Best Boy by Eli Gottlieb

the darkness kinda coming out of the woods and everything getting all spooky and mysterious for a few minutes? I think if I was a poet I’d have written about it.”
    â€œNo,” I said.
    He never got punished for hurting me, not once. Not when he put rocks in my bed or teased me till I got volts. Not when he did a wedgie and pulled my underwear till it hurt or once swung a bat and cracked me with it in the head at the Goldsteins’ Fourth of July picnic. Nothing ever happened to him except that he stayed and I left. Small, chunky sounds came out of the phone. He was chewing ice. “How about,” he said, “the way Dad in the warm months would pour himself a stiff one and head out to the deck of the house, like clockwork, every day at six, and never miss a day?”
    â€œUm,” I said.
    â€œGod, he loved that backyard deck!”
    â€œThe deck,” I said.
    The deck was attached to the house. The house was in the town of Grable where we lived, on top of a hill that looked out on other houses sitting repeatingly on shelves in the same hill below us.
    â€œThat deck,” my brother said, “was his own little piece of paradise.”
    â€œRight,” I said. I was getting ready to ask him about coming home again. I had to ask him. It was important that I ask him. The problem would be the “incident.” I knew it would. Maybe it was time to think again about the “incident.” Maybe it was time to think about it again from beginning to end. According to Nate the incident had changed everything. The incident had happened when Nate, Beth and the kids had flown out toPayton for the very first time to see me, just before our parents began to die.
    â€œI miss him so much,” he said softly.
    â€œI know,” I said into the phone while I watched him and his wife walk towards me out of memory that day, crossing the Payton lawn to my cottage. Behind them ran two little boys who were fighting loudly. I had never met his wife before then. She was tall and thin and wore a long dress that hung straight down from her shoulders like clothes off a hanger. From that dress a thin arm shot out. I shook it.
    â€œHello, Beth,” I said to her.
    â€œHi!” she said loudly, and then I shook the tiny hands of his two sons. After that we got into the car and drove directly to a restaurant about ten minutes from Payton called Bob’s Cabin. This was a big modern restaurant built onto the original old tiny cabin that once held miners. On the day we went there it was filled mainly with old people eating quietly. We sat down and I quickly ordered the special of the day which was the fried chicken platter. But first I made sure there was no peanut oil used in the frying by asking the waitress. I’m allergic not only to sesame seeds but also to nuts which if I eat them can cause someone to have to stab me with an EpiPen to keep me from going into anaphylactic shock that closes the throat.
    â€œNate was right,” Beth said, nodding after the waitress left, “you run a pretty tight ship, Todd.”
    â€œThank you,” I said.
    After that Beth kept trying to look into my eyes while she talked which I don’t like. She was moving her mouth a lot but she was down the table from me and her voice kept getting a little bit lost in the restaurant sounds. I watched and listened and after a while it became clear that she was talking about herchildren. She was saying they had incredible appetites. She was saying they were talented at tai chi and soccer and math and painting and that their teachers loved them.
    â€œFour gold stars in a row had never happened before,” Beth was saying when a waiter brought our food and I stopped trying to listen and started eating. The name of my platter was the Cluck Tower. It had many pieces of chicken piled on a dome of french fries. At a certain point during the meal my brother left the table to go to the bathroom and Beth leaned