I arrived about one to find the funeral home parking lot empty. I drove around the block a couple times before pulling my car into a spot across the street, near a busy intersection where traffic pooled before swirling away in little eddies of exhaust fumes. As I waited I turned up the radio, closed my eyes, and thought about warm summer days spent with Angela when we splashed around half naked in the river to cool off our overheated bodies. One song made me laugh out loud as I remembered the way slats of sunlight fell upon us as we lay sprawled on the floor of our cramped apartment eating dinner off paper plates.

            Within an hour the parking lot filled up completely, the mourners spilled out of cars and vanished through the doors in an endless procession. Looking at dull eyes in the rear view mirror, I straightened out my tie and pulled the keys from the ignition. Time to go.

            A neatly dressed woman, with a soft demeanour and a Wal-Mart smile, shoved a program into my hand and ushered me inside the chapel. Seeing all those who Angela had touched in her lifetime crammed in the chapel, I envied the love she inspired and wished I might be half as lucky when my time came.

            I took the last empty seat in the back row, next to an elderly gentlemen dressed in cashmere who spent the whole service clearing his throat of phlegm. In the breaks of the program, he turned to me and introduced himself as Barnes, an old family friend from Lethbridge. He told me how as a young girl Angela played the piano superbly, a regular child protégé, so he said. I never knew that about her, but should've suspected it when Angela ran her delicate fingers along the keys of an old piano we found in an Inglewood antique shop. She never played it. He said she'd given up a scholarship to the Royal Conservatory in Toronto for a young man she'd met the summer before college. In the last few years she'd begun playing again, he continued, but the dexterity had left her fingers and her playing just wasn't the same.

            After the service I waited until the hall emptied for a chance to be alone with her. I made my way over to the tiny casket and leaned over, pressing my hands to buffed mahogany. The cold surface surprised me, and it took a moment to warm my palms; in her life Angela was such a warm person I couldn't believe anything she touched could ever be so cold.

            "I got married, Angela," I whispered, lowering my face close to the casket, as if she could hear my voice through the thin walls keeping us apart. "Does that surprise you?" I imagined a smile cracking the rigor mortis in Angela's blue face on the other side.

            "She doesn't make me crazy or have your smile, but I love her any ways." Caressing the wood grain of the lid with my fingers, I remembered how the soft tussles of her hair felt in my hand. "You two would've got along famously."

            I never had the chance to say goodbye to her on that bridge twenty years ago. In the heat of our argument, with each of us tossing verbal grenades at each other, I cut her up with mean words and left unsaid the most important things – the things that really mattered.

            "Christ, what do you want from me?" I said, stepping back from her with my arms out to the side. Traffic rushed passed us on the bridge. "I don't get you, Angela. I just don't get you."

            She locked eyes with mine, holding me in her gaze for a long time before she spoke. "I want you. I want you, you selfish bastard." Her voice twisted, hoarse, and then, with her lower lip quivering, she burst into tears. I was conflicted; I wanted to throw my arms around her, take away all the pain I caused, but I also wanted her to bleed. 

            "I don't know what to say." I stood my ground, unflinching, even while my heart sank. In the fast moving river below, ducks paddled to the far shore with a grace I could never achieve.

            "If you don't know what to say, what are you doing here?"

            "I don't know." I avoided eye contact, staring out across the bridge at the grey river. "I don't know what to say any more."

            "So, that's it then," she said.

            "I guess so."

            "Fuck you! Fuck you!"

            It took me years to pull out all the shrapnel buried inside of me. This time, however, would be different; I'd have the final word. I lowered my lips close to the casket. "I'm sorry I was an asshole. I'm sorry things didn't work out," I told her, forcing a sad smile to my lips, and then feeling a weight fall from my shoulders, I said goodbye to Angela Haines, making the best peace I could to her memory. "I still think about you – us. I won't forget you."

            I tried to slip out unnoticed among the mourners pouring out of the service, but Angela's older brother, Jim, recognized me and yanked me aside. He insisted that I meet Angela's family, and despite my protests he refused to accept no for an answer telling me that Angela would've wanted me to meet them. "Don't think for a moment you're getting out of here without saying, 'Hi'," he warned me, tossing a heavy arm over my shoulder and pulling me close. While Jim's affable manner set me at ease, his weight on my back made it impossible to break loose.

            "Paul, I think there's someone here you'll want to meet," he said, patting me on my shoulder and shoving me down the hall. All along the hallway people stopped Jim to chat and pay their respects, and just as I thought I might escape his strong grip, Jim caught me by the arm and tugged me a little further towards the reception.

            He introduced me to Angela's husband, Glenn, a tall man with a reserved strength and a friendly smile, and I recognized the two little ones, Kyla and Dawson, both of whom made tight orbits about their father's leg. At the end of the line stood a thin young man, no more than nineteen or twenty, with short brown hair, sipping on a bottle of water.

            "And this is Brett," Jim said with a grin, squaring me up face to face with the young man. "Brett, this is Paul."

            "Nice to meet you," Brett said, putting his hand out to me. I took it, and he shook my hand with a confident squeeze.

            Seeing Angela's son for the first time, I stared into the sharp brown eyes of a young man I knew twenty years ago. The reflection in that mirror merged both my past and present, simultaneously. "And you too, Brett," I managed to mutter, feeling the blood rush out of my head.

            My God, Angela!

            Even after twenty years she had the final word … again.