He lit another cigarette, and I watched him do it, hating how much he looked like our dead brother. Were Robert here instead of Jason, he’d have wrapped me up, laughing. He’d have squeezed so hard I couldn’t breathe, then he’d have pushed me back, mussed my hair, and said, My God, look how you’ve grown. I often wondered if war had changed him as it changed Jason. Was he harder in those last days? Or was it Robert’s goodness that got him killed in the end, some softness that my other brother lacked?

“What are you doing tomorrow?” Jason asked.

“I don’t know. Hanging out, I guess.”

“Let’s do it together, the two of us. You have a car. I know some girls.” He smiled around the cigarette, then pulled in smoke and streamed it through his nostrils. “Robert and I used to do that, you know. Back roads and cold beers, life before the war. What do you say? It could be like old times.”

“What girls?” I asked.

“This guy.” Jason hooked a thumb, and looked at Chance. “What does it matter, what girls? You don’t trust me?”

“It’s not that…”

I hesitated, and Jason’s grin faded. “Don’t say it’s our mother.”

“You know how she is.”

“You’re going to bail on a day with two fine women and your long-lost brother because it might upset our mother?”

“You’re not around, man. You don’t see how she gets.”

“Let me guess. Demanding? Judgmental?”

“I’d call it overprotective.”

Jason shook his head, and pulled hard on the bottle. “You don’t think Robert would want us to be in each other’s lives? You don’t think that, deep down, even Dad thinks it’s wrong, the way she keeps us apart? But hey, you know what? It’s cool.” He flicked the cigarette, and showed the brightest, coldest eyes I’d ever seen. “If you’re not man enough…”

“Don’t say that, Jason.”

“Man enough. Grown enough.”

“Screw you, dude.”

He grinned again, and looked at the cliff. “If you were man enough, you’d have made the dive. You used to be a tough little nut. You remember that? How that felt?”

The bright eyes were a challenge, and I felt the same coldness in me. “Like you could make that dive,” I said.

“Any day of the week.”

“Not a chance in hell.”

“Oh really?”

“Yeah, really.”

“How about this, then? I make the dive now, and we go out tomorrow, you and me. Not only that, but you tell Mom what you’re doing. You tell her all of it—me, the girls—you tell her all of it and see what she says.”

I stared at the cliff, thinking of my mother. Different kind of ledge. Different kind of dying. “You understand what she’s afraid of, right?”