The Long Shot

This time, Elizabeth had been left with a distaste in her mouth. She was feeling fairly confident in my deliberate amnesia and there was nothing better than that. In fact, she believed wholeheartedly that there was nothing more thrilling or intoxicating or irreverent than losing an interest in the past.

He was a winemaker and that had made him all the more exciting. Not because he was surrounded by the most beautiful grapes she had ever seen--or tasted, for that matter. Not because he had a beautiful house upon hundreds of acres in the Tuscan countryside. But mainly because he seemed very much to enjoy his solitude.

He lived alone, had nothing he was accountable to--or for, for that matter. He was a homebodied vagabond, if there was such a thing. She watched him from afar on most days of the week. He walked the fields, read his newspaper in Italian, let the haunts of Billy Holiday and Duke Ellington waft through the vineyard. She wondered why he did that and imagined that it must have been his way of having company.

The thunder rolled in with the clouds every evening just after six. That's when he would turn his porch lights on and rest his body out on the hunter green Adirondack chair. She had the sinking sensation that this day was different--that he finally knew she was there, watching from out in the distance. But he had nothing to say about the matter. And for the first time, neither did she.

It was in that moment that she smiled. Beamed actually. She had nothing to offer a man so set in his ways. This she knew. Then on Tuesday, she did not show up for the end of his work day. It had all been romanticized for the wrong reasons.

That week had been a magnificent blur and she knew he would stay there, alone, and likely content. Tomorrow she would go about her own manifest destiny with the sudden reassurance that the world was conspiring in her favor.