Among the Dead by Michael Tolkin

Dockery got up and called for everyone to listen to him. For those who wanted to go, it was time to move to the Sheraton. They were to board a bus and would be settled in at the hotel in twenty minutes. Frank stopped Dockery after the announcement and told him that his brother was coming, and Dockery told Frank not to worry, they’d tell him where to go.

3
Buffet
    Lowell called from the lobby, and Frank gave him the room number. He had a few minutes to think about things while his brother found the elevator. He worried about his brother, how his brother would try to take over the situation and tell him how to suffer and tell others how to treat him, how to give them both respect.
    There was a knock. Frank opened the door, and Lowell was there. The expected hug. Frank patted Lowell’s shoulder, as though Lowell needed the comfort more than he did.
    In the family’s mythology Frank had one respected attribute, his role as peace-maker. Lowell, for all of his brilliance in business, brought his attack to the dinner table, and what had been, in childhood, to his mother, a lawyer-like precocity was now sometimes exhausting. The only times their mother was ever really impatient with Lowell was at dinner, when Frank was the least indignant. But Frank knew, and he told himself, too often, as a kind of punishment, that to face the truth, any truth, he had first to admit to himself that Lowell really was his superior, emotionally, morally, intellectually. Let their parents pretend they were equal, because they owned equal shares in the business, but Lowell had the better ideas. Did their parents always know that Lowell was better? Or did they believe that the business started as a true partnership? He imagined better parents had the courage to see the differences between their sons, and then act on this knowledge, help them, help the one who needed help. And is this why I was so reluctant to have two children? Fear of the pain of their competition? Fear of having to distinguish between them?
    And did their parents ever admit to themselves what they so obviously thought of the partnership? Or did they pretend that it was a kind of unspecific soup of ideas, no separate areas of expertise?
    What did they tell their friends? Lowell is the businessman, butFrank is the one closer to the artists. And did the friends think, how odd, since Lowell is the homosexual, and by rights should be closer to the artists than dull Frank? Or did their parents avoid the topic?
    It was Lowell who found the locations for the stores, and moved near them as they opened. He kept a condominium in Santa Monica and came to the city for a few days every two or three weeks.
    Frank worked with the record companies and distributors, keeping up to date on the schedule of new releases, because he was supposed to be the more musical of the two, but that was a convenient lie the brothers told themselves, an accommodation to this: if Lowell died, the business died; if Frank died, the business continued. The business was not about music, but about making a profit selling records.
    â€˜My God, Frank. My God.’
    â€˜Yes,’ said Frank. He felt a wave of shame for having called his brother to his side. If his brother had a family, and the family had been killed, and his brother called for his help, Frank thought that he would have been annoyed at the interruption of his daydreams.
    â€˜Fuck God, Frank,’ said Lowell.
    Frank wanted to leave God out of this. Frank felt that it was important to protect God right now and not blame Him for the crash. He might need God soon and didn’t want to give Him an excuse to bargain with his prayers.
    â€˜This is a terrible question,’ said Lowell, ‘but I don’t know how else to ask this. How do you feel?’
    â€˜I guess I’m in shock. It’s hard to feel anything.’
    â€˜Of course, of course. It’s Nature’s way, I guess. It protects you.’
    â€˜I’d like to