For several minutes I sat at Richard’s table and listened to the refrigerator hum and the distant sound of one of the vineyard trucks starting beyond the barn. Outside, the morning was clear and warm, the kind of August morning that makes you understand why people spend their lives growing things.
The silence in the house did not feel lonely.
It felt clean.
I finished my coffee. Then I carried my cup to the sink and rinsed it and set it on the rack and went into the study and opened my laptop.
The pending payments were all there in the account interface. Caterer. Florist. Quartet. Tent company. Rental service. Linen supplier. Several smaller vendors. All scheduled to process at noon.
I looked at each one.
Then I picked up my phone and called Ben.
Ben Okafor had managed this property for sixteen years. He had come to us when he was twenty-eight, fresh from an agricultural program in Davis, with opinions about drainage and cover crops that Richard had initially challenged and ultimately adopted. After Richard died, Ben had become the person who
kept the operation running during the years when I was learning how to manage grief and an eighty-acre vineyard simultaneously. He did not confuse the two jobs but he understood that they were happening at the same time.
He answered on the second ring.
