“I’ll meet with whoever you like,” he said. “I’m so glad you’re here.”
“I’ll do some research,” I said.
“Good,” he said.
I helped him toward the stairs in the cellar and he slowly ascended back into the house. We found ourselves right in the dining room. The door to the cellar was hidden in the wall, covered in wallpaper and moldings.
“I never would have known this was there,” I said. “How cool.”
“This house has lots of secrets,” he said.
“I’ll be sure to put that in the advertisement for the hotel,” I said.
“No ghosts, though,” he said.
“Selma!” I yelled. “We’re back.” She came quickly from the kitchen.
She said immediately, “You must rest, Mr. Everett.”
“I find that hard to believe,” I said.
“What?” he asked.
“No ghosts,” I said.
“Maybe one or two,” he said. “But they’re benevolent.”
I nodded. Who didn’t want to sleep and eat in a house filled with benevolent ghosts?
CHAPTER 23
I finally got back to the tasting room, which had mercifully been cleaned and reset by someone. It must have been a cleaning service. I had to thank Celeste for that. She did an incredible job managing all of those details so that I didn’t have to think about them. I unlocked the front door and found Ethan sitting with his back to the door, book on his knees.
“Hi,” I said.
“Where have you been?” he asked.
“It’s been a long morning,” I said.
“I’ll say,” he said, looking at his watch. “It’s almost one and I think I have a sunburn.”
I touched his forehead and pulled my finger away. It was a little pink, but not so bad.
“I think you’ll survive,” I said. “Want to come in and have a glass of wine?”
He nodded and pushed himself up from the ground.
“Did anyone else come by while you were waiting?”
“A few cars. I told them I was waiting for you to open—you were cleaning up after the party—so they said they’d come back.”
“I hope they do,” I said. “I should have been here to open earlier . . . but we’re a little short staffed.”
He shrugged and followed me into the cool darkness of the tasting room. “It is nice here,” he said.
“I know,” I said.
“And you have a great shower,” he said.
“Amazing, right? Someone here has remarkable taste in bathroom fixtures. You should see the ones in the house.”
“You’ve been in the bathrooms of the house?”
“I was evaluating the rooms for their next business venture.”
“And that is?”
“An inn! Isn’t that brilliant?”
“What do you know about running a hotel?” he asked. He sat at the bar and I went behind it and opened a bottle of Cabernet Franc.
“You’ll like this,” I said. “It’s light and spicy.”
He swirled it around in his glass and tasted. “Nice,” he said.
“I resent that you don’t think I can learn how to run a hotel,” I said. “You don’t believe in me. You never have. You say you do, but what you really want is for me to fit into your vision of who you want me to be, not who I actually am.”
“I do believe in you,” he said.
“Well, you don’t show it very well.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I tried.” There were tears in his eyes.
“Me too,” I said. “I’m sorry I’m not the person you want.”
“You are . . . ,” he started to say.
I put my hand on his arm. “I’m not,” I said. “I might resemble her somewhat, and maybe when we met, I was closer to being her. But I just don’t think I am anymore. But I’m sure she’s out there somewhere.”
He sighed. I could see tears forming in his eyes. But if he really disagreed, he would be fighting more. “When will I see you again?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I think I’m going to stay up here. See how it goes. Or something.” I hadn’t actually thought of this idea until it came out of my mouth, but as I said it, it seemed perfect. This was where I belonged right now.
“What about our stuff that’s in storage?”
“I don’t really have a lot,” I said. “I guess some clothes. Some books. I can get them whenever. Or never. I don’t know. We can abandon the storage unit and send the key to Storage Wars.”
“I don’t think they’d really find anything of value,” he said.
“Will you ever come back to California?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Everything I know is back in New York. Except you.”
“You better go back, then,” I said.
“Right,” he said.
I didn’t really know what to say, because this really did feel like an ending. “It’s all going to be okay,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “I do love you, Hannah, even now.”
I came around the bar and gave him a long hug that did actually bring a few tears to my eyes. He had, after all, cared about me. He had come all the way back here to come to my party. But it wasn’t enough.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Me too,” he said.
I think we were probably sorry for different things, but after that, he turned and walked away. He didn’t look back to check if I was watching him leave. But I was.
* * *
—
Later that day, he called me from the airport. He clearly was hiding in a bathroom stall. I could hear the waver in his voice. “Are you sure?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Me either,” he said.
“I know I really am sorry, though,” I said. “I wish I felt differently.”
“Me too,” he said. “What do we do next?”
“I don’t know that either,” I said, but I was getting more sure that my next step was to stay right here.
PART III
Dessert
Warm chocolate brownie, served with sea salt caramel ice cream and cacao chips
Pairing
Buena Vista, Syrah Port, 2008
(Sonoma, California)
Deep berry and chocolate flavors
CHAPTER 24
The summer had flown by, and by the September harvest we had gotten five of the ten bedrooms of the house ready to rent. We’d updated the mattresses and the Wi-Fi, and Celeste had found us a photographer. I’d put together a website and also figured out how to post the rooms on Airbnb. I got Rory, the sous chef from the party, to agree to come and cook breakfast on the days that we had guests. I had originally asked Annie, but she said she was too busy. Rory, naturally, was grumpy about it and complained that it would cut into his surfing, but I told him life was long and if it turned into a real job he’d be able to have all his afternoons and evenings off, which was unheard of for a chef. He agreed.
While we were getting the house ready, lots of business things had happened too. At Everett’s request and really because I was kind of in over my head, I hired a distributor. Our team was doing too good of a job and the demand for our wines was higher than we could fulfill. It turned out that having a distributor was a blessing and a curse. I spent the evenings with Everett at the kitchen table looking at the orders, managing inventory, looking at our database of what we had bottled and stored (another thing I had had to create after we signed the distribution papers) and figuring out what we reasonably could give them to sell. It was also important for us to keep the tasting room open, although I had had to hire someone to staff it because getting the hotel ready meant that my days were erratic at best.
Things were growing and thus becoming t
otally overwhelming. I regularly posted pictures of piles of paper on Instagram with captions that read, “Who knew running a winery required so much paper?” and pictures of boxes of wine captioned, “More wine out the door today! Order your Sancerre before we run out.” Poor Tannin’s feed was severely neglected. I barely talked to William. He would call, I would show him what was going on in the hotel and the winery via FaceTime, and then we would generally run out of topics. A silence would fall over the call and we would find an excuse to hang up. I tried not to overanalyze it, but it did weigh on me.
* * *
—
And then it happened. In late September, I got a little ping on my phone. “Request to Book from Sean.” It was late in the afternoon. I had spent the entire day in the wine cellar reconciling my database with what was actually there—for some reason I couldn’t keep it accurate. I wondered how Linda did it. I was sitting by myself in the cottage, reading A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley—she was whom I read when I wanted both to feel nostalgic for home and also to be kindly reminded that I didn’t belong there—and Sean’s request popped up. I grabbed my phone and opened it. Sean and his wife, Meg, wanted to book the master suite for the Harvest Festival in early October. Sean described them as wine enthusiasts from Denver who had always dreamt of attending the festival and they found the suite on Airbnb and were interested in it. I squealed, dropped my book, and ran up to the main house. Everett was sitting on one of the brocade settees in the living room working on a crossword puzzle. I had forced him to hire a housekeeper and remove the white sheets from all of the beautiful living room furnishings. It turned out that they were surprisingly comfortable and now Everett spent more time downstairs than in his sitting room upstairs.
“Everett, Everett!” I yelled. I knew I wasn’t supposed to get him excited, but I couldn’t help it.
“What is it?” he asked. He was used to my excitement at this point and generally didn’t react to it.
“We have our first booking!” I exclaimed, brandishing my phone in his direction.
“What am I looking at?” he asked.
“It’s a message from people named Sean and Meg. They want to stay here during the Harvest Festival!”
“Well then,” he said. “That’s something.”
“It’s everything!” I said. “I’ll call Rory and Celeste and Marta the house cleaner, and get everything ready!”
Everett nodded and went back to his crossword.
“Everett,” I said. “Are you okay? Isn’t this exciting?”
“It is,” he said. “But it’s a bit strange. People coming to live in my house.”
I sank down into the chair next to him. “Oh,” I said. “Do you want me to tell them not to come?”
“There’s just been a lot of change around here,” he said.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“I’m just a little blue,” he said. “It used to be a mom-and-pop operation, but now mom is gone and pop is kind of sidelined. And William . . .”
“Do you want me to call him and see if he can come back?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t want to bother anyone.”
“You’re the most important part of all of this,” I said. “You’re the brains behind everything!”
“I’m just an old man,” he said.
I was so sad that Everett was feeling out of the loop. I’d really come to love him in the months after his accident and since Linda left. We’d spent a lot of quality time together and he was wrong that he wasn’t important. He was the linchpin for everything. He knew everything about the winery and I consulted him daily on all the questions and problems that came up. He always knew the answers.
“You are the only reason that any of this can happen,” I said. “You’re just not comfortable with your new role as CEO. You sit in the corner office, or the corner living room in this scenario, and tell all of us peons what to do.”
“CEO?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “That’s exactly who you are. I mean, you only have, like, three employees, but that is what you’re doing here now.”
“Well, really I just do the crossword and taste wine.”
“That’s an understatement,” I said.
“Well then,” he said. “If that’s true, we should celebrate. Let’s make some steaks for dinner, and remember that 1985 Bordeaux? Tonight is the night we should drink it. And we should call William together and tell him all the good news.”
Hearing William’s name was like a shot of adrenaline. I had been too busy to think about him too much, although I did occasionally check his Instagram and his most recent Facebook friend adds (late at night only) for clues to any girlfriends he might have. Our conversations had been stilted and we hadn’t talked much, other than sending a few friendly texts back and forth. I would occasionally send him a photo of Tannin. It seemed right to call him to tell him this news.
“I love that idea,” I said. “I’ll go talk to Selma. You stay here and act like the boss that you are.”
* * *
—
Two hours later, we were sitting outside at the picnic table, with steaks and mashed potatoes in front of us. Everett had gone down to the cellar to get the bottle. He’d opened it an hour earlier to let it breathe, and then we decanted it into a glass pitcher, just to open it up a little. He ceremoniously put the pitcher and the bottle between us on the table.
“This wine is from the past, but we’re drinking it to celebrate the future,” Everett said as he poured it into our glasses. We clinked and he closed his eyes and sniffed. “Honeysuckle. Smoke. Cedar. Cassis.” He tasted, thought. “Blackberries. Wow.”
I sniffed and tasted. I could also taste blackberries, but it also tasted a little like freshly cut grass. Not in a bad way. And not that I had ever had grass. I didn’t know if I should say that. Then I decided that I didn’t care. “I kind of taste grass, but clippings.”
“That might be a scent, but yes.” He sniffed again. “Grass. Maybe moss. And there’s an herbal taste. Thyme, I think. It’s very good.” He cut a piece of steak, chewed, and then tasted the wine again. “Even better,” he said. “It’s definitely a food wine. And on the palette, it exceeds the nose, which is so rare.”
“Thank you for sharing this with me,” I said. “It is really incredible.”
“Oh! We should call William.” He pulled his phone from the belt clip he kept it on and handed it to me. “Do the thing where we can see him.”
I looked at Everett’s contacts; all he had were Linda, William, Felipe, me, and Nurse Selma. I wondered if she had programmed in her number herself. I felt badly for him, that he didn’t have a wider network. But then I realized that I didn’t really either. The hotel would be good for both of us. I dialed William and went around the table to sit next to Everett. I propped the phone against the bottle of Châteaux Margaux. William answered.
“Hi, son!” Everett said.
“Hi, guys,” William said. He had about two days of stubble and his hair was too long. It was kind of flying around his head because he was outside, but it was hard to tell where he was because it was dark. A streetlight above him illuminated his face in a halo.
“Where are you?” I asked.
“Battery Park,” he said. “It’s so gorgeous down here. I come down to watch the sun set.”
“Looks like you missed it,” Everett said jokingly.
“I guess I just kept sitting here after,” he said. “I’ve just been listening to people talk and writing down their dialogue.”
“How’s it going?” Everett asked. “Have you started the new semester yet?”
“Yes,” William said. “So far, so good.”
“We have our first hotel booking,” I said.
“Wow,” William said.
“Early October,” I said.
He lo
oked a little bit sad at that news.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“It’ll just be weird,” he said. “Having people stay in the house. And with Mom not being there . . .”
“I know, I know. But we’re putting them in the rooms we don’t use,” Everett said.
“Still,” William said.
“And we uncovered the living room furniture and you wouldn’t believe how comfortable it is!” Everett said.
“Oh, I know that,” William said. “I used to try to take naps there when I was a kid, but Mom would always find me under the white sheets.”
“That’s cute,” I said. Then I looked over at Everett to see if that story made him nostalgic. But he didn’t betray any emotion.
“I know it’s asking a lot,” Everett said. “But I’d love it if you came back for the first guests. Just so you see that it’s okay.”
“I’ll think about it,” William said.
“Thanks,” Everett said.
“It would be nice to see you,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “It would.” And then: “Well, I better go.”
I held up my glass to the phone and clinked it onto the phone so that William could see. “Think of it as a glass half-full, rather than a glass half-empty,” I said.
“I’ll try,” William said.
“Bye,” we said together. William clicked off his phone and I set Everett’s down on the table.
“I hope he comes,” he said after a long silence. “It’s quiet around here.”
“It won’t be quiet for long,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “But, you know . . .”
I did. Everett was allowed only one glass of wine, so when Nurse Selma helped him up to his room to go to sleep, he insisted that I take the rest of the Bordeaux back to the cottage with me. “And finish it tonight!” he said.
The Shortest Way Home Page 25