the will

 Augustus J. Powers had been a force in the American west since before World War II but he’d seen the writing on the wall. Divesting his interests in copper and silver mines in the early 80’s he had sunk the proceeds into land. Not just any land. There was the ten acre estate in Southampton, the huge ranch in Santa Ynez, California and the six story Manhattan brownstone on 54th street here in New York City. Good properties all and his grandson Tom couldn’t help but feel disappointed when at the reading of the old man’s will, they had gone, one by one, to his three older sisters. Not that Tom had been forgotten. And nobody could argue that the parcel of land he had been given wasn’t the prettiest of the lot. The problem was thatParadisio as it was called, the big Spanishhacienda overlooking a long, lovely slice of tropical beach, was in the middle of the jungle, in the Yucatan, Mexico.

 “That’s what you get for being the old boy’s favorite,” his sister Mariah teased him.

 “I love the place,” Tom replied, hiding his disappointment well.

 After they passed the New York bar exam, Tom and his wife Janet had pooled their resources and opened a small law firm in the Bronx. The idea was to do as muchpro bono work as possible while still keeping the doors of the firm open. It had been a tough go so far. There was money in Manhattan brownstones and Californiaranchos but there was no money in a Yucatan fishing camp. The parcel of land the old Spanish ranch house was built on was sizable but too far off the beaten path to be considered a‘hot’ property. Still, by the time Tom left the lawyer’s office that afternoon, his initial disappointment had melted into grateful acceptance.

 How else could he feel? His parents had died in a car accident when Tom was ten tears old. Since then, his grandfather had always been there for him with advice, money, even a rough affection that Tom recognized as love. Because he was the youngest child by nearly ten years, he alone among his siblings had visited the fishing camp in Yucatan often as a child. He’d learned to sha