Pride of Barbados (Coastal Fury Book 2) by Matt Lincoln

Author:Matt Lincoln [Lincoln, Matt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-07-22T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 24

The rest of the day freed up after that briefing. Even though the thing with Alvin Wright didn’t sit well with me, I had to let it go for the time being. There wasn’t anything I could do about it until we were on Barbados, so I tried working on the stack of paper waiting on my desk. My head wasn’t in it, but I wasn’t ready to return to the Mariah Jean and my guests.

I kept thinking about Gramps. He would’ve been over the moon, as he loved to say, about those coins. But would he have sold them? I needed to think and to think, I needed to take the coins to Gramps.

I fetched the coins’ box from the vault and headed out on the hour drive to the family homestead inland. My great-grandparents bought the property in cash not long before the Great Depression. They lost most everything else, but they held onto that land and built a life out of it.

When Gramps was a child, he climbed the orange trees along with hired hands. He inherited the orchard and house, married Mariah Jean, and raised my mother there. A dry-season wildfire devastated the property in 1971. He rebuilt, but smaller. My mom was their only child, and they didn’t need a large home like his parents had built. She died when I was little, so the two-bedroom home was passed down to me.

Nearly an hour after picking up the coins, I turned off the main road and onto the slightly overgrown driveway of my family’s homestead. Even though I tried to get out to the place once a month, I didn’t always make it, so the driveway and other areas of the property had a tendency to get covered in greenery. The Florida ecosystem had a way of taking back what humans didn’t maintain.

At the end of the long drive, I parked under the carport, took the box out, and headed over to a massive live oak that marked the edge of the orchard. The oak’s canopy now reached over the small Lancaster burial plot, a fitting tribute to a close-knit family.

My grandparents were buried next to each other. A romantic until the end, Gramps had a rose-quartz stone commissioned after Grandma passed. Two hearts intertwined, and their names were engraved more in the style of a wedding invitation than a memorial.

Tobias Jacoby Lancaster and Mariah Jean Lathem Lancaster met under a tree in 1948 and forever dedicated their hearts to one another. Their love now continues for eternity.

Someone cut the grass recently and refreshed the ever-present silk bouquet, which made me smile. The neighbors, Hank and Mallory DeVries, often brought their young grandchildren to pick oranges. Hank drove them in the cab of his tractor with the grass cutting attachment, and Mallory always followed in the car. It was an arrangement I had with a handful of people. Feel free to take oranges to keep or sell, and help keep the property from growing completely over.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.