The Half Brother by Holly Lecraw

been faithful to Florence throughout our whole marriage. Completely faithful.”
    “I admire that, Preston,” I said.
    “It was mostly out of my own pride,” he said, and then May came back and he shut up.
    I pondered that one awhile, but never told her.
    Quietly, it was agreed that someone should be with him at all times. He only ever wanted May, but sometimes, during the week, I stayed at the house while she ran errands. By then I was regularly stayingovernight. She was vague about all this with her family. “They’ve never really thought I’d do anything interesting,” she said. “I don’t think they’d even notice us. If they were here.”
    One afternoon, when I was with him, he was fidgety and petulant, refusing music, TV, me reading to him, a nap—and then all at once he smiled and said he would set up the chessboard.
    I half expected him to ask for a drink; he’d become increasingly belligerent about habits and routines, and if he remembered that he usually started his game with a scotch on the rocks by his side, we’d be in trouble; but instead he moved his pawn, tipped his head coquettishly at me, and broke his cardinal rule, which was no chatting during play. “Charlie,” he said, “I like to know about people, and I realize I don’t know your middle name.”
    He didn’t seem like Preston at all, but like an actor, a character. A genial nursing-home resident I could josh around with. “You’re asking after all this time? Well, I don’t know yours either,” I said.
    The old, the real, Preston would have bristled. This one smiled indulgently. “I am Preston Broussard Bankhead,” he said. “Preston from my father’s mother, and Broussard from my mother’s mother. A family tradition.”
    He was formal as a paper doll, and it was at that moment that I realized, once and for all, that Preston was dying. That sooner rather than later, he would not be there. He would be merely an absence. A space, nothing.
    And I further realized that he wasn’t in his right mind, and I could say whatever I wanted. I could—not to put too fine a point on it—just make shit up. It was cruel and, in the moment, made complete sense to me. “I’m Charles Satterthwaite Garrett,” I said.
    Which was untrue. My middle name was Spooner, my mother’s maiden name. How could Preston have known so little about me? How had my name never come up in conversation? He seemed to know everyone’s middle name. It was the sort of detail Preston Broussard Bankhead used to suss out on his own, climbing up people’s family trees to inspect the view.
    I waited for him to call me on it, to furrow his brow and wonder aloud if he was confused. But he didn’t.
    I was aware that Spooner would not impress him, might be a detail he actively disliked. Maybe I was protecting my mother from him. And protecting myself. Maybe I was seeing that hot little town she came from, where she took me only once, and even then I had no desire for Preston to sense any of it in me, to smell it on my breath.
    I was protecting something that I hadn’t entirely figured out. It was, in the purest sense, none of his business.
    He was waiting, I realized. “Satterthwaite’s from my father’s side,” I said, “an old name,” and I’d told another lie that felt like play and protection at once.
    “I’ve been thinking about these things. I have a great deal of time to think now,” he said, waving a hand magisterially. He sat back in his chair, the game forgotten. “It’s important to know who you are. To know who’s around you. Because I’ll tell you.” And then, all of a sudden, he’s launching into the Grey boys sermon.
    Always the same phrases, the same arc. “So, do we have relativism?” he intoned. “Isn’t one the most important? But what if it’s tainted? Cus tom, or cul ture, or con science? Or all three? Because I’ll tell you, friends. Someday you’ll wake up and you’ll be on a different ride at the fair. You’ll be alone at