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main entrance to Highland Farm and Montgomery Estate Vineyard. Mia’s artwork, almost certainly. She was the only one of us to inherit Mom’s artistic talent. The place where Greg’s car destroyed part of the wall was still visible, even with the posters covering the seam between the old and new stone, though the demolished stone pillar had been completely rebuilt. Eli turned into the entrance.
    “That is an absolutely revolting idea,” I folded my arms and stared out the window.
    “It is not. I’m not talking about throwing a bunch of coffins in the back of Hector’s pickup and carting them off to a landfill or something. There are ceremonies for situations like this. We’ll find another site, maybe build a mausoleum. It’ll be tasteful.” He sounded irritated. “Mia agrees with me, babe. And don’t tell me you can’t use the money like the rest of us.”
    So much for family unity. He and Mia were going to gang up on me so it was two against one.
    A cloud of red clay dust swirled around us as we drove along Sycamore Lane, the private gravel road that led to the house and the vineyard. The name came from the magnificent two-hundred-year-old tree, which had grown up a few hundred feet from the main entrance, dividing the road like a “Y” into left and right forks. Eli came to the divide and downshifted, pausing briefly in front of the enormous tree with its soaring branches and its crepelike bark, peeling like a bad case of sunburn. It had been here as long as my family and it could easily live another three or four hundred years.
    “We’re broke, is that it?” I said. “Are you telling me we have to sell the place to pay off Leland’s debts?”
    He glanced at me as he nosed the car to the right and headed directly toward the main house. No sentimental tour for my home-coming. Had we gone left—the road was an enormous loop—we would have first passed the winery, Mosby’s Ruins, the cemetery, and a large spring-fed pond.
    “Calm down, will you? And don’t turn on the waterworks, either, Luce. I can’t take it right now. We’re not technically broke.”
    I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. “I’m not crying. And you sound like a lawyer. Just tell me yes or no. Are we broke or not?”
    “It’s complicated.”
    “Tell me. I’ve got time.”
    “No, you don’t. We’ve really got to move. We’re twenty-one minutes behind schedule. I’ll fill you in later.”
    “It wasn’t my idea to have the wake two hours after I got off the plane from France,” I said. “And you drove like a madman. You made up for a lot of lost time. We’ll be fine.”
    “We’re the family. We can’t be late.”
    He pulled the car into the curved drive in front of the house. Highland House, as it was called, was a harmonious mixture of Federal and Georgian architecture built of locally quarried stone. Not a pretentious or grand mansion, it possessed—at least to my eyes—a grace and elegance in its well-proportioned symmetry that made it seem somehow more substantial than it was. Scott Fitzgerald used to attend parties here when he came from Baltimore to visit friends in the area, and FDR dined with my grandparents the day he gave the dedication speech for the newly constructed Blue Ridge Parkway.
    When my mother was alive, she’d made frequent pilgrimages to the gardens of Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home, and to the Pavilion Gardens at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, which he’d designed. I’d often gone with her on those trips, watching while she read his Garden Book, making plans to incorporate into her own gardens the harmony and beauty Jefferson had sought to achieve. Like him, she believed botany ranked near the top of the list among the sciences, and so it had happened that every year our home had been one of the most popular ones on the annual garden tour.
    “Oh my God,” I said. “What happened?”
    I stared through the Jag’s tinted window. Everything she had created was