For a few minutes longer you and Lionel stand on the sidewalk before the house, staring and blinking as if you could never get enough of seeing whatever it is you are seeing: a house like many others in the neighborhood, and in South Niagara; what might be called a family home, two story, neatly painted, scattered tall trees, evergreen shrubs, what appears to be a flower bed or garden alongside the house where your mother once tried to establish a garden. You find yourself smiling, recalling the groundhog that infuriated your mother, running with astonishing alacrity to its burrow, leaving behind a ravaged garden.

Lionel says: “Remember the God-damned groundhog, Jerr and I killed?” Lionel laughs, crumpling the beer can in his fist.

Killed? You don’t remember this.

“Slammed the fucker with the shovel. Flattened his fucking head.”

Such vehemence, such an air of righteous indignation. “Mom told us to. Chased him all over the God-damned yard.”

You are feeling just slightly faint, off-balance. No memory of a groundhog being chased all over the yard with a shovel, let alone killed . . .

But here is a more disturbing memory: how, beyond the rear of the property, in the no-man’s-land above the river, your brothers hastily and carelessly buried the baseball bat that would incriminate them. So unreliable is memory, so surreal, you could swear you’d seen them kicking leaves, compost, debris over the body of Hadrian Johnson dumped into a shallow grave with the bat.

Muttering to himself, laughing, Lionel fumbles for another can of beer and cracks it open. Offers this one to you—(if the gesture is mock-gallant you chose not to notice)— and you see yourself take the can from his fingers out of a wish to seem friendly to your brother, not to seem not-friendly to him, not wishing to offend him, or to suggest (to him) that you imagine yourself superior (to him), lifting the can still cool from the refrigerator to your lips, and taking a (small) swallow.

Then handing it back to Lionel. As if this is something the two of you do frequently, sharing a can of Molson’s on the street.

Such rapport between you! Indeed if someone were observing the two of you from the second floor of the house, your father for instance, frowning and staring, shaking his head in (bemused) disbelief, he would identify you not only as sister and brother but as close friends, companions.

But you are choking, just a little. Swallowed the (bitter) beer the wrong way.

“Weird. ‘Family’ means so much to people.”

This is Lionel’s observation. Quite unlike anything you have heard Lionel say.

“Well. There isn’t much else, is there?”—a likely reply, a female/sister reply, though you are not convinced that it’s so. “I mean, for most people.”

Lionel shrugs. Drinks. Something angry, aggrieved about your brother’s thirst.