The Shortest Way Home

by Miriam Parker

  “No,” I said. Ethan did know that bread was my vice. More than ice cream or candy or wine or even French fries. I loved bread—all bread—from artisanal corn bread and focaccia to Wonder Bread. Especially Wonder Bread, actually. The way you can make it into little bread balls. The way it tastes with raspberry jam. It was the one food from my childhood that made me nostalgic and that I craved. When I was little, both of my parents worked crazy-long hours, my mom as a nurse and my dad as a truck driver. When they got home, all they would do was sleep and watch game shows on television. I remember sitting in the living room with them one night at around six o’clock, watching my dad nap on the recliner and my mom nap on the couch while I flipped through my library book, hoping someone would make me dinner, finally deciding on making myself a peanut butter and honey sandwich on Wonder Bread. Of course, after everything that happened, I would be nostalgic for those lazy days. “Well, I wouldn’t want to waste my whole life waiting for a dream to come true when I could seize it right now. Why not have your life be your dream?” I felt tears come to my eyes. All of a sudden, I felt so passionate. I did want my life to be my dream. “Remember that song ‘Working for the Weekend’? Why not work for the week?” My life in Iowa certainly was not varied and it definitely wasn’t fun. I knew that there was more out there and I went after it.

  “What about other dreams?” he asked. He put his hand over mine, probably trying to remind me of the house with the yard in Bedford where we would build a huge tree house like the one we’d seen on HGTV, so the kids could have sleepovers in it; the Tribeca apartment that I had leased, sight unseen, with a portion of my signing bonus, where we would live together when we got to New York after graduation.

  “Everything happens for a reason,” I said.

  “You know I hate that ‘fate’ nonsense,” he said. We had an ongoing debate about the concept of fate. I’d always believed in it, which annoyed him, because he was a firm atheist. It wasn’t a religious thing for me, just kind of a sense.

  “Well, I like to believe it’s true,” I said. “Don’t you think it was meant for us to meet?”

  “Not right now,” he said. “I feel like we have nothing in common right now.”

  That was a punch in the gut. I stood up. “I’m going to the bathroom. Don’t eat the crème brûlée without me.”

  * * *

  —

  Normally, we were totally in sync. We’d be judging the other diners and making up stories about people’s lives—on a regular day, we’d be inventing an entire backstory for the people at the winery, the history-obsessed dad, the son trying to escape, the overworked mother. On a regular day, we’d even be into figuring out how to fix the place. We often spent hours riffing on marketing ideas for failing businesses. We’d done it in the car on the way up: How do you help the hotel with the crooked sign and one rusty minivan in the parking lot? What draws truckers in to truck stops? Is it a mistake to have a T.J. Maxx next to a Bed Bath & Beyond in a strip mall? Is it better to start your own sandwich shop or buy a Subway franchise? It was like our business school version of I Spy. But I didn’t feel like inventing stories as I made my way back to the table.

  “What is going on with you?” I asked as I cracked the brûlée with the back of my spoon.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I started to feel worried about our future.”

  “Why?” I asked. “We’ll be in New York together. We can show each other the places we liked when we lived there before. Before we knew each other.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “We’ll both be busy working a million hours. It won’t be like grad school. And I felt something weird at that winery. Like you liked it a little too much. Besides, I know how much you hate New York.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. Although we both knew that he was right.

  We were quiet for a minute. Up until this moment, our prospects had felt pretty secure. We were both thirty, were about to finish graduate school, were about to embark on fruitful careers. Ethan was going to start a company with his two best friends from MIT. I had this amazing opportunity at Goldman. His company would be supersuccessful. I would move up at Goldman. We could live the American dream. I could have the life I dreamt of growing up—a house from the Luxury Homes and Estates section of the New York Times Magazine (which I later learned was just a real estate advertising section, but I had fallen for it, it seemed editorial to me), furniture from Town & Country, and two children who would never, ever eat Wonder Bread, unless I decided to make a from-scratch, organic modernist take on Wonder Bread and say things like “This is what Mama used to eat when she was a little girl.” It was all rolled out in front of me: the most socially acceptable life I could possibly imagine. I just needed to consent to it.

  “What were the other wineries you wanted to go to?” I asked, a little half-heartedly.

  He shrugged and handed his credit card to Reed. “I think I’m going to go back to the hotel to take a nap. Why don’t you go without me? There was that one we passed on our way back to town that you can walk to. Ravenswood?”

  I guessed he was testing me, to see what I would do. We stood up and said good-bye to Reed, and Ethan kissed me on the forehead, which felt like a more distant gesture than usual.

  “I’ll see you later,” I said. “Besides, I think I left my wallet at the winery.”

  “Ugh, Hannah.”

  He hated when I lost or broke things, which I did with regularity.

  He turned and walked back toward the hotel. I stood in front of the restaurant, watching him. Wondering if he would look back. He didn’t.

  CHAPTER 3

  As I watched Ethan cross the street, I weighed my options. I could follow him, tell him I loved him, and climb into a hotel bed with him. A king-size one with really nice cool-feeling sheets on it. We could cuddle, have comfortable relationship sex, and take a shower together after. I could do that and secure my future—prove to him that I wanted him, nothing else. Along with the Ethan Katz–life checklist would come a diamond ring, a house in Bedford, a personal trainer, and two well-rounded children with knowledge of Mandarin and musical theory and who played competitive youth soccer. But all of a sudden it all felt a bit forced to me. The plan. The checklist.

  I’ll admit that the plan was one of the reasons I had fallen for Ethan. On our second, or maybe our third, date, he’d asked me what I wanted from life. I had said something vague about how I just wanted to be happy. Besides, I had learned from dating in New York City that one had to keep one’s expectations pretty low. Even though before I moved to the city, I was sure I would have a perfect life there, events conspired to disappoint me. I had once left a hair elastic in the apartment of a guy I had been sleeping with for about two months. I wasn’t even at the subway yet on my way to work the next morning, when he texted to say that I had forgotten something and did I want him to mail it to me. “It was a hair elastic!” I screamed at my phone. But it was apparently too much for him. He never called me again after that, except on a lonely Christmas Eve about a year later. I was thrilled to tell him that I was in bed with his favorite bartender.

  But Ethan wasn’t afraid of commitment or of plans. On that same third date, when I was wishy-washy about my plan for the next hour, no less the rest of my life, he laid it all out. He had grown up in the city, but his happiest moments had been at his aunt’s home in Bedford. It was a large property with horses and dogs, a large playhouse for the kids in the yard (it sounded more like a guesthouse; it had a working refrigerator and a pantry stocked with snacks) where they had sleepovers. There was a pool table in the basement and a projection television. Ethan’s cousins had played on their high school soccer and baseball teams. They had learned to ride horses and played volleyball in the pool in the summer. They were always tan and seemed untroubled to Ethan. Bedford was his happy place. He wanted a big old house like his aunt’s, with land and maybe a do
g or two (he wasn’t sure about the horse). He planned to start a business with his best friends, who currently worked at Google, and to sell it for millions of dollars. He wanted a wife who worked but was willing to give it up for the kids. Someone would need to facilitate all of the lessons and practices, which he didn’t trust a nanny to do.

  At the time, I found this plan intoxicating. It was exactly (I told myself) what I had wanted as a child—fancy and stable, with wealthy parents who were devoted to the improvement of their children. The way I was raised was pretty much the exact opposite of Ethan’s plan. I grew up in a tiny town in Iowa called Winthrop that had a population of 750. My father died when I was eleven, and my mother did not handle it well. My main happy memories were walking to the town library with my brother, Drew, and reading the books we picked out there in the quiet privacy of a closet. All I wanted to do was grow up and get out of there.

  But the plan was also appealing after experiencing the horror show that is dating in New York. The guy who was afraid of a single hair elastic was just the tip of the iceberg. There was the guy who was dating me as well as a rich Upper East Side widow. When the widow found out about me, she had her driver take her to my building in Ditmas Park and she waited outside for me until I got home from the gym. Then, dressed in a pale pink Chanel suit while I was in my sweaty Old Navy workout gear, she came up behind me as I was unlocking the front door and threatened me, saying that if I ever talked to her boyfriend, Sloane, again, she would come back and get me. When he tried to explain the whole story to me (in secret, on a burner phone that he kept for his affairs), I told him I never wanted to talk to him or his widow again. Besides, how could someone want to date both of us? We literally had nothing in common.

  There was the nonprofit publicist, with whom I spent three hours, whose only interest was going to the gym. He wasn’t even interested in the very nonprofit that he was a publicist for. Needless to say, I didn’t return his calls. I’m sure he’s happily married by now, with 2.5 children, to a woman younger and prettier than me.

  At least the publicist had a job, though. Most of the guys I dated seemed to stay home all day to “work,” although it looked to me like they were mostly tweeting about sports; they called themselves a “life coach,” a “freelance writer,” a “drummer.” They were “creative” and “consulted” and “freelanced” (I was pretty sure all they did was look at porn), while I toiled getting coffee and making fancy manicure appointments for my boss, taking the train for an hour each way to my job as an assistant to the chief marketing officer of Tiffany’s. But, of course, I chased the freelancers down for a date and ended up paying for dinner, and then they would disappear in the middle of the night. It was all so depressing. I was sick of dating broke artistic guys who could easily find a prettier, richer woman at any time, just by opening their phone and swiping right. Many of them had multiple girlfriends at the same time, all ready to straighten their hair and meet for a drink without even a phone call. Sometimes even an emoji would do it.

  I wanted a real boyfriend who wanted to be with me, who wanted to talk on the phone or at least text words, not an eggplant emoji. And it would be nice if he also had a work ethic and a plan for the future. So, when I met Ethan—good guy, with rich parents, a history of working, no unhinged widow exes, and a true love of monogamy—I was sold.

  And up until this very day, Ethan’s plan—wedding, Bedford, babies, Mandarin classes, Suzuki violin lessons—had seemed totally reasonable, albeit a little bit staid. But now I was second-guessing everything. All of a sudden, I noticed that being with Ethan was a little boring. We never talked about anything important; we just observed other people. It was something about the winery. Everett. William. All the ideas I had for them. They were starting to eat at my brain, the way the idea of going to grad school had started to take hold in the year before I applied. I could make a difference at the winery—in a way that I wouldn’t make a difference at Goldman Sachs.

  Of course, I couldn’t discount New York. I’d be living in Manhattan with my entrepreneur boyfriend and making a handsome salary. I’d be able to pay off my grad school loans and also buy grown-up furniture and have a personal trainer. I’d be making connections that I’d use for the rest of my life. I’d be able to go for long runs along the Hudson River, go to top restaurants and plays and museums (if I ever got out of work), and I’d be there with Ethan. A real boyfriend to have brunch with and hold hands with in the park. It was crazy to give up.

  I sighed and kept walking in the direction of Bellosguardo.

  * * *

  —

  The walk did wonders to clear my head. The scent of juniper wafted from the trees. If I lived here, I told myself, I would have a purple house, a brightly colored hammock hung between two trees in the backyard. I’d have a porch swing in the front and a vegetable garden. I would make salad for dinner from the leafy greens and heirloom tomatoes I harvested daily from my yard, and I would take naps in the hammock with a dog. Because there would be a dog. A dog like Tannin, ideally. I would drink wine on the porch swing while classic jazz played inside the house and wafted out through the screened windows. I wouldn’t have someone who had huge expectations of me. Something about the plan that had felt so alluring when I met Ethan was starting to feel stifling. As it became more real, it got a little bit scarier. What if I wasn’t ready yet to settle down? I was only thirty. I wanted life to be fun! Was that too much to ask?

  I texted my brother, Drew, my lifelong confidant, who still lived in Iowa: “What do you think about Sonoma, California?”

  “Love it,” he texted back.

  “I was hoping you’d say that,” I responded. “I’m here.”

  “Enjoy it,” he wrote.

  “I will.”

  I turned down Old Winery Road, which wound around toward Bellosguardo. I crossed the bridge over the creek and dropped a stick in the water like they did in Winnie-the-Pooh, racing over to the other side to see it pass by. On the second visit, I was able to appreciate even more that the winery was a truly impressive place. The building itself looked kind of like a wine barrel, but not in a cheesy way like the commercial winery we’d been to. More like an homage. I took a mental picture, captioning it: “The first day of the rest of my life.” It was a dorky habit, one that I never admitted to doing.

  There were a few cars in the parking lot now, which made me happy. I approached the heavy wooden door, accented in iron, and pulled it open. I entered to find a young couple sitting at the end of the bar drinking full glasses of red wine, a plate of cheese and crackers in front of them. Tannin sat under their stools, looking up at them, awaiting crumbs. William was not behind the bar, but an older woman with salt-and-pepper hair wearing a rumpled black linen tunic was there instead. I wondered if it was William’s mother.

  I sat at the bar and gave her my friendliest smile, tucking my straight brown hair behind my ear.

  “Would you like to do a tasting?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  “Reserve?”

  I nodded. I already felt like an expert.

  She pulled out the paper and explained it to me in a way very similar to how William had explained it that morning. They clearly had worked on the script together.

  “But, for you, I’m going to start with a wine that’s not on this list. It’s our new Sauvignon Blanc, which we’ve won several local awards for. Generally, this area is known for Chardonnay, but we have a wide variety of grapes on this property, since it was originally planted so long ago by a Hungarian count. We just discovered the heirloom Sauvignon Blanc grapes a few years ago. It took us some time to perfect it, but we’re really happy with it.” She poured me a taste. It was perfect. Cold. Bright. Citrusy like the early notes of grapefruit juice.

  “I could drink this all day,” I said.

  “Me too,” she said, smiling. Then she started to get excited. “If you like that, there’s other thi
ngs I want you to taste; hold on one second.” She ducked into a room behind the bar and came back with two open bottles and a bowl of oyster crackers.

  “First, cleanse your palate.” She held out the crackers to me and then poured another white wine. “This is a Pinot Gris,” she said. “Also bright, but more like apple and pear than citrus.”

  I swirled, sniffed, sipped. “It’s delicious,” I said.

  “Perfect with sushi,” she said.

  “Oh!” I said. “That’s a great idea! Host a sushi night here. You could get a local young chef to make rolls live and serve companion white wines. Someone who would work for cheap and want exposure to fancy people. You could probably charge one hundred dollars a person for that!”

  “With mochi balls for dessert?”

  “Of course,” I said. “Who doesn’t love mochi balls?”

  “Oh,” she said, “you’re the girl who was here this morning with all of the good event ideas. William was telling me about you. He said you had all these ideas for how to use the dog on social media and how to get more people into the winery and the wine club. I’m Linda, by the way.”

  I blushed. “I’m Hannah. I got a little excited this morning.”

  “So did I,” she said. “I mean, after you left. We really need the help of someone like you. But William said you were moving to New York?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m graduating from Haas and I have a job at Goldman Sachs working in finance, but I’ve always loved marketing.”

  “That sounds like a nice life you’ve got set up for yourself,” she said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s a lot nicer here than in New York.”

  “It sounds like you have a good job, though,” Linda said.

  “It does sound good,” I said. “But sometimes things sound better than they are. I mean, I feel lucky to have the opportunity. I’m going to make a lot of money and I’ll be able to pay off my loans . . . Oh my God, am I oversharing! I don’t even know you. I’m sorry . . . I shouldn’t be . . .”