“We sell wine all over the world, but it’s all from one core root that my great-great-great-great grandfather brought from an estate in eastern Italy. He worked as an assistant groundskeeper of the Barone estate, and during Italy’s first War of Independence, in 1849, the estate was captured and burned. Alfonzo escaped with a graft of the vine root. He gave it to his wife, Gemma, for safekeeping while he was conscripted into the military. Alfonzo served under the Grand Duchy of Tuscany and was discharged with honors. The Duchy gave him this plot of land as a reward. He planted his first vineyard from the graft and…the rest is history.”

“The rest is heaven,” RJ said as they stopped in the back courtyard.

A cool, inviting blue pool spanned the yard, tall cypress trees cordoning it and beyond it, the striking view of the pastoral landscape turned the world at once immense and calm.

It reminded her of her family’s home in Montana. Maybe not as much history, but still, a part of the land, the landscape of time. A legacy upon the earth.

It stirred something deep inside her that she couldn’t name.

“Oh!”

The cry came from an older woman as she dodged Hana and the kitty. Late sixties, perhaps, with silvery hair piled behind her head. Lean, and dressed in a pair of jeans, a floral blouse, she carried a watering pitcher, wore a pair of worn, dirty fabric gardening gloves, and matching tennis shoes.

“Tssk. Tssk,” Hana said, and the sound nudged something inside RJ. A memory. She couldn’t wrap her fingers around it.

“Mamma Tessa,” Ziggy said and approached the woman, speaking in Italian.

Hana chased the kitty under the shade of a portico and scooped it up around the belly. Nuzzled her face into the gray fur.

For a second RJ was a seven-year-old girl chasing cats on her family’s ranch, running into the cool of the barn.

“This is RJ,” Ziggy said, bringing the woman over.

“RJ, this is my Mamma, Tessa.”

The woman had removed her gloves and now pulled RJ close and kissed her on each cheek. “Benvenuto.” She had Ziggy’s aquiline nose, high cheekbones, her full lips, but green eyes. “Are you hungry?”

And that’s how RJ found herself, an hour later, sitting at the long, rough-hewn table with Tessa and Ziggy’s father, Santini, under the lights of the portico eating Tuscan fish stew, with tomatoes, clams, anchovies, halibut, shrimp and a host of fresh herbs she’d watched Tessa cut from pots. A half-cut loaf of crusty Italian bread and fresh cheese sat on a board in the middle of the table.