The Bright Forever by Lee Martin

you’ll have to trust me.”
    He never raised his voice. He never stomped a foot or shook a fist. He didn’t have to. He narrowed his eyes and said what was on his mind, and because no one, particularly Junior Mackey, was accustomed to hearing him talk with such force, his words, quiet as they were, had weight.
    Gilley stepped out onto the patio, golf club in hand. He saw his father and Mr. Dees, and something about the way they were standing told him he should turn around and go back into the house. He saw his father take a step back from Mr. Dees. He rubbed a hand over his head.
    “A misunderstanding,” he said. “That’s all. Come back tomorrow and we’ll give this another try.”
    Gilley stood there and watched Mr. Dees walk across the yard to the street. His back was straight, his shoulders squared, and he wasn’t in a hurry. He took his time, and Junior stood there, watching him go.
    “Something wrong?” Gilley said.
    Junior brushed past him on his way into the house. “You don’t know anything,” he said. “That man’s got backbone. You’re a kid.”
    Gilley was accustomed to his father’s moods—the way he could fall quiet, go inside himself—but this was something different. This was hostility. This was a remark meant to belittle, and Gilley didn’t know what to do with it. All he knew was that something had shifted between them. Ever so slightly, something had turned. He would feel it all through that evening, the slap of those words:
You’re a kid.
Even at the supper table, when his father, back in good spirits, would tell the joke about the horse who walked into the bar and the bartender who said, “So, tell me. Why the long face?” Gilley, laughing, would feel something catch inside him, and he would wonder what it was about him that his father had found to scorn.
    Then one afternoon, a few days later, when he was in the display window at Penney’s, slipping a sleeveless summer blouse onto a mannequin, he suddenly sensed that someone was watching him. When he turned toward the sidewalk, there was his father. Their eyes met, and his father immediately looked away, turned on his heel, and walked on up the street, his arms swinging with purpose, as if he couldn’t move fast enough from the sight of his son dressing that mannequin, his fingers nimbly buttoning the blouse, smoothing out the collar.
    Gilley felt the distance spreading between them, and though he couldn’t name its source, he knew that somehow he had disappointed his father.
    They never spoke directly about that afternoon, but that evening, when Gilley got home, his father asked him whether he’d been working hard, and he told him yes.
    “Let me tell you what real work is,” his father said, and Gilley knew then that their trouble had come about because he had refused to work at Mackey Glass. “Of course, you’re probably not interested in hearing it. You’re probably too pretty for that.”
    Gilley lay awake a long time that night, hearing those words again—
too pretty
—and the way his father sneered when he said them and then stalked off to his office and closed the door. Immediately, in his heart of hearts, Gilley knew that it was so. Not that he was on the other side of the street when it came to the baby-oh-baby between boys and girls—not that—but because he was more finicky than a seventeen-year-old boy should be, overly concerned with trifles; the slightest details gave him concern, and he would work and rework them until everything was just the way he wanted it. He was, as he often heard Katie say about Rene Cherry, a fusspot, or, as his father had suggested, a pretty boy.
    He thought of all the nights he spent in the backyard working on his chip shots, going through the mechanics of his swing, bringing the club back, pausing to see how his weight was distributed, repeating a single motion until he was satisfied that his body had memorized it. He practiced the same obsession with his wardrobe, taking time