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money you’ve been saving up for that new Gibson you’ve had your eye on? Well ...”
    But nothing happened. The cops just said good morning right back at Thomas and ordered up their coffee and ham and eggs and
sucked deep at the long night’s last cigarette and joked and laughed and argued about the Maple Leafs over greasy-fingered shared sports pages and one at a time eventually left the same way they came to return to wives and children relieved to see husbands and fathers safe and sound and at home again from another night of protecting our fair city.
    A little after 10 a.m. and the last cop gone, the restaurant basically ours now and the breakfast specials already thinking about turning into lunch specials, and me already ten minutes late opening up Making Waves, “Are you crazy, man?” I said. “I don’t know what the deal is where you’re from, but up here you don’t mess around with the Man because the Man will mess around with you. Got it?”
    Thomas kept smiling into his empty coffee cup with a heavy-lidded gaze that said he just now might be ready to finally come down and cash it in for the night. Or was it for the day? Anyway, lucky Thomas, I thought.
    Because even if I’d only forfeited another night’s sleep in return for another lesson in all things country soulful—tonight’s class conducted cross-legged on the floor of my room, cross-eyed drunk on a bottle of Old Grandad, listening to the collected works of Buck Owens and his Buckaroos—once again Thomas was off to bed and I was off to work and the onset of morning-after crankiness said this just didn’t seem particularly fair. Also, maybe I had long hair and my very own roach clip, but I was also my parents’ son whether I wanted anybody to know it or not and had never been late for a day of work in my life. Until I met Thomas, that was.
    Slowly raising his eyes from the table, “Everyone says all we need is love, Buckskin,” he said. “All incense and peppermints and hugs for all the one-eyed teddy bears and your momma and daddy holding hands as they tuck you into bed every night and you safe at home forever. But what we need, what we really need ...”

    His voice trailed off and he wrapped his hand tight around his cup, squeezed it hard like he wanted to make sure it was really there. “What we really need is more give . Because love, that’s hard. That’s real hard.”

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    Sometimes it was like this. Sometimes this was all there was, all he could see, hear, think, breathe; every nerve end in his body encoded right down to the bone with it, every cell inside stuffed straight through until it felt like it was all he’d ever been, would be. Drink smoke snort shoot swallow and still, there it is. Play guitar and sing every song you know until your fingers bleed at the tips and it hurts your throat to swallow and at the end of it, staring right back at you, there it is.
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    The screen door slams shut with a hard, wood-to-wood summer whack and Becky screams across the lawn and through the small forest of trees everyone has always called Dream of Pines, “Thomas, come here now, Thomas, please, come here now!”
    Thomas knows the only thing his sister hates more than being around him and all his dumb twelve-year-old friends is asking her little brother for anything, so he drops the football and tells his friends to go home and tears off toward the house. The Grahams have the biggest lawn in Jackson—it takes two coloured men all day to cut every green inch—but Thomas is up on the front porch before his sister has to call out a second time.
    Panting, dry-mouthed, “What?” he says.
    Graham family flesh clamped tight to Graham family flesh, her little brother’s hand in hers seems to calm Becky, to give her resolve. “Let’s go and see Momma,” she says.

    Their father, as usual, is away on business in Memphis.