Sixteen
Russell knew he was being childish at leaving the table without eating, but he’d reached his breaking point. Besides, his invitation to the picnic had included a note asking him to meet his father at the Old Mill right after breakfast. No specific time given, just go there and wait. Between feeling like an intruder among friends and his curiosity about what his father wanted, Russ left.
As he drove, he couldn’t help but think about the fact that Travis now knew Russell was his brother. But then Russ had always known about Travis Maxwell. He’d known that living in a big house, seeing his mother every day, being given anything he wanted, was a boy who was his part brother. When he was little and his mother told him he had a “half brother” Russ had started crying. His mother couldn’t understand why until Russell had tearfully asked which half of the boy was missing.
After his mother explained that they had the same father but different mothers, Russell had become interested in his brother and often asked questions about him. It was something he and his mother shared.
Not that there was much. They rarely saw each other when he was growing up. She’d be gone for weeks at a time, traveling all over the world, never far from Randall Maxwell’s side.
Russell was left at home with nannies, who changed rather frequently, and later tutors came to him. It hadn’t been a shock to find out that they were the same men who’d taught his brother.
When Russell reached high school age he’d had enough of living in Travis Maxwell’s shadow, and he showed his mother a brochure for a boarding school. She wasn’t allowed to say no.
Russell wasn’t sure when his curiosity changed to anger. And he didn’t know why his animosity was aimed at his half brother and not at his father.
He only saw Randall Maxwell about a dozen times when he was growing up. When he was five, one rainy Sunday morning he was sitting in the room beside his mother’s office drawing pictures when a man walked in. He wasn’t especially tall and he didn’t seem frightening in any way.
The man stopped at the doorway, didn’t say anything, but then he turned back. “Are you Russell?”
He nodded.
The man came to stand by him and looked at what Russell was drawing—a picture of the big buildings outside the windows. “You like art?”
Again Russell nodded.
“Good to know.” The man left and Russell wouldn’t have remembered it except that later his mother said the man was his father. And the next Sunday that Russell went to the office with his mother there was a big box full of art supplies there for him.
His mother said, “Your father is a very generous man.”
For years afterward Russell had kind thoughts about his father. It wasn’t until he was about nine that he began to be aware of what other people’s parents were like and what they did for their children.
Russell couldn’t afford to be angry at his mother, as she was all he had. And his mother said they owed his father “e
verything,” so he didn’t dare aim his animosity at him. Instead, Russell took his anger out on his brother, the boy he’d never seen, the boy who had everything, including a mother who stayed at home all the time. And Russell never forgot that their father lived with him.
Russell went to the same college his brother went to, but by then his mind-set was different. He didn’t study law. After school he traveled some, returned to the U.S., and studied some more. But he’d never been able to settle anywhere for long. Maybe it was the demons that raged inside him that made settling impossible.
When his mother had called recently and asked him to help Travis, Russell had said no. He’d even laughed. Help a brother who had never contacted him? In Russell’s mind it was up to the older brother to make the first move.
That’s when his mother told him that Travis didn’t know he had a brother. That had been such a shock to Russell that he’d agreed to sweet-talk some girl enough to find out information from her.
But when Russell was finally able to meet Travis, every bit of the anger he’d felt as a child came forward. He’d expected a spoiled, know-it-all jerk, but what he’d found was a man who made an omelet for him.
Since that first day the two of them had been nearly inseparable. But in spite of their ease together, Russell still felt the anger inside him. He’d liked besting Travis in negotiating the contract with Kim’s greedy boyfriend. He’d even liked riding around with his brother. And later, when Kim told Travis off, Russell didn’t think he’d ever enjoyed anything so much in his life.
But still . . . What had been difficult for him was seeing the way Kim and Travis loved each other. While it was true that they fought, it was easy to see that underneath it all they belonged together.
On the drive from Virginia to Maryland, Travis, nervous and upset, had told him how he and Kim had met as kids, and how she’d changed his life. For the first time Russell heard the full story of how Travis’s life hadn’t been the glorious adventure that Russell had always assumed it was.
This morning at the breakfast table had been all that Russell could bear. “Domestic bliss” was written all over the faces of Kim and Travis. And this afternoon Randall Maxwell was throwing a picnic, no doubt in honor of his eldest, number one son.
Russell was thinking so hard that when the car in front of him suddenly stopped he had to slam on the brakes. When he did, the blue velvet box Travis had handed him yesterday slid forward.
“Kim doesn’t want them,” Travis had said yesterday when he’d called Russ to his room. “Get rid of them.”
Russell refrained from pointing out how much the rings cost. Nor did he snap that he wasn’t Travis’s servant. Russell knew this was brotherly bossiness and not business, so he shoved the box of rings under the seat of the Jeep, intending to give them to his mother to deal with.
Russell turned down the road to the Old Mill. He’d found out—or his mother’s relatives had—that a descendant of James Hanleigh, Dr. Tristan Janes’s first illegitimate child, still lived in Janes Creek. “She’s a widow,” he was told, and he envisioned a gray-haired woman with a bun at the back of her neck. No wonder she couldn’t afford to renovate the old stone mill.