The next couple of years are a blur, for Brendan, thanks to drugs and drinking. Picking up girls and even the occasional guy. A snort of coke and he just doesn't give a shit about social norms. On a whim, he, Jeremy and Everett drive to Austin to hear a punk band called The Next, and Brendan buys their cassette for one song -- Monotony. He moshes with other punks and has a quickie behind the bar with a punkette who loves his scars. Since the band is from San Antonio, he suggests a trip there, but Everett refuses to go.
Jeremy and Everett grow apart, mainly because Jeremy realizes he's a substitute for Brendan. He could tell from how much love Everett poured into his paintings of Brendan as opposed to himself. The next Friday night dinner, Jeremy learns Myron has never tried sauerkraut so promises to bring him a Reuben...but before he can, Myron dies. Mrs. Glendon calls Brendan over to help handle it. Fortunately, the coroner and cops don't care about him, just filing the paperwork for a death by natural causes. Myron's parents throw all his things away, infuriating the rest of the group.
Brendan keeps abreast of Ma's cancer treatments through letters from Mai and Maeve as well as what Rhuari mentions in his letters to Eldon. He feels nothing until he happens onto an old Peugeot 541 rusting away behind a motorcycle shop in the Heights, one night. The owner lets him restore it, paying only for parts, and over the next year it re-centers Brendan. He quits the drugs and drinking and lets his hair grow out, and then Uncle Sean brings him his new passport. An Irish one for Brennan McGabhinn, but without some of the needed details. Like an entry and exit stamp for when he was first brought to the US. He gets the corrected one before Hallowe'en and has 90 days to decide what to do.
The Call Comes
It's now 1981 and Brendan comes home after a Friday dinner on a cold night to find a note to call Mairead. Urgent. He does and learns his mother is terminal. Maybe 3-4 months left. Mai is pregnant so can't go over for the funeral and wake, but Aunt Mari is going, straightaway. Brendan promises to go in a couple months. He doesn't want to spend too much time in Derry, since he's fairly certain the British Army is still looking for him in regards to the bombing and he's not confident his new documents will protect him for very long. Mai asks him if he hates Ma and he puts off an answer by claiming he's drunk and can't think straight.
He climbs up on the pool-house roof, despited the cold, and remembers how his mother had always picked at him and derided him, and he cannot understand why. What she told him after Bloody Sunday...that he was different from Eamonn and Mairead and she distrusted him...no longer makes sense and actually strikes him as a weak excuse. He wonders if she would tell him, now.
The B-Girls see him and tell him Aunt Mari is going over in a couple days. They seem to sense he will not be returning to Houston. They ask if Evangelyne was still his girlfriend would he even leave, and he won't reply. They know he was hurt because of her, and they know their father had something to do with it. Then they ask if he's been with Everette and he tells them no. Aunt Mari is in the kitchen having her usual beer and a cigarette, so she calls for the girls to go to bed. Brendan is left alone, wishing he could just lie atop the pool house roof forever.
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