Melissa arrived three days later, with six suitcases and the scent of costly failure. Five welfare projects in eight years. Each one funded with her father’s money. Each one abandoned when it required real work. But she hugged Nicholas with genuine tears and slept by his bedside the night before he died, which is why I still struggle to understand what happened next.
The funeral was simple, just as Nicholas would have wanted. The cemetery sits on a small hill on the outskirts of town, overlooking our orchards; the first spring flowers were just beginning to bloom. I stood between my children as they lowered him into the ground, Brandon’s stiff arms around my shoulders, and Melissa weeping uncontrollably with an embroidered handkerchief I’d never seen before.
“Now he rests in peace,” the pastor said.
And I wondered if that was true, or just something people say when someone dies after a long period of suffering. Nicholas and I weren’t religious, but we had kept up the habit of attending church occasionally—at Easter, Christmas, the odd potluck—enough for Pastor Williams to know that he should focus on Nicholas’s love for the earth rather than any heavenly reward.
What I remember most about that day was the silence that followed. The house echoed with him as neighbors dropped off food and spoke in hushed tones about Nicholas’s kindness, his integrity, how he had helped Mr. Peterson save his dairy farm during the recession, or how he had given the Wilson boys work when they needed summer jobs. No one mentioned how he had built our business from the ground up while raising two sons who seemed to have inherited none of his values.
“I’ve prepared the guest rooms,” I told Brandon and Melissa that evening, as the last visitors were leaving. “I thought we could go through some of your father’s things together tomorrow.”
“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 sort things out quickly. We both need to get back.”
“Settle things?” I asked. “The inheritance,” Melissa clarified, checking her phone. “The house, the business.”
Brandon and I need to define the next steps.
I expected my children to express their sadness, perhaps to remember their father. Instead, I found myself in a work meeting. Brandon opened his laptop on the dining room table, where we had celebrated birthdays, graduations, and farewells.
“Dad told me about this last year,” he said, without looking me in the eye. “He was worried you wouldn’t be able to manage a loan. The business needs to modernize and invest. The house is too expensive for someone your age.”
—My age—I repeated, with a bitter taste in my mouth—. I have managed this orchard with your father for forty years.
