People only eat bland food in the Midwest, he’d been cautioned. And even if he wanted to introduce more eclectic cooking, the ingredients couldn’t be found locally, his colleagues had warned.
“Not true and wrong,” he’d replied. “Besides, I need some downtime.” Which was perhaps the more cogent reason for his flight to what his West Coast cohorts perceived as the outland of the world. He’d been working too hard and playing too hard. “I’ll check back with you in six months,” he’d added, knowing he was leaving competent managers in charge of his restaurants. “Consider this my long-delayed sabbatical.”
At thirty-five, he’d been in the business in one form or another for twenty years, and while wildly successful in every sense of the word, he found he wanted more or something else-or something different.
Not that he knew what the hell something different meant.
But he’d given himself six months to find out.
Two
Olivia Bell, known as Liv for obvious reasons- or at least obvious reasons to anyone who had been plagued with the teasing designation Olive Oil in grade school-lifted her booted feet up on the railing of her front porch and leaned back in her chair.
It was hotter than hell today, especially with the sun at high noon. She was dripping with sweat under her jeans and T-shirt, her fingernails were dirty as usual-no matter she’d scrubbed them after working in her vineyard-her pale hair was a riot of curls with the humidity at near record highs, and even unkempt and sweaty, she was happy, content, and really grossly self-satisfied. Sitting on the porch of her old farmhouse, surveying her vineyard that bordered a bubbling creek running through her land, she felt as though she’d found that much-lauded promised land. Or at least her own little piece of heaven, she decided, opting for a modicum of modesty in her assessment.