“Little puffs,” I told her. “And don’t bother inhaling. Remember, you’re a teenager, so this isn’t about the nicotine; this is all about looking cool. Watch the expert.” I slouched down on the bench James Dean style, slid a cigarette into the corner of my lip, lit it and jutted my jaw to blow out smoke in a long stream. “There. See?”

She was giggling again. “You look like a gangster.”

“That’s the idea. If you want to go for the sophisticated starlet look, though, we can do that too. Sit up straight.” She did. “Cross your legs. Now, chin down, look at me sideways, purse up your lips, and . . .” She took a puff, threw in an extravagant wrist flourish and blew smoke at the sky. “Beautiful,” I said. “You are now officially the ice-coolest wild child on the block. Congratulations.”

Nora laughed and did it again. “I am, amn’t I?”

“Yep. Like a duck to water. I always knew there was a bad girl in there.”

After a moment she said, “Did you and Rosie use to meet out here?”

“Nah. I was too scared of your da.”

She nodded, examining the glowing tip of her smoke. “I was thinking about you, this evening.”

“Yeah? Why?”

“Rosie. And Kevin. Is that not why you came here, as well?”

“Yeah,” I said, carefully. “More or less. I figured, if anyone knows what the last few days have been like . . .”

“I miss her, Francis. A lot.”

“I know you do, babe. I know. So do I.”

“I wouldn’t have expected . . . Before, I only missed her once in a blue moon: when I had the baby and she wasn’t there to come see him, or when Ma or Da got on my nerves and I’d have loved to ring Rosie and give out about them. The rest of the time I barely thought about her, not any more. I’d other things to be thinking about. But when we found out she was dead, I couldn’t stop crying.”

“I’m not the crying type,” I said, “but I know what you mean.”

Nora tapped ash, aiming it into the gravel where Daddy might not spot it in the morning. She said, with painful jagged edges on her voice, “My husband doesn’t. He can’t understand what I’m upset about. Twenty years since I saw her, and I’m in bits . . . He said for me to pull myself together, before I upset the baba. My ma’s on the Valium, and my da thinks I should be looking after her, she’s the one lost a child . . . I kept thinking about you. I thought you were the only person who maybe wouldn’t think I was being stupid.”

I said, “I’d seen Kevin for a few hours out of the last twenty-two years, and it still hurts like hell. I don’t think you’re being stupid at all.”