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drove in convoy back to the Wyatt Ranch for the carefully prepared luncheon that Olivia, Minerva, and their neighbors had been working on for days before the wedding.
    As soon as they got home, Olivia flew around the kitchen instructing ranch hands to carry trays and platters to the waiting tables outside. Their wives had been hired on to help serve and clean up afterward, and the tables laden with food seemed to stretch on forever, turkeys and capons, roast beef and ribs and hams, black-eyed peas and sweet potatoes, vegetables and salads, aspics and deviled eggs, and cookies and sweets and fruit pies and a huge white wedding cake set up on its own table. It looked like enough food for an army, as Tad helped the men to open the wine, and Tom stood grinning at his bride, with Boyd smiling shyly beside them. Boyd was a good-looking boy with an open heart and kind eyes, and he had always been fond of the Wyatts. His sister, Ginny, had gone to school with Becky, and he remembered Jared and Crystal when they were babies, although he was scarcely older than they were. But at twenty-two, with four years of war under his belt, he felt a lifetime older.
    “Well, Tom, you did it. How does it feel to be a married man?” Boyd Webster grinned broadly at his friend,as Tom looked around him with unconcealled pleasure. Marrying into the Wyatt family had been a step up in the world for Tom Parker. He was looking forward to living on the ranch and sharing in its comfortable profits, if not directly, at least in life-style. Tad had been grooming him for months, explaining to him about the corn and the cattle and the vineyards. The walnuts were the least profitable venture on the ranch, but even that was no small operation. And in walnut season, everyone on the ranch lent a hand, until their fingers were stained from picking and shelling the walnuts. For the first few months, though, Tom was going to be helping his father-in-law with the vineyards.
    “Yeah, I’ll bet you will,” one of Tom’s friends teased him over plates heaped with ham and turkey, “wine-tasting, isn’t that what they call it, Tom?” The groom laughed happily, his eyes a little too bright, as Becky giggled in the center of a group of the girls she had grown up with. Most of them were married now too. With the war finally over, and the boys coming home just as the girls finished high school, there had been dozens of weddings in the valley in the past year, and some of them had already had babies. And they were already teasing Becky now about getting pregnant. “It won’t be long, Becky Wyatt … just you wait … another month or two, and you’ll be expecting!” The girls giggled as cars and pickup trucks continued to drive up, and their neighbors arrived, dressed in their Sunday best, reprimanding their children, admonishing them to behave, and not tear their clothes running wild with their friends around the tables. Within an hour, there were two hundred well-wishers crowded along the long tables of food, and half as many children, small ones standing close to their mothers’ legs, afraid to stray too far, babes in arms, a few little boys carried about on their fathers’ shoulders, and a slightdistance away from the carefully laid tables, a huge crowd of children running and playing tag, with their parents’ words of caution instantly forgotten. The boys were chasing each other around the trees, as several of the more adventurous ones climbed them, and the girls stood in large groups giggling and talking and laughing, some of them taking turns on the swings Tad had built years before for his own children. They joined their elders briefly from time to time, but on the whole each group was content to ignore the other, the parents assumed that the children were safe nearby, and the children were content that their parents were having too much fun to concern themselves about what their offspring were up to.
    And as always, Crystal stood on the fringe of the