Tim drove Angela back to her place after they left the hospital. For a minute she sat there with her hand on the door handle, looking toward her house. The yard with uncut grass and a maze of kids toys amidst it.

Her daughter came out of the front door, stood there waiting on the steps. She had the same dark curls and blue eyes as Angela, but somehow she didn't look a thing like her.

Angela sighed, straightened her shoulders.

"Alright?" Tim asked her.

She nodded. "Sure. Why don't you get the boys and come back here for dinner."

He watched her go up the worn dirt path to the front door. Her daughter stood with her arms folded while Angela spoke to her.

"She's a smart one," Angela had told him. "God, I hope she doesn't get knocked up to some loser."

Tim wished again Chris had been someone else, someone who would be there, who would help, who would at least cut the fucking grass.

He pulled out and headed to the hotel on roads which seemed so familiar he might never have been gone at all.

He knew where the shops where, knew where to go to buy a bottle of Whisky. He uncapped it in the car and drank while he drove, holding it down on his lap when he pulled up at lights.

He thought he'd forgotten everything but it was all there inside him still.

The hotel came up too soon. He pulled in. Took a last drink before shoving the bottle into the glove box.

Jay was standing out on the balcony of their room, leaning on the railing with his chin on his arms, listless boredom in his posture.

He lifted his head when he saw Tim, nodded in a brief greeting before dropping it back down.

Tim stopped in the stairwell and leaned back against the cool concrete wall for a moment, his head spinning. He regretted drinking so fast.

He remembered another walk out of the hospital, the one where it was Curly left behind him. Driving home and staring out to the streets which his brother would never see again. The crushing feeling inside him, as if something had driven onto his chest and could never be moved.

He shook his head and felt the rough wall scrape against his back, remembered all that happened in another life.

When he opened the door to the room the boys were waiting for him. Jesse on the edge of the bed with his feet on the floor, Jay standing beside him, both of them looked braced, ready.

"Hang on a sec, I got to piss," he said to them.

He sat on the edge of the bath and smoked half a cigarette. He stared at the rows of tiles, waiting for the wavering edges of his vision to come right, waiting for the memories rushing at him to recede again.

He stood and ran the water into the sink, stared at himself in the mirror above. He could feel the photo he'd slid into his pocket pressing against him. He still looked just like that boy, only more tired, less cocky.

"She died about one," he said to the boys when he went back out. "It's alright, it was her time, huh?"

He ruffled Jesse's hair and went over to the kitchen bench to make a coffee.

Jay came and leaned against the bench beside him, watching him.

"Was it, you know, not too bad?"

He hesitated, looked at Tim.

"Yeah, she was drugged to the fucking eyeballs, didn't feel a thing," Tim said.

She hadn't been scared, not like Curly had. Instead it seemed like she was letting go, letting herself fall into the blackness.

The jug boiled but Tim didn't really feel like a coffee. He didn't know what he felt like, only it wasn't to be in this airless room with his sons watching him in silence, as if there was something else they were expecting him to do or say.

He grabbed his cigarettes off the bench and went out to the balcony. Jay came after him, resumed his position against the railing.

Jesse came out too, tucked himself under Tim's arm, pushing in close to him. Tim squeezed his shoulder briefly, feeling a moments comfort from the warm body against his, the beat of the life he had brought forth, but then he pushed him away.

He loved his boys, but he knew they had to be strong, to stand on their own.

"I don't know if I should feel sad," Jesse said. "I mean, she was our grandma, but we didn't know her."

He looked puzzled by the question.

Tim shrugged. "You don't have to feel anything, son."

"Are you sad?" Jesse asked.

Tim dragged on his cigarette, thinking again of the whiskey. Should have brought it in instead of leaving it in the car.

Jay watched him with an inscrutable expression. He wondered how his own sons would judge him one day, when they were old enough to look back at their life.

"I don't feel anything either," he said.

XXX

Tim sat at Angela's kitchen table, watching her slinging dishes into cupboards.

"You're gonna break something in a minute," he said.

He remembered the long ago life when they shared a house, when glasses and plates went flying, when any object small enough to lift could be flung.

"Don't talk to me you asshole," she shot back. If their mother could have walked in from her shift at work just then, Curly sidled in to try and pinch a beer from the fridge, his stepfather roared at them to shut the hell up, it would have been as if they were back in that house on the North side.

"Be reasonable, Angel," he said, even though he might as well have told her to fly.

"It's pretty fucking reasonable to expect you to go to your own mothers funeral," she said.

"Look, take this," he said to her, pulling a cheque from his pocket and holding it toward her.

She turned from the bench, still holding a plate in her hand. He wasn't sure if she was about to chuck it at him.

"What's this?"

"For the funeral. I've signed it, you can fill in however much you need."

She took it between her fingers, as if he were handing her something filthy.

"You think you can buy your way out?"

But she didn't toss it back at him, she put it into her pocket. Angela had her pride, but most of all she did what had to be done.

"That's my part, you can do the organizing," he said. "I have to get back for work."

Saying it felt like a lie. He had to get back. But staying a few more days wasn't going to get him fired either. He could stay if he wanted to. Walk back into that church, stand in the graveyard again.

He finished his beer, went to the fridge for another.

Angela stood looking at him in silence. Her face bemused.

"Nobody could ever tell you what to do," she said after a while.

She still saw the gang leader. A boy Tim could barely remember being.

"Back then I didn't give a shit about getting jailed," he said. "But my boys got no one but me."

She folded her arms, leaned back against the bench.

"What ever did happen with Maria?" she asked. "She always seemed crazy about you."

"She always liked to party, you know. Smoke pot, all that shit. But then she started on harder stuff. Ended up running off with her drug dealer."

It could still make him laugh. He was trying to clean his act up and she was bored as shit, off hunting for another prison bound bad boy.

"No kidding," Angela said, wide eyed. "Guess those boys are better off she stays gone then."

"I reckon so," Tim said.

"They miss her?"

"Nah, they never mention her."

Angela raised an eyebrow. "You don't mention her you mean?"

"What for?" Tim asked. "No use thinking about someone who's never coming back."

The door from the hallway banged open and Jay and Tony came into the kitchen.

"Heading out for a bit," Tony said to Angela, standing in the doorway with Jay beside him.

She sighed, shook out a cigarette.

"Don't you get in any trouble. I mean it, Tony."

Tony paid her words no more attention than if she'd said nothing at all.

"That alright, dad?" Jay asked.

"Where you going?"

"Just over to his buddies place," Jay said.

"Where?" Tim asked, looking at Tony.

"Just two streets up, " Tony said grudgingly. Tim could tell the boy wasn't used to having to answer to anyone.

Tim nodded at Jay. "Back by eleven, got it?"

Tony made an incredulous face, but Jay only nodded agreement before heading for the door after Tony.

"You know where he goes?" he asked Angela, after the door shut behind him.

His son out there walking those streets he once did seemed like some kind of loop in time. Some mistake.

Jay could handle himself. No boy could handle himself against five others, against a knife.

"His friends got one of those video game things. He doesn't go far. I know some things, Tim."

"The kids still do all that soc and greaser shit now?"

"Don't think so," Angela said. "But everyone still knows who comes from the wrong side of town, that doesn't change."

Then she smiled.

"Jay really going to come home at eleven is he?

"He better do," Tim said. "Anyway we got to get back over to the hotel still."

"He was pissed off, though."

"Nah he wasn't."

"Didn't show it you mean? He's just like you, Tim."

"Except for throwing a good punch he ain't like me at all."

She didn't even know his boys. She didn't even know him anymore.

But she was nodding. "He got that blank look he gives you if he doesn't want you to know what he's thinking. Doesn't talk about his mother. Come on Tim, you can't tell me he never wonders about her."

Tim stood up, took a drag on his cigarette.

"I never gave our old man a second thought after he ditched us."

"You're a liar," she said. "I used to snoop through your draws all the time, looking for cigarettes, cash. You kept that photo of him."

He was headed for the door out to the backyard, so he could smoke his cigarette in peace without her poking on at him. He forgot what she could be like. Never let a thing go.

"Forgot to chuck it out I guess," he said.

The last of the sun cast long shadows over the yard. He thought about Jay again, out in the night. She was wrong.