Brown-Eyed Girl (Travis Family #4)(36)

“I went to the River Oaks house today,” I said. “Ella showed me around.”

“What did you think?”

“Very impressive.” The massive stone house had been designed to look like a château, surrounded by vast tracts of mowed green lawn, precisely trimmed hedges, and elaborate flower beds. After seeing walls sponged with a Tuscan faux finish and windows smothered with swag draperies, I had agreed with Ella’s assessment that someone needed to “de-eighties” the place.

“Ella said that Jack had asked if she wanted to move there,” I continued, “since they have two kids and the apartment’s getting cramped.”

“What did she say?”

“She told him the house is too big for a family of four. And Jack said they should move there anyway and just keep having children.”

Joe laughed. “Good luck to him. I doubt he’ll ever talk Ella into moving there, no matter how many kids they end up with. It’s not her kind of place. Or his, for that matter.”

“What about Gage and Liberty?”

“They’ve built their own house in Tanglewood. And I don’t think Haven and Hardy have any more interest in living in River Oaks than I do.”

“Would your father have wanted one of you to keep it?”

“He didn’t say anything specific.” A pause. “But he was proud of that place. It was a measure of what he’d achieved.”

Joe had previously told me about his father, a tough bantam of a man who’d come from nothing. The deprivation of Churchill’s childhood had instilled a fierce drive to succeed, almost a rage, that had never fully left him. His first wife, Joanna, had died soon after giving birth to a son, Gage. A few years later, Churchill had married Ava Chase, a glamorous, cultured, supremely elegant woman whose ambition was equal to Churchill’s, and that was saying something. She had smoothed some of his rough edges, taught him about subtlety and diplomacy. And she had given him two sons, Jack and Joe, and a petite dark-haired daughter, Haven.

Churchill had insisted on raising the boys with responsibility and a sense of obligation, to become the kind of men he approved of. To be like him. He had been a man of absolutes: A thing was either good or bad, right or wrong. Having seen how the children of some of his well-to-do peers had turned out – spoiled and soft – Churchill had been determined not to raise his offpring with a sense of entitlement. His boys had been required to excel in school, especially math, a subject that Gage had mastered and at which Jack had been proficient and Joe, on his best days, had never been more than adequate. Joe’s talents had been in reading and writing, pursuits Churchill considered somewhat unmanly, especially because Ava had liked them.

His youngest son’s lack of interest in Churchill’s private equity investments and financial management consulting business had finally resulted in a huge blowup. When Joe turned eighteen, Churchill had wanted to put him on the board of his holding company, as he’d done with Gage and Jack. He’d always planned on having all three sons on the board. But Joe had flat-out refused. He hadn’t even accepted a nominal position. The mushroom cloud had been visible for miles. Ava had passed away from cancer two years earlier, and there had been no one to mediate or intervene. Joe’s relationship with his father had been ice cold for a couple of years after that and hadn’t entirely recovered until Joe had stayed with him after the boat accident.

“I had to learn patience fast,” Joe had told me. “My lungs were shot, and it was hard to argue with Dad when I was breathing like a Pekingese.”

“How did you two manage to reconcile?”

“We went out to play golf. I hated golf. Old-man sport. But Dad insisted on dragging me to the driving range. He taught me how to swing a club. We played a couple of times after that.” A grin emerged. “He was so old, and I was so busted up, neither of us could break one thirty on eighteen holes.”

“But you had a good time?”

“We did. And after that, everything was fine.”

“But… it couldn’t have been. If you didn’t talk about the issues…”

“That’s one of the great things about being a guy: Sometimes we fix things by deciding it was bullshit and ignoring the hell out of it.”

“That’s not fixing,” I had protested.

“Sure it is. Like Civil War medicine: Amputate and move on.” Joe had paused. “Usually you can’t do that with a woman.”

“Not usually,” I had agreed dryly. “We like to solve problems by actually facing them and working out compromises.”

“Golf’s easier.”

In less than a week, my team had put together a vintage-boardwalk-themed party for Haven Travis’s baby shower. Tank had enlisted a local theater set crew to help him construct and paint a dessert station that resembled a boardwalk game arcade. Steven hired a landscaper to install a temporary mini golf course on the grounds of the Travis mansion. Together Sofia and I met with caterers and agreed on an outdoor party menu featuring gourmet burgers, grilled shrimp kebabs, and lobster rolls.

The forecast for the day of the party was ninety degrees and humid. The event team arrived at the Travis mansion at ten a.m. After helping the tent company reps to set up a row of open-sided cabana tents by the pool, Steven returned to the kitchen, where the rest of us were unboxing decorations.