Free The Bright Forever by Lee Martin

because, despite his family’s wealth, he imagined that he had farther to reach than most men. “Short men have big dreams,” he told me once when we were talking about what I would do after I graduated. Like me, he was barely five-foot-seven. “We’re bulldogs, you and me. When we get our jaws around something, we don’t let go.”
    When I went into the kitchen to tell my mother and Katie that the steaks were ready, Katie was crying. She was sitting on the kitchen counter, and my mother was standing in front of her, using nail-polish remover to take the red polish off Katie’s toes.
    “It’s Gotta Go?” I asked.
    Katie rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand. She sniffed back a few last tears. Then she nodded her head and told me, “The nail polish or the new bike.”
    Just to play the devil, I said, “You should have given up the bike.” Although there was no logic to my claim, it was enough to make her doubt her choice and start her crying again.
    My father came into the kitchen and said, “What’s all the howling about?”
    “It’s nothing,” my mother said. “Are we ready to eat?”
    Katie wouldn’t stop crying.
    “Someone tell me what’s going on,” my father said.
    “It’s Gilley.” Katie pointed her finger at me. “He’s mean.”
    “Shut up, dimwit,” I told her, and the heat in my voice surprised me.
    “Oh, he’s just being a big brother,” my father said. “That’s what big brothers do. They try to get your goat.”
    “My goat?” Katie said, still sniffling. “I don’t have a goat.”
    “Sure you do,” said my father. He stooped down and put his face next to hers. “Just listen.” He made the gruff baaing noise of a goat, and then he chanted a rhyme. “There’s an old billy goat. Where’s that old billy goat?” He traced his finger down Katie’s chin. “Right here, my dear. Right here, in Katie’s throat.”
    Katie giggled then, and just like that my father had made her forget that just a few moments earlier she’d been upset. We all went out to our patio to eat, and my father said with a big smile, “Well, here we are,” and I could tell at that moment he was, like the rest of us, in love with this life we had.
    Later that night, when I was in bed, I heard my mother talking to my father. Her voice, low and even, drifted up from downstairs, and the last thing I heard her say before I fell asleep was this: “Junior, how well do you know Henry Dees?”
    It was a question that I would forget by morning, and only remember later. I’ve never been able to put it out of my mind, any more than I can forget my father’s senior quote from his
Hilltopper
: “The measure of a man’s real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out.”

         
    Clare
    R AY TOLD ME later. It was after the sun had gone down, and we’d come in from outside. He was at the kitchen sink washing his hands, and to this day, whenever I smell that soap—that Lava soap, strong and clean—I think of that night and the way he told the story so la-di-da as if it was nothing at all, just a little piece of chitchat he’d carried home in his pocket.
    “He’s one of them,” he said. “That Henry Dees. He’s a kid fruit. He’s got short eyes.”
    I didn’t know what he meant. I was at the counter dumping the Kentucky Wonders into a drainer so I could rinse them, and I said, “Short eyes? Sounds serious. I thought he just needed his glasses straightened up.”
    Ray turned off the tap and shook water from his hands. “He’s a puppy lover, Clare. An uncle. A chicken hawk. Do I have to say it plain?” He dried his hands on the dish towel. “He gets his jollies from being with those kids. He’s a pervert.”
    “Henry Dees? I can’t believe that.”
    “It’s hard to know someone,” Ray said. Then he said the rest of it, told me that Henry Dees snuck around in the dark and kept his eyes on those kids, one in particular, a little girl who lived in the