The Last Chance Olive Ranch

by Susan Wittig Albert

  “Good that you check for the date,” Jerry said approvingly. “But even that doesn’t always help. For instance, if it’s a use-by date, you have no idea how it was calculated. A specific harvest date is better. But there’s a new wrinkle, too. California, which produces most of the olives in the U.S., allows this year’s olives to bear next year’s date—making them look fresher than they are.”

  “No kidding?” Pete had finished constructing his sandwich and was adding some luscious-looking marinated olives to his plate. “I hadn’t heard. How are they getting by with that?”

  “They harvest the olives in the fall, same as we do here in Texas,” Jerry said. “The oil is pressed at the time of harvest, of course. But it’s stored and bottled in the spring. The date on the label is really the bottling date. Which may push other states—and European producers as well—to adopt the same practice. In the name of competition, you know. It’s a really competitive business,” he added, to me. “Cutthroat.”

  “Deceptive,” Pete growled. “Some growers will do anything to get ahead. Cut any corner. Screw standards. To hell with quality.” The words some growers had a special emphasis.

  “Damn right,” Jerry said, as if he knew who Pete was talking about.

  I didn’t. To cover the awkward gap in the conversation, I chirped brightly, “So the next time I buy California oil, I just need to remember to subtract a year from the date on the label. Right?”

  “Nah,” Pete said, as we moved forward in the line, toward the bowl of gazpacho. “You don’t have to do that. In fact, you don’t need to buy any oil at all. We’ll send you home with a liter of our estate oil, produced from the most recent harvest. And the next time you’re here, we’ll give you another one.”

  “Best in Texas,” Jerry said, nodding to a pair of carafes. One was labeled Lemon and Olive Oil, the other Balsamic Vinegar and Olive Oil. “Sofia uses it to make her dressings,” he added. “And in her gazpacho.”

  “Estate oil?” I gave my salad greens a liberal dressing of the lemon and olive oil. “What’s that?”

  “A blend of oils from several different kinds of olives,” Pete said. “We produce both a Spanish and an Italian estate oil, blended in small lots, carefully. And I do mean carefully. We can trace every single olive back to the tree that produced it.”

  Jerry laughed. “Well, not quite. But almost. Anyway, we’ll make sure that you get a nice sample of each.”

  Ahead of us in the buffet line, Ruby was filling her bowl with gazpacho. With a laugh, she asked, “Didn’t I say you’d love it here, China?” She filled another bowl and set it on the buffet for me. “Didn’t I, huh? Bet you’re sorry now that you didn’t come out with me sooner.”

  “Yes, I am,” I said truthfully, as Ruby left the buffet and headed for the table. “But I’m glad I finally managed to get here.” I picked up the bowl she had filled for me, sniffing appreciatively, and put it on my tray. I looked up and noticed that there were several bottles of wine at the end of the buffet.

  “Wow,” I said over my shoulder to Pete. “Wine with lunch. Now I’m really glad. Do you guys do this all the time, or is it a special occasion?” But Pete wasn’t there. He was following Ruby to the table.

  “A very special occasion,” a deep voice said behind me—a familiar voice that I recognized at once. I turned quickly, so fast that I lost my balance, and my napkin. A strong arm steadied me, and a man bent over and picked up my napkin off the floor.

  “Hello, China,” he said, putting the napkin back on my tray. “How long has it been? Twelve years? Fifteen?”

  No. It hadn’t been twelve years, or fifteen. More like twenty, that mad fling during the summer between our first and second year of law school. Chet Atwood and I were clerking in the Texas Attorney General’s office in Austin that summer. We’d work late, sometimes till nine or ten o’clock, then go out with a couple of other law clerks. We liked the live piano music at Donn’s Depot on West Fifth, in the old Clarksville neighborhood. The Depot had once been an early 1900s Missouri Pacific train depot. The entry area was a real railroad car and the ladies’ restroom was a real caboose. Chet and I would have a couple of glasses of wine and dance, holding each other close on the crowded floor.

  And then together, we would walk to his two-room student apartment over a garage just up the street, where we’d pour another glass of wine and lie on the bed and talk and finally, sweetly, make love. July and August was blazing hot that year, the nights were sultry, and the tiny apartment had no air conditioning. The window next to the narrow bed was open wide and Donn’s piano, dreaming with the moonlight through the trees and over the rooftops, took us where we wanted to go. The night and the music were magic for two young kids on their way somewhere, not knowing where, just clinging to whatever temporary refuge they could find in each other, and then moving on.

  But not together. I went back to class in the fall, and then on to a corporate career in criminal law. Chet—a laid-back guy with a large, soft heart—had already had enough of the constant push-push-push of law school. He wasn’t ambitious and hard-charging. He preferred to let things happen rather than make them happen. The legal profession wasn’t the right place for him, and our summer clerking job made that clear. He dropped out and disappeared.

  Well, not quite. He sent me postcards from here and there, from Provence, from Spain, from the south of Italy—going with the flow, I assumed, moving wherever it took him. But he gave me no address where I could write to him, and anyway, I wouldn’t have known what to write. I couldn’t say “Come back to me” or “Where are you? I’ll come to you.” Other people had filled my life, and other dreams and ambitions, and whatever connection Chet and I might have had was broken.

  And here he was.

  “Oh my gosh, Chet,” I babbled. “Chet Atwood. Is it really you? I mean . . . Well, golly. What a surprise! What are you doing here?”

  He had put on some weight since I’d seen him last, but he still had that relaxed, Kevin-Costner, middle-America, good-guy look. He wore jeans and a short-sleeved blue polo shirt. His face was tanned and weather-beaten, the face of a man who refused to spend his days in an office, and the lines around his mouth were more pronounced. But his brown hair was still thick and dark and his right eyebrow still lifted in a crazy quirk, and he still had a problem with beard stubble. It grew darkly along his jaw and I knew without touching him that if he rubbed his face against mine, it would be rough and sandpapery. I flushed at the recollection, for with it came a flood of memories. Warm memories. Stirring.

  Chet was watching me, his mouth crinkling into a familiar smile. I wondered if he could read my thoughts, and my flush deepened.

  But all he said was, “I came over to restock Maddie’s tasting room. I’m a part-owner of the vineyard on the other side of the river.” He stepped around the end of the table and picked up a wine bottle. In the comically exaggerated tone of a French maître d’, he said, “Madame will find that it’s difficult to pair ze wine weez ze gazpacho, but I can recommend ze Sauvignon Blanc.”

  I laughed and he slipped back into his own voice. “And this—” He held the label so I could see the drawing of a vineyard with a Tuscan-style house in the distance. The label read Last Chance Vineyard and Winery. “This is it, China.” His eyes met mine. “Our vineyard and winery. I hope you’ll come over and visit us before you leave. I would love to show it to you.”

  Our vineyard . . . Visit us. He was married? I sneaked a glance—he wasn’t wearing a ring. Some guys don’t, of course, especially if they work outside. “Sure,” I said. “I’d love to see it.”

  He pointed toward the table. “Find a seat and save the one beside it for me. I’ll get some food and join you.” He grinned. “I’ll be the one with the bottle.”

  I had to grin, too. That was what he had always said, back in those half-forgotten days when we were students together. We would be planning to take a picnic
to Zilker Park, or sail on Lake Travis with his longtime friends Jason and Andrea, or climb Mount Bonnell to watch the sunset. Chet would be the one with the bottle. And even then, he knew his wines. He made a game of it, knowing wine, but it had been a serious game. The wine would always be just right.

  All that had been a very long time ago, and we were two very different people now. But when Chet sat down beside me, poured the wine, and we began to eat and talk, it was easy and relaxed and comfortable, and the years fell away like leaves from a tree.

  We had plenty of catching up to do. He had spent a decade traveling. “Working and learning,” he said, “mostly in southern Europe, in wine country. I wanted to learn as much as I could about the business, so I latched on to anybody who was willing to teach me.”

  He had been back in the Hill Country for only five or six years, partnered with Jason, who was now married to Andrea. Hence the our and the we. Andrea had grown up on a local ranch and knew the area. She had introduced them to Boyd Butler. They purchased a hundred acres from him, Chet said, and went into the grape business.

  “Boyd Butler?” I asked. “So you bought a piece of the old Last Chance Ranch.”

  “Yep,” Chet replied. “We call ourselves the Last Chance Vineyard and Winery. Jason is the business manager. I’m responsible for the vineyard and wine production. Andrea works with both of us. We’re still a start-up and it’ll be a few years before we have a decent harvest. We have vines in production, but they’re still young. So mostly we buy grapes from local vineyards to make our wines—the one you’re drinking, for instance.”

  “Nice,” I said, tasting it again. “Very nice.”

  He nodded. “We’re learning. Like the olive business, it takes a while. By the time we start harvesting our own grapes, we’ll be expert vintners.” He went on with his story, the personal side of it. He had been married briefly, then divorced, no children. “I was too footloose to manage a long-term relationship,” he said ruefully. He quirked his eyebrow. “But you’d know about that, wouldn’t you? I sort of ran out on you, if I remember right.”

  “I don’t think either of us was ready for anything long-term back then,” I said ruefully. “I had a lot of ambition and drive. You know. Things to do. Places to go.”

  “And I didn’t have any.” He laughed. “Ambition and drive, I mean. The way I remember it, I was one lazy sonovagun.” He shook his head. “But not you. You used to scare the hell out of me, China, you were so motivated. You were fierce, you know? Ruthless.”

  “Yeah, that was me,” I admitted. I was a little uncomfortable with ruthless, but fierce certainly fit.

  “And then what?” He cocked his eyebrow at me. “You made the big time, you hung around for a while, and chucked it.” When I looked surprised, he added, “Andrea kept tabs on you, from a distance. She wrote me that you’d left your legal career and moved to a small town and opened your own business.” He twinkled. “I was married at the time, or I might have come looking for you. Might’ve tried picking up where we left off.”

  I wondered, fleetingly, what would have happened if he had. Probably nothing, I guessed. Chet and I were a summer thing. We’d been close for a while, but we always knew it was temporary. I said, “I got to the point where the career didn’t mean anything to me. I was sick of living in the city. I needed to do something else with my life. Something I could care about.”

  “And now you’ve got an herb shop in Pecan Springs. And you’re married.” It wasn’t a question. And he wasn’t looking at me.

  I nodded, busying myself with my soup. “I have my own shop, and I’m partnered with my friend Ruby in several sideline businesses. And yes, I’m married to an ex-cop, Mike McQuaid. Between us, we have two great kids: his son Brian, a freshman at UT, and Caitie, my niece, just thirteen.” I laughed a little. “Kids, cat, dog, chickens, a big house and some acreage. Kind of a found family, you might say.” At the thought of McQuaid, I felt a sudden cold in the pit of my stomach, and I shivered. I had successfully pushed the threat away for a little while, and I didn’t want to think of what might be happening.

  Chet frowned a little. “All going good back home, China?” He’d always had an almost uncanny way of reading me.

  “Mostly,” I said, trying for nonchalance. “You know how it is with real life. Ups and downs.”

  Still frowning, he touched my little finger with his little finger, a familiar, playful gesture. “Everything okay in the marriage?” he asked. Then, quickly, “Hey. If it’s none of my business, just tell me to buzz off.”

  I met his eyes, feeling the need to be truthful. “Everything in the marriage is fine. It’s just that my husband has this dicey ex-cop thing going on this weekend. It could be . . . well, dangerous. I guess I’m sort of nervous.” With an uneasy laugh, I dug into my salad. “Not that I can do anything about it. I was already scheduled to come out here, and he didn’t much like the idea of me hanging around, getting in the way.”

  Chet raised an eyebrow. “An ex-cop thing?”

  “An escaped convict who’s gunning for him.” I held up my fork. “Look. Could we talk about something else? You mentioned Boyd Butler a moment ago. Ruby tells me that he’s challenged Eliza Butler’s will. He wants to take the ranch away from Maddie.”

  His mouth tightened. “So you know about that. Well, one way or another, it looks like he might get it.” He looked at me, and the light seemed to dawn. “Hey, maybe you’re here professionally. To help Maddie.” He chuckled wryly. “Even if she asked me, I couldn’t give her any help. If you’ll recall, I left law school before I could take Curzon’s accursed course on wills and estates.” Even if she asked? I was wondering what that meant, but he was going on. “And Maddie’s lawyer—Clarence—isn’t much better equipped than I am. He’s a local guy. Knows the players very well. Clueless about the playbook.”

  “No, I’m not here professionally,” I said. “I took Curzon, but I’m no whiz on wills and estates. I’m interested, though. Maybe you can tell me. What’s the deal?”

  “Here’s how I understand it,” he said. “When Eliza’s will was probated, Boyd was surprised—incredulous is probably a better word—when he found out that he wasn’t in line to inherit the ranch. So he challenged the will. He charged that Eliza was mentally incompetent when she left her property—this ranch plus some oil leases out in Pecos County—to Maddie, who isn’t a relative. He also charged undue influence on Maddie’s part.”

  I emptied my salad bowl and pushed it away. “Alleging the usual nasty stuff?”

  “Right.” He pulled at his ear. “Of course, since then, he’s changed his tune.”

  “Changed his tune? How?”

  Chet gave me a look that I couldn’t read. “Ask Maddie. If she wants you to know, she’ll tell you. Anyway, her lawyer—good old Clarence—knew enough to ask for a jury trial. The probate jury found in her favor on both counts, and we all thought she was home free. But the judge—a friend of Boyd’s named Tinker Tyson—reversed the jury’s verdict. He found in favor of Boyd on both counts and awarded everything to his pal. The ranch, the West Texas property, everything.”

  “Reversed the jury?” I was surprised. But then, on second thought, not so much. I had read about similar happenings in Texas, where probate judges are elected in partisan elections, where their party affiliation is listed on the ballot. They frequently have no legal training. I picked up my sandwich. “His name really is Tinker Tyson?”

  Chet nodded. “He’s an old high school chum of Boyd’s. Which explains a lot, of course.”

  I understood. “The reversal was appealed, I suppose,” I said. Even good old Clarence ought to know enough to do that. “What happened to the appeal?”

  “The appellate court found a handful of legal errors and sent the ruling back ‘for judicial review.’”

  I rolled my eyes. “Back to the judge who committed the errors in the first place. The plai
ntiff’s buddy, Tinker Tyson.” The name made me want to giggle. “Clarence didn’t raise the issue of judicial misconduct?”

  “He did. He filed a complaint with the Commission on Judicial Conduct, but you know how those things go. Exactly nowhere.” He picked up his ham sandwich. “I did a little digging when this happened, China. You know, probate law is so complicated that lawyers need to take Curzon before they can even begin to read the fine print. But probate judges in Texas are political animals.” He paused to chew a mouthful. “It turns out that only a couple of dozen in the state’s two-hundred-and-fifty-some counties have any professional legal certification. The rest of them are farmers, car dealers, local politicians. They’re even more clueless than I am when it comes to probate law.”

  That would make for some humongous problems, I thought. “So what happened when Tyson did his so-called ‘review’?”

  “Not much.” Chet finished his sandwich. “He gave Maddie a survivor’s tenancy in this house and in the West Texas property, and handed Eliza’s half of the Last Chance and her share of the business to Boyd, as Eliza’s nearest and dearest.”

  “Uh-oh,” I said. The survivor’s tenancy meant that Maddie could continue to live in the house as long as she wanted, which was something. But if Ruby was right and the oil reserves were depleted, the West Texas property was essentially worthless. The award was designed to prove to the appeals court that the probate judge had seriously reconsidered his original ruling, but it wouldn’t help Maddie. And losing half of the business to Boyd would be crippling. I remembered her earlier comment about putting things on hold. She must have decided not to invest a lot of work in projects she would have to hand over to somebody else.