“Why did you leave in the first place?”
“I was sort of… not myself… after the broken engagement, and my father passing away. I needed a change. And I especially needed to be with Sofia. We had just found each other. It was the right decision to move down here. But someday, when Sofia is ready to take over, I’m going to go back to New York and give it another shot.”
“I think you’ll do fine wherever you live. In the meantime, you can go visit, can’t you?”
“Yes, but I’ve been too busy the past three years. Soon, though. I want to see my friends in person. I want to go to a couple of plays, and some of my favorite restaurants, and find a street fair with five-dollar pashminas, and have a slice of really good pizza, and there’s this rooftop bar on Fifth where you get the most perfect view of the Empire State Building…”
“I know that bar.”
“You do?”
“Sure. The one with the garden.”
“Yes! I can’t believe you’ve been there.”
Joe sounded amused. “I’ve been outside the state of Texas, despite appearances to the contrary.”
He told me about a couple of his past trips to New York. We exchanged stories about places where we’d traveled, about ones we’d want to go back to and the ones we wouldn’t. About the freedom of traveling alone, but also the loneliness.
When I realized how late it was, I couldn’t believe the conversation had lasted for over two hours. We agreed it was time to call it a night. But I had no desire to stop. I could have gone on talking.
“This was fun,” I said, feeling warm and even a little giddy. “I wish we could do it again.” In the short silence that followed, I covered my eyes with my free hand, wishing I could take back the impulsive words.
There was a smile in Joe’s voice. “I’ll keep calling,” he said, “if you’ll keep answering.”
Eleven
As it turned out, we talked every night for a week, including the night Joe was driving back late from a photo shoot in Brownwood. He’d done a session for a young congressman who’d just been elected to the U.S. House in a special runoff. The congressman had been a difficult subject, controlling and awkward, posing like a politician, roosterlike, despite Joe’s efforts to catch him in a relaxed moment. And the guy was a braggart, a name-dropper, qualities that were nearly intolerable to a Travis.
While we talked during Joe’s long drive to Houston, he told me about the photo shoot, and I filled him in on the planning for Haven’s baby shower. It was going to be held at the Travis River Oaks mansion, which had gone unoccupied ever since Churchill’s passing, mostly because no one knew what to do with it. None of the Travises particularly wanted to sell the place – it was where they’d grown up – but neither did any of them want to live in it. Too big. Too reminiscent of their parents, who were both gone now. However, the pool and patio on the mansion’s three-acre lot would provide the perfect setting for a party.
“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.