And done! Thanks all who have reviewed for the encouragement.

Tony attended the same school Tim once had. It looked just as he remembered it too, only empty, everyone was already in class.

He remembered hanging around outside in the car park, sitting in cars, leaning against them. Smoking, checking out girls, trading insults with soc's.

Strange that he couldn't really remember ever sitting in a classroom, though he must have done at times, enough that he remembered the wait outside the principals office well enough.

Tony sighed from the back seat.

"Man, I'm gonna end up puking all over my desk."

Tim turned to look at him. He was slumped against the door, hand pressed against his head.

"Go on, you'll live. Go to the nurse and ask for an asprin."

"Shoot, last time I saw her she told me I was gonna get a stomach ulcer," Tony said.

"You plan on living like this you better toughen up then," Tim said.

Tony looked back at him in reproachful silence. But the world was no soft place for a boy like him. He would learn.

"Hey," Jay said, "you should come up and stay with us sometime."

"Yeah, that'd be cool," Tony said.

He said it the exact way Tim would have replied to an offer like that when he was a kid. Like it was something outside the realm of possibility.

The only people who went out of town were going to jail, or running out on their family, or soc's.

"You ask Angel," Tim told him. "She says ok I'll send you a bus ticket."

"Alright," Tony said. "I will."

He said it as if he were laying down a challenge. He looked back at Tim a minute longer, under the defiance a slight hope in his gaze.

"See y'all later then," he said.

He kicked the door shut behind him and strolled up toward the school entrance. A teacher coming down the stairs veered on seeing him, headed to cut him off.

"Uh oh," Jesse said. "He's gonna get detention now."

"You turn up and get in the shit and then they wonder why you don't bother turning up again," Tim said, watching Tony.

"Guess you would know," Jay said.

Tim pulled back out to the road, glanced in the rearview mirror to see Tony headed in the main doors with the teacher behind him.

"We going for breakfast now?" Jay asked. He looked considerably healthier than he had when he first woke up.

"One more stop first," Tim told him.

XXX

The sun was warm at his back as he walked through the gates of the cemetery. The last time he'd been here it was raining, the sky dark, his brother being buried in the mud.

He paused under the iron gates to light a cigarette, to bide for time.

He never expected to come here again. In the weeks after Curly's funeral, before he left Tulsa, he would feel a tug in him anytime he drove near.

Yet when he approached the gates the very same force would repel him. He would swing the car around, drive away with images chasing him.

Curly in the coffin, sightless blue eyes and bloodless wounds. The lid closed down on him. Dirt above. Sometimes Tim would almost feel like it was him in there, suffocating, trapped.

He smoked, stared at the rows of graves, what had been buried in him turned over again.

His boys stood silent, watching him, waiting. As they always had. He tossed the cigarette onto the gravel path and headed down toward the rows of headstones. He would say his goodbyes this time, all of them.

He knew exactly where Curly's grave was, but another memory jogged him as he headed down. He stopped, scanned the rows.

There was no headstone, only a wooden cross. Dallas Winston. 17 years.

"Who's that?" Jay asked, as Tim came to a stop in front of it.

"A boy I was friends with," Tim said.

Back then he never would have referred to Dally as a friend.

"Fuck off Shepard, we ain't friends," Dally would have said. He could just about hear it, the hard laugh.

"We fought each other half the time," he added. "Drank together the other half."

"What happened to him?"

"He was shot by the cops."

"Shit," Jay said, his eyes wide. "Man, he was only young."

But Tim couldn't imagine Dally grown up. If he would have spent half his life in jail, or gotten a job, or had a kid, or only killed himself some other way.

All the chances to do anything else were gone. Just like Curly.

"He slashed my tires once, the asshole," Tim said.

"How come?" Jesse asked.

Tim tried to remember the reason but couldn't. Just the fight they'd had when he caught up with him. There probably never was a reason.

"He just liked pissing me off," Tim said.

"Yeah, it is kinda fun," Jay said.

He laughed and ducked the half hearted cuff Tim aimed at him.

Jesse grinned at his older brother, admiration in his gaze, and Tim felt the old wound rubbed in him.

Tim turned away from Dally's grave and continued down to where Curly's was. His sons fell in beside him as he walked, Jesse so close Tim could have just about tripped over him.

He waited for the crushing forces to come, the images of his dead brother, but in the sunlight with Jesse bouncing at his side there was nothing, only the tender hurt he'd felt seeing the bond between his sons. What he would never have again.

There was a headstone for Curly Shepard. Our beloved son and brother. Rest in eternal peace.

Tim stared down at it. He couldn't imagine Curly in eternal peace. Curly would think that was boring as shit.

"Guess we should have brought some flowers," Jay said.

"Nah," Tim said. "He'd have hated that."

He pulled out his packet of cigarettes instead. Pulled one out and tossed it down at the base of the headstone. There was a glass of wilting flowers there too.

"He was always after me to give him smokes," Tim said. "I'd tell him, go steal your own. But he was the worst fucking thief. Never was any good at being a sneaky shit."

Tim remembered Curly's hopeful eyes, the little smile. Smoke, Tim? He would ask. His little brother and sister knew they were his weakness.

"So I guess you didn't want to rob banks with him either," Jesse said, making Tim laugh.

"What?" Jay asked, looking puzzled. "Shit, what else haven't you told me?"

"Just a joke," Tim said, giving Jesse a wink. He wouldn't let Jay know his little brother had dropped him in it. Jay would only think he had gotten away with something.

"I wish I got to meet him," Jay said.

"You did meet him," Jesse said. "I never did."

"Yeah, but it's not like I remember."

Tim did though. He was glad for it, the memory of his brother holding his son.

He got his wallet and pulled out the photo his mother had given him at the hospital.

"Here," he said. "This is me and him."

His sons leaned in close to see it. He felt the solid weight of them against him.

"Your hair was pretty long," Jesse said.

"That's how we wore it back then. We were greasers, that's what people called us."

They called them plenty other besides that too. Dangerous. No good. Hoods. All names they had reveled in.

"Man, you two look like you could have whipped anyone who called you names," Jay said.

"We sure did," Tim said. "Curly was walking home once and a soc - that was what we called the rich kids - swerved in a puddle to get him wet. So we drove around to his house and started caving his car in with a baseball bat. Then when he came running out Curly dropped him."

He laughed, the image clear in his mind for an instant. Curly standing over the prone boy, turning to Tim with a triumphant grin, the rain coming down through the shattered windscreen of the Mustang.

There was a strange comfort in it, remembering the story, seeing his sons look at the photo and knowing they would remember too now.

"You miss him, dad?" Jesse asked.

"Yeah, I do," Tim said.

He wrapped an arm around each of his sons, pulled them close.

Between their heads he could see the inscription of his brothers name.

"You know I love you," he said, to the boys, to Curly.

Jay hugged him back hard for an instant before yanking away.

"Same, but don't do that in public again," he said.

Jesse stayed put, his head against Tim's chest.

Tim kept on looking down at the grave. See Curly, he could have said, I looked after these ones.

For a minute he could see his brother standing up on the cliff above the river, a dark shape against the sky.

Curly clad in shorts, shirtless, laughing and jumping down.

He wondered if at the very end it was what Curly remembered. The long fall into the water and the way for a minute it felt as if you were flying. He hoped Curly carried the good memories with him.

"Come on," he said, turning to leave.

Jay stopped to glance back as they walked out of the gates and Tim put a hand on his shoulder to keep him moving forward, not looking back himself.

"I should tell you about the time Curly broke his arm," he said to Jay.

Because what he left behind down there wasn't his brother, it was only a body. Curly was with him, in his memories, in his sons, in himself. He only had to let it be.

"He climbed up a goddamn telephone pole ..."