day, this is where I belong,” Linda said. “The other life, it was a fantasy. A fantasy that took a lot of years to get out of my system. But it’s gone now. And I have a purpose here. And I have love here. I’m needed here. More than anything, I need to be needed. It’s what I’ve learned about myself. It took long enough, but I finally know.”

  “Well,” I said. “I guess I need to go check on our hotel and leave you lovebirds to it.” I stood up from the table. “I really am glad you’re back, Linda. And it should be easier for you here
now too. I had to streamline things because I was the only one, and . . .”

  “Whatever you did is great, dear,” Linda said. “I’m just glad to be home.”

  “Me too,” I said.

  I left the room and went into the main foyer to check on our “front desk,” which was just an iPad on a side table. I was rearranging the flowers that Celeste had left on the entryway side table when she walked in the front door.

  “Welcome to Bellosguardo,” I said teasingly. “How can I help you?”

  “It looks so good here,” she said. She ran in and gave me a hug. “I’m so excited for this to take off. Did you see that we have two more bookings for next weekend?”

  “We do?” I asked. I hadn’t looked at my phone in more than an hour.

  “Yes!” she said. She was almost jumping up and down.

  “I’m really glad,” I said. “And guess what: Linda is back to cook for us! You can let Rory off the hook.”

  “She’s back? Wow,” she said. “Almost all is right in the world. Now all we need is to find you a boyfriend. I’ve kind of moved in with Thunder. What’s taking you so long?”

  I bristled a little. “I just want to focus on all this.”

  “What’s this if you don’t have someone to share it with?” she asked.

  “It’s just me,” I said. “Accomplishing things. That’s better than anything. I’d rather say that I did it all myself.”

  “Sometimes your midwestern independence is irritating,” she said, but I could tell that she was joking.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t help it.”

  “Fine,” she said. “We have a lot of work to do. Let’s go upstairs.”

  I nodded and followed her up the stairs.

  * * *

  —

  Later that day, we welcomed our first guests, Sean and Meg, with a glass of sparkling wine and mints on their pillows. Linda also decided to cook a big dinner for everyone, free of charge. “I am going to try and not make a habit of this,” she said as she showed Sean and Meg to their room, formerly her room. “But I’m so excited that you are our first guests. Will you join us for a barbecue?”

  “Of course,” Sean said. “How could we turn that down?”

  So, later that night, I found myself out at the family picnic table, eating homemade fried chicken with Sean and Meg and Everett and Linda and Celeste and Felipe and his wife, Maria José, who had come to join Felipe after many months of separation. The only people missing were William, and Felipe’s children, Alejandro and Lucia, who were back at the house with a babysitter. Tannin was lounging under the table, waiting patiently for someone to drop something or give in to his big brown eyes. Sean and Meg had bought some wine at the festival that afternoon and insisted that we open it since we had generously invited them to dinner. I was fine with that because the Bellosguardo wines were so precious at the moment, we were rationing them for the guests, the tasting room, the wine club, and the distributor requests. I had told Felipe that he needed to up production for the next year. The 2012 Dutton-Goldfield Pinot Noir was perfectly balanced and paired impeccably with the crispy panko-encrusted chicken.

  Meg was telling us about her post-retirement tourism company, which she had started in Denver—she offered personalized tours for small groups to the best restaurants and breweries in the area. She drove them around in her own SUV for half- or full-day tasting menus. She loved doing it, since she was the ultimate extrovert, as she described herself. “And it keeps Sean and me out of each other’s hair. I don’t know how you two do it, running a business together,” she said to Linda. Everyone at the table bit their tongues.

  “It’s not always easy,” Linda said magnanimously. “But at the end of the day, it’s the most important thing. Family.”

  As if on cue, the kitchen door was thrown open and William strode out into the yard. I almost started crying, I was so happy to see him. Linda did start crying. And Everett stood up to hug him.

  “Looking good, Dad,” William said. “And, Mom! It’s good to see you here!”

  “William!” I said. “Wow!”

  “I wouldn’t miss this,” he said. He walked around the table and gave his mom a hug and then stood behind me and massaged my shoulders. I let him do it for a second before I slid over and invited him to sit. It was good to be near him again.

  “Have some chicken,” Linda said, passing the plate down. “It’s a little cold . . . but it’ll still be good.”

  “Don’t mind if I do,” he said.

  As William heaped his plate with chicken and salad, Everett stood up and raised his glass. “I want to make a toast,” he said. “To family, old and new. If you had told me six months ago that we would all be sitting here together right now, I would not have believed you. But I’m so glad that we are. Sometimes change is stressful and bonds can get stretched and life is not the straight road that we think it is going to be, that we see in the movies . . .” He winked at William. “But whatever form it comes in, we have to celebrate it. To health and love,” he said, raising his glass.

  “To health and love,” we all said, and raised our glasses with him.

  “And a glass half-full,” William said, looking at me.

  “May they always be,” I said.

  Tannin let out a little bark when our glasses clinked, and we all laughed.

  CHAPTER 26

  After dinner, I went back to my cottage alone, but William knocked on the door a few minutes later. I was in the process of making a fire, so he sat on the couch and watched me. “You’ve gotten so good at this,” he said as I balled up newspaper.

  “I wasn’t just going to sit around waiting for you to come back and make me a fire,” I teased. “Besides, I like knowing I can do it myself.”

  “But you missed me just a little?” he asked.

  “I guess,” I admitted. “It’s been a day full of surprises.”

  I settled back on the couch, but not next to him.

  “Everything you’ve done here is great,” he said. “And you somehow got my mom to come home.”

  “Your dad did that,” I said. “And it sounds like she missed us.”

  “Well, it seems like things are all as they should be,” he said. “Except one . . .”

  I didn’t really know what I wanted from William now. If he had asked me back in the summer, on our day at the beach, if I wanted to be in a relationship with him, I would have said yes. But after everything that had happened since then, my new friendship with his dad, Linda’s leaving and returning, all the things that I had accomplished with the hotel, it felt different. I wanted to see if I could make things work on my own. I had been that way in New York before graduate school. I felt proud to have escaped Iowa and I felt proud of what I had accomplished in finding my own place and getting a job at Tiffany’s and then in studying for the GMAT and getting into grad school. Those were all things that I did on my own. Nobody helped me. In school, maybe because I met Ethan on the first day and we were inseparable after that, I started to feel like it was “us” who were in school, not “me.” And I wasn’t ready for “us” again; I still wanted to be me. I wasn’t exactly sure how to explain that out loud, though.

  William scooted toward me on the couch and I scooted back.

  “What if I were to tell you that I wanted to come back here permanently?” he asked, backing away a bit.

  “I’d say that your parents would probably really appreciate that,” I said. “But what about your screenwriting dream?”

  “I can do that from here. It doesn’t really make sense for me to be in New York when everything that I love is here.”

  Tears welled up a bit in my eyes.

  “We could really be together,” he said. “And really make this place great. We could move into town to one of those little colorful bungalows that you like so much. We could get a dog of our own.�
��

  “Oh, William,” I said. “I love the idea of that. It’s perfect really. But I’m just not ready for it yet. I need to be myself for a while before I can be a girlfriend again. I need to figure out what I want. Who I am. The past few months have been exactly what I needed. But I need more time.”

  He cast his eyes down and fidgeted his hands, making little circles with his thumbs. “Oh,” he said.

  “And you should stay in New York; this is your only chance. When you have no responsibilities and I’m here taking care of things.”

  “But I’m lonely there,” he said.

  “Everyone is,” I said. “You’ll find your place. We all will. And it’s entirely likely that that place is here. For both of us. It just might not exactly be today.”

  I then stood up to give him a hug and usher him toward the door.

  * * *

  —

  I got in bed alone that night, completely happy. I chose my life; I chose my career; I chose my friends, as unexpected as they might be. I didn’t need to post a contented photo on my Instagram with the hashtag #Ichooseme. I just could feel it myself without seeing how many likes I would get on the post.

  None of what happened to me this summer was what I expected when I walked into the tasting room of Bellosguardo on that beautiful May morning, but everything that happened as a result seemed right.

  Will I one day live in a brightly colored bungalow with William and a Cavalier King Charles spaniel with a wine-inspired name? I hope so. But for now, I spend my nights alone in the cottage, my days in the tasting room office and managing the hotel. I learn something every day and I get to work with two best middle-aged friends who don’t understand the Internet. What a life.

  * * *

  —

  I woke the next morning to sunlight streaming through my window. In my happy exhaustion, I had forgotten to close the blinds. There was a lot to do at the inn, but I took a moment to appreciate the sun and the beautiful place where I found myself. As I looked out the window, our inn guests, Sean and Meg, walked by carrying a basket overflowing with flowers and pastries, a thermos of coffee, and two mugs that I recognized from the castle kitchen. They each had an arm hooked through the basket and they carried it together, smiles on their faces. As they tried to walk carefully down the hill, a croissant fell out of the basket and Tannin darted into the scene, ready to pounce. That dog did love carbs. They put down the basket and tried to get the pastry away from the dog, but he defeated them. Laughing, Sean put his arm around Meg and kissed the top of her head. She looked up into his eyes, and without speaking about it, they broke into a waltz. It was clearly one they had done before. He put his arms around her and they twirled together. He dipped her and she put her leg up in the air. They stayed frozen in the dip just long enough for a virtual photo to be snapped. Then he brought her back up, spun her one last time. A kiss. They separated, bowed to each other, laughed, and then picked up the basket again, swinging it between them. They must have been going toward the picnic area we’d set up among the grapevines. The dog trotted after them, in hope of another pastry. I smiled, stretched, and jumped out of bed, ready to face the day in my new home.