Chapter 2

The night before the meeting, Amos did not sleep.

He lay in the small house at the edge of the property — the one where his great-aunt Martha had lived, the one the family had always called "the sharp-roof house" because of its steep pitch — with the probate order on the nightstand beside him, in its envelope, the flap unsealed. He had spent the evening at the kitchen table, an old oak thing with one leg shorter than the others, reading the order through again by the yellow light of the gooseneck lamp, tracing his finger over the parcel number, checking it against the county assessor's map he kept in the drawer.

Larkspur Vineyard. APN 72-148-903. Forty-seven acres. Separate parcel line for the old barn, the crush pad, the tasting room, and the house he was lying in.

The grantee line: AMOS THOMAS PRYOR.

He knew the words by heart. He had read them so many times they had worn a groove in his brain, and still he read them again, because a part of him did not believe them.

In the morning he rose before the sun, pulled on his work jacket over a fresh grey henley, and walked the rows. The vines were heavy with fruit, the Zinfandel clusters tight and dark, the Barbera just beginning to show color. He ran his hand over one cluster, feeling the weight of the season, the work of every season before it pressing down into the grapes.

He had tended these vines for twenty-seven years. He had pruned them in February, when the canes were bare and the mist sat in the hollows. He had watered them through the dry months, dragged the hoses down every row, walked every line of drip tape and every emitter. He had picked with his hands and his back when the picking crews didn't show, had driven the truck to the fruit buyers when the crush tank was full, had stood at the fermentation and watched the juice darken.

None of it had been his. Not legally. Not on paper.

His great-aunt Martha had owned Larkspur. She had been the one who taught him the vines, who had taken him into the rows when he was ten and shown him how to read the growth — the old wood from the new, the bud break that meant the season had turned. She had never had children of her own, and through the years she had said, once, only once, with her hand on his shoulder: "This place goes to the one who tends it, Amos. Not the one who talks about it."