Tod and Buz are in Oregon working at a plywood mill. While picking up the mail in town at the post office, Tod encounters a young woman getting off the bus. She is twenty-six year old Lucia Trapani, a provincial Sicilian who has just arrived in the country for only five days. On the advice of her family, she has come to sell the land deeded to her by WWII American G.I. Alec Haymes as he died shielding her from the German artillery on July 21, 1943, when she was only nine. The property in question: the state of Oregon. She has come specifically to meet Bill Morrison and Nathaniel Hobbs to help her deal with the land sale. Morrison, the mill foreman, and Alec were like brothers, they both unofficially raised by Hobbs after their own parents died. Hobbs, never having gotten over Alec's death, has been an angry recluse ever since, speaking to no one except Morrison. Tod, Buz and Morrison, who don't have the heart to tell her not only that Alec did not own Oregon but that he owned no material assets whatsoever, have to figure out how not to burst her memories of Alec, while hoping that her presence will soften the hatred Hobbs has now had for life - especially anyone involved with the war - for seventeen years.
—Huggo