Mary does come to the funeral in the end. No husband and no kid in tow this time: nothing to prove anymore, he guesses.
Billy tells Pipe and John and John's girlfriend that he'll make his own way home, and walks to the graveside, standing next to Mary. They're almost alone: the people from the funeral home are off at a respectful distance, packing up something in the hearse.
Some asshole sent a flower wreath in the shape of a dollar sign. It's next to the grave, propped up on one of those little folding stands. Billy reaches for his cigarettes.
Joe is dead. Billy's life will never be the same. Mary is wearing Calvin Klein perfume.
"I knew something bad was going to happen," Mary says.
"What, you're fucking psychic now?" Billy says.
She rolls her eyes and tosses her hair. Billy didn't remember her having so much hair.
They both look into the open grave.
"Did you love him?" Mary asks.
"More than anybody else I've ever known since," Billy replies.
More than you, was the obvious subtext. Mary doesn't seem to mind, though: she just nods and accepts this as a statement of fact.
Mary pauses; and then, in a deliberately detached, cool voice, she says, "John told me he fucked you up the ass, and that's what went wrong. That was why the band broke up."
This was how Mary talked when she was trying hard to pretend that she didn't care. He'd heard her use that voice before, one time, when they were lying in bed together and she said So you're not gonna stay, huh?
He fucked you up the ass. Mary's eyes look a little wild and scared.
Billy counts to ten and tries to think. Mary hadn't spoken to John at the funeral, and they'd never really been friends back in the day, so she wouldn't have spoken to him until....
"Was that at the show in Regina?" he asks, and she nods.
"John had just lost his meds," he says, trying to make his voice gentle. "He didn't know what he was saying."
"But he was talking about something real, right?" she insists. "He didn't just invent it?"
Billy throws the butt of his cigarette into the open grave. Joe wouldn't have minded. Joe gave himself a Germs burn with a cigarette once and claimed that he liked the pain. Which was a lie, because Joe was a fucking baby, and when he fell down a skateboard ramp and had to get stitches he'd cried and sweated and begged for morphine.
Billy stepped back, paced a few steps away, then turned to face her.
He didn't want to talk about this.
Mary could be trusted, is the thing. She wasn't in the band, she wasn't even a roadie, but she had always kept their secrets. She had the same kind of blind loyalty they all felt, the kind that had dragged him back here for the tour.
So tell her. Bring her in from the cold.
"Years ago," he says, "When we first moved to Vancouver...."
Back before they got their band back, back when Joe was playing bass in a go-nowhere bar band called Lobotomy and Billy was just Billy, Joe's boyfriend instead of Billy Tallent.
"Joe and me were together. Together, like...."
Mary just looks at him. He turns away.
"We broke up just before we got the band back together, in 1981," he says. "That was the end. That was it."
That was a lie, but the only person who could prove it was lying in front of them, six feet under in a wooden box.
"I never knew that," Mary says, and then; "I'm sorry. Dumb thing to say."
"Nobody knew. Well, maybe a couple people, but....We never really talked about it after we broke up. Except. On the last tour, in 1990. I think Joe knew I wanted to leave. We were fighting all the time. He started bringing it up in front of the other guys."
He shrugs. "I guess he was trying to prove that he knew who I really was, what I really wanted." Trying to make it a joke, make it sordid, make it embarrassing. "So maybe John heard him then, and got confused."
And the fuck of it was, they'd been happy, for however long they'd dated - six months, maybe, if that. It hadn't been sordid, it hadn't been wrong.
Of course they'd broken up over something stupid, but it was a miracle Joe had ever allowed it to happen at all - dogged by a self-hatred that corrupted everything it touched, that consumed him, that made him want to take the good things he'd had and drag them through the dirt.
It had been a good thing. One of the few good things Billy could salvage, as he looked back on the wreckage of the last 15 years.
"I didn't know you were like that," Mary says.
"I'm not," Billy says, irritated. And she looks at him and he looks away, rubbing at his face. "I'm not - I'm not in denial. Sure, we were together, but I was young. I wasn't like Joe. I don't think he liked girls at all."
"That would certainly explain a few things," Mary mutters.
"Oh, what?" Billy says.
"Nothing!"
"Couldn't he get it up? I want details."
Mary hits him on the arm and says "Jesus, Billy, he's lying right there, dead."
"Yeah, he's dead, it can't hurt him, so tell me," Billy says.
"No," she says.
"Look at it this way," he says, "I'm your gay best friend-" and Mary laughs.
Damn, she was really pretty when she laughed, even wearing those dorky glasses. It was a shame she was married now. That big lunk from Saskatchewan didn't know what he had.
"You could never be my gay best friend, Billy," she says. "I don't even like you, and you just said you're not even gay."
And it was like Joe had never come between them.
"Wanna go get wasted?"
"Yeah," Mary says. Suddenly, she looks her age.
She opens her giant bag - Billy guesses that all women got given one of these giant handbags when they turned 30, to put their ibuprofen and tubes of lipstick and crochet kits and pocket books in. She pulls out a lighter and a packet of Marlboro reds. "Bye bye, Joe."
Billy put his arm over her shoulder as they left. It seemed like the right thing to do, since she was crying.