The Five Years My Brother Kept Us

The Booster Stand

The last Friday in September, I stood in the concession line at the Wellfield homecoming game with a man’s hand on the small of my back and told the biggest lie of my life in four words.

The line ran along the chain-link fence. Dalton had one arm around me. His mother, Pam, had driven over from the next county with his father, Rich, to meet me for the first time, and she had a stadium blanket folded over her arm and reading glasses on a chain, and she was doing what a mother does when she meets the woman her forty-one-year-old son has been seeing for five months. She was reading me.

I had my good jeans on. I had told Piper to stay close to the rail with her friends and not wander, and I had told myself in the car that this night would go fine.

Down on the track, a tall man in a yellow safety vest was walking toward the Booster stand with a thermos in one hand. The power district puts a lineman on standby at homecoming every year, in case a transformer drops the field lights, and it was his turn in the district truck behind the east end zone. Piper, at the rail, saw him and waved with her whole arm. She does that. She has never once in her life waved with half an arm.

Pam watched her do it.

“Who is that tall fellow in the yellow vest Piper keeps waving at?”

It was my brother. I knew before she finished the sentence. I knew the walk, the way he carries one shoulder a little lower from twenty years of climbing, the vest with the district’s name across the back. I knew the feeling in my stomach, too, the dropping one, the one that comes right before you do something you already know you will hate.

“Oh, him,” I said. “He’s just the babysitter.”

Dalton laughed, the easy way he does. Rich said, “Good help is hard to find.” And Pam smiled at me with her whole face, relieved, the way you smile when the thing you were worried about turns out smaller than you thought.

That relief is what I have not been able to forget. Pam’s face loosened because I had made my brother small. I had handed her a smaller version of my life, and she was grateful.

Then I felt something at the back of my neck, the way you feel a draft, and I turned around.

Curt was standing ten feet behind me, holding a ten-dollar bill.