Free Passing Time by Ash Penn

one,” Louis said as they emerged into the warm afternoon air.
     
    She stopped in her tracks. “What do you mean, no wake? What kind of funeral is this?”
     
    “The kind where the guy making the arrangements barely knew the deceased.”
     
    Mrs. Banks eyed him for a while. Her voice softened. “You can take me for a port and lemon. Large one mind. This one yours?” She indicated with her stick toward a sleek gray Jag.
     
    “No. Ours is on the far side of the car park.”
     
    “What’s it doing all the way over there? You can’t expect my legs to carry me. Unless you’re volunteering to do the honors?” She glared at Jake, and Jake glared right back.
     
    “Go and get the car,” Louis told him, half expecting to be snapped at again. Jake simply stuck out his jaw, spun on the balls of his feet, and huffed away.
     
    “You should’ve come to see her,” Mrs. Banks said, staring after Jake’s retreating back.
     
    Louis sighed. Now was not a good time to try to defend himself. “She didn’t want to know me. I wrote her several times over the years. I even sent her photos, but I—”
     
    “Seen ’em,” she said with a sage nod.
     
    Louis frowned. “My mother showed you photographs of me? Are you sure?”
     
    “Many a time.” She sounded sure enough. “You and your special friend abroad. Not the laddo.” She gestured in Jake’s general direction with her stick. “You get around, don’t you, sonny?”
     
    Did she mean get around as in travel? Or did she mean with men? She’d be right on the first count. Maybe right on the second, back in the day when Carter and he would share their bed with anyone who caught their eye. Or more precisely Carter’s eye.
     
    “Should’ve been a wake,” she said. “Thought you people liked to party.”
     
    “I’m afraid I’m not the partying kind,” Louis said, his mind still focused on the possibility his mother had actually read his letters and kept his photo. “I’m not much like my mother.”
     
    Mrs. Banks gave him the benefit of an extra-harsh stare. “Your mother hadn’t taken a drink in twenty years.”
     
    Louis waited for this new information sink in. “You mean she quit?”
     
    “The same day you abandoned her.”
     
    “I didn’t abandon her.” Louis frowned. “You know what she was like. The way she was.” He paused, his breath trapped in his chest. “I needed a parent, and she was never that to me.”
     
    The old woman said nothing but simply watched Louis try to conceal his grief a moment before speaking up again. “Forget the port. You take me home.” She patted his hand. “Got something for you there.”
     
    Before he could ask what exactly it was she had for him, Jake pulled up so close Louis had to shuffle back to avoid the tires.
     
    “This is your car?” Mrs. Banks squinted at the small, buglike vehicle with a disdainful curl of her fleshy lips.
     
    “Jake’s.” Louis opened the passenger door for her.
     
    “Figures.”
     
    With Louis’s help she eased herself inside. Louis sat in the back with her stick digging into his thigh while Mrs. Banks barked directions at Jake. Louis wondered how much this woman was to be believed. She seemed sincere enough, if rather blunt. Why hadn’t his mother answered his letter or his calls? He’d done everything over the years except fly in for a visit. His father had convinced him doing so would be a bad idea by claiming if she hadn’t wanted him at fifteen, she wasn’t likely to want him at twenty-five or thirty. So he hadn’t gone. And now it was too late.
     
    They arrived on a street lined with familiar rows of Victorian terraces, a street Louis had last seen from a taxi’s rear window. A shiver tingled the length of his spine. Nothing much had changed, not in all these years. The cars parked along the curb were more modern, of course, and more plentiful. The little grocery shop across the road had been converted to a house, but apart from that, he might’ve