The funeral was small, just as Nicholas would have wanted. The cemetery sits on a low hillside outside town, overlooking our orchards; the spring blossoms were just beginning to show. I stood between my children as they lowered him into the ground, Brandon’s arms stiff around my shoulders, Melissa openly weeping into a monogrammed handkerchief I’d never seen before.
“He’s at peace now,” the pastor said.
And I wondered if that was true, or just something people say when someone dies after long suffering. Nicholas and I weren’t religious, but we’d maintained the social convention of occasional church attendance—Easter, Christmas, the odd potluck—enough that Pastor Williams knew to focus on Nicholas’s love for the land rather than any heavenly reward.
What I remember most about that day was the silence afterward. The house echoed with it as neighbors dropped off casseroles and spoke in hushed tones about Nicholas’s kindness, his integrity, how he’d helped Mr. Peterson save his dairy farm during the recession or employed the Wilson boys when they needed summer work. Nobody mentioned how he’d built our business from nothing while raising two children who seemed to have inherited none of his values.
“I made up the guest rooms,” I told Brandon and Melissa that evening as the last visitors left. “I thought we could spend tomorrow going through some of your father’s things together.”
“About that, Mom,” Brandon said, setting down his whiskey glass with a precision that reminded me of his father. “Melissa and I have been talking, and we think it’s best if we settle things quickly. We both need to get back.”
“Settle things?” I asked.
“The estate,” Melissa clarified, scrolling through her phone. “The house, the business. Brandon and I need to figure out the next steps.”
I’d expected grief from my children—maybe some reminiscing about their father. What I got instead was a boardroom meeting. Brandon opened his laptop on the dining table where we’d celebrated birthdays, graduations, and departures.
“Dad spoke to me about this last year,” he said, not meeting my eyes. “He was worried about you managing a loan. The business needs modernization, investment. The house is too much for someone your age.”
“My age,” I repeated, the words tasting bitter. “I’ve managed this orchard alongside your father for forty years.”
“And you’ve done wonderfully,” Melissa said in the same voice she used when selling overpriced vitamins to desperate women. “But it’s time to think about your future, Mom. A retirement community would give you friends. Activities.”
“I have friends,” I said. “I have activities.” My voice sounded distant even to my own ears. “This is my home.”
“It’s all of our home,” Brandon corrected. “And Dad left the business to Melissa and me in the will. He wanted us to take care of you, but he knew the business needed younger management.”
I stared at my son, this stranger in expensive clothes, who thought he knew anything about the earth that had fed him, the trees his father had nursed through drought and blight and frost.
“Show me the will.”
He slid a document across the table. Not our family lawyer’s letterhead, but something printed on Brandon’s corporate stationery. Nicholas’s signature looked wrong somehow—too perfect, too steady for a man whose hands had trembled with pain for months.
“You had him sign this while he was on morphine.”
The rage that rose in me then was something primal, something I hadn’t felt since I watched a fox try to steal into our chicken coop when the children were small. I’d chased it off with a broom and the kind of fury that comes from protecting what’s yours.
“He was lucid,” Brandon insisted. “He wanted us to have a fresh start with the business. There’s a developer interested in the land.”
“Developer for a luxury housing community,” Melissa explained, her eyes bright with the prospect of money. “They’ll pay seven million. Mom, we can all start fresh.”
