When her husband had been alive the two of them had worked it and sold their vegetables at a farm stand, getting by in the good years, scrambling in the bad ones. My father had bought his vegetables there when I was a boy, and Amelia had delighted me with small, surprising gifts such as a seemingly normal apple that broke in two in my hands to reveal an apricot instead of a core, and within the apricot, where the pit had been, a strawberry. Her humor was the witty kind that had delighted both me and my father. My father had liked the Muletos and had made a practice of taking fish by their house when he’d had luck with the blues or bass. Ray Muleto, like every Azorian I’ve ever known, and there are a lot of them and their children on the Vineyard, loved fish. His farm kept him too busy to catch them himself, so he was particularly happy to get them when they came his way. In exchange, he would give my father wine that he’d made. It was strong, red stuff. “Vigorous,” my father had called it.
