“It’ll be far more effective this way.” Lily opened the journal and read aloud what Ophelia had written in the first entry.

Holly sat in stunned silence, her mouth slightly open and her eyes wide. “Why couldn’t Ophelia take care of things? You did after Daddy left. I can’t believe my kinfolk had slaves. That’s so wrong. A million kids in our schools are black.”

Holly’s question was valid for a fourteen-year-old kid just learning about the horrors of the Civil War. Lily thought about them all for a few seconds while she kind of basked in the comment that Holly had made about her taking care of things. The child would never know how much that simple sentence meant to Lily.

“It was a different time,” Lily finally said. “Women couldn’t vote. People weren’t allowed to be a lot of things. The first female doctor graduated from medical school only a few years before that war broke out, and there were no woman lawyers until after the war.”

“Why?” Holly was aghast.

“Because women hadn’t fought yet for those rights. They were considered weak, and the men had to take care of them,” Lily explained.

“God, I’m glad I didn’t live back then,” Holly said with high drama. “I can’t imagine living like Ophelia did. I’m going to research”—she sighed so loud that she almost snorted—“but I can’t because I don’t have a computer.”

“There’s a whole set of encyclopedias on the bookcase in the living room, and you can always use your free time at school to look things up in the library,” Lily said.

“Whatapedias?” Holly asked.

“Very funny. Go down there and look it up, and I’ll take a picture of this page. We’ll talk about the next entry another day, and you can see how things go from then until your Granny Vera wrote in it her last time,” Lily said.

“Thanks, Mama,” Holly said, and opened her notebook.

Lily closed the book and carried it over to her room. She went to the window and watched the snow. The big flakes swirled in circles as they tried to float to the ground. The weatherman said that the temperature tomorrow would be in the forties and there would be sunshine, so whatever stuck would melt before noon. How many times had Ophelia stood in a window and watched a rare snowfall when Henry was off fighting for the Union? she wondered.

If only she’d taken care of her mother’s things earlier, she would have already read all of the journal. Now she felt like she should hold off and let Holly catch up so they could talk about each entry together. She wandered down the stairs toward the kitchen to get a scoop of ice cream.

“Busted!” Mack came out of the living room with a dirty bowl in his hands. “I always figure if no one catches me having a second helping of dessert late in the evening, then it doesn’t have fat grams or calories. I got another slice of your cake and topped it with a spoonful of ice cream.”

Lily passed him on her way to the kitchen. “I was about to get some ice cream.”

“Put a little sliver of cake underneath it,” Mack suggested. “I was going to put something in the DVD player. Want to watch a movie?”

“Sure,” Lily said. “What are we watching?”

“I was thinking about Lethal Weapon, the television show, but you can choose whatever you want. I’m afraid there’s not many chick flicks in my collection.” He followed her to the kitchen, rinsed his bowl, and put it in the sink.

“I saw a couple of episodes of that show.” She got out what was left from a cobbler she’d made a couple of days ago, and the ice cream. “I wouldn’t mind watching it.” She carried her bowl into the living room and settled into her mother’s recliner.

Mack put the DVD into the player and sat down in her dad’s chair. They were two episodes into the season when she finally asked.

“Why didn’t you ever get married, Mack?”

He hit the pause button on the remote. “I don’t talk about it, but if you really want to know, it’s because of my brother.”

“What did Adam do?” Lily’s curiosity was piqued.

“It was my last semester in college, and I was going to ask my girlfriend, Brenda, to marry me. We’d more or less been living together that last year, and I was in love with her. So I brought her home to meet the folks over spring break. Mama said the first one of us boys to get married could have the engagement ring that had been passed down through the family for five generations. That didn’t matter so much to me. I figured Brenda would be just as happy with a different diamond ring, and I’d already been looking at one. Anyway, to make a long story short . . .” He stared into space for a long time.

“If it’s painful, you don’t have to tell me,” she said.

“I want to so you’ll understand how it is between me and Adam,” Mack said. “He’ll be coming around every so often. I don’t want you to think I’m a bastard because of my indifference to him. I love him, but I don’t like him so much. But back to my reasons. Brenda and I went back to college after three nights here in Comfort. She was acting kind of weird, and after we left, she told me that the second night we were here, she had slept with Adam out in the hay barn. They were married as soon as school was out, and of course, Adam got the family heirloom.”

“And it didn’t last, did it?”

Mack shook his head. “Five years later, I fell in love with Natalie, but you can bet your sweet soul I wasn’t bringing her around Adam. By then I was teaching in Hondo, and Natalie and I were living together. Mama and Dad came to visit one weekend, and I figure she’d mentioned Natalie to Adam. He showed up at the house one Sunday afternoon with the excuse that he hadn’t seen me since Christmas. History repeated itself. He left Brenda for Natalie.”

“Good Lord!” Lily gasped. “What’s the matter with him?”

Mack shrugged. “I’ve talked to Drew about it several times. He says that Adam can’t stand to see me happy.”

“And his last wife, Charlene?”

“That’s on him. She was Natalie’s third cousin. He met her at the wedding, and he divorced Natalie six months after they were married. He and Charlene got married a few months after that,” Mack said. “He’s always been the good-lookin’ twin, the one that could get any woman he wanted. I’ll never understand why he had to take away my happiness.”

“How can you even stand to be in the same room with him?” Lily asked.

“He’s my brother, and he has a problem. I can’t fix it, but I can’t seem to cut ties with him, either,” Mack replied.

“My sister and I got along well before she died, but then we were both really young. Sometimes I wonder if we’d have bickered like Braden and Holly if she’d lived longer than eight years. I was only five that year and just remember being lost without her. I admire you for continuing to be a brother to him after the way—” She stopped and stammered, “Do you think he was flirting with me because he thinks we are . . .”

“Probably, but then, you are a beautiful woman, Lily, and more likely, he simply couldn’t help himself,” Mack said.

“Well, I don’t like him, never have, not even in high school. I’m sorry to say that about your brother, but I don’t,” she said.