Last year we had the wettest March and April ever, everyone said so, more than 20 inches. And of course it was at the worst possible time, just when the buds were setting, so the crop was a terrible loss.

Oh, sure, that made a lot of sense. Pele's miffed because this sweet young thing made off with an ounce and a half of lava, so she dumps two feet of rain on her father's cabbages and rutabagas, and on everybody else's rutabagas too.

We didn't realize it then, but that was only the start of our troubles. At harvest time, the pulper brake down and one of the workers got his hand caught in the gears while he was trying to fix it, and he had to be rushed to the hospital in Papeete but he…

Brenda frowned. Pulper? Papeete? She turned abruptly to the last page of the letter, to the signature.

"I don't believe it,” she said aloud. “Therese."

Mrs. Laney glanced up from the triple-taped container she had been trying unsuccessfully to breach.

Brenda raised the letter. “Unbelievable. This is from my cousin."

Mrs. Laney's plucked eyebrows rose. Her half-moon glasses slid farther down her nose. “Really? Your own personal cousin?"

Yes her own personal cousin. Therese, whose mother was Aunt Celine, Brenda's mother's older sister. Therese, whose father, the bigger-than-life, transplanted American Nick Druett, owned not a cabbage farm but a thriving Tahitian coffee plantation, two thousand prosperous acres carved out of the jungly flanks of Mt. Iviroa, twenty-five miles south of Papeete and three thousand miles southeast of Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.

Brenda bent to the letter again.

…but he lost two fingers anyway and had to be made a supervisor. Next, the new drying furnace started a fire and ruined 75 bags of beans that we were processing for the other farmers, and we had to pay them thousands of dollars as a result. Then the brand-new sorting machine broke down three times this year alone, and even though there was a warranty it took at least two weeks to get it fixed every time, which meant we had to hire a whole lot of extra people to do the work. And I can't tell you how many times the computers have acted funny. My husband says it's like there's a ghost in the system.