“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.