been his mother's, the pub a few blocks west, and the Ukrainian Roman Catholic Church and LVIV Hall, southeast.
He moved between the plant, the church, the pub and two daughters he didn't understand but meant well by.
The car was parked in the back lot and was freezing cold when they climbed in. Ed watched his youngest daughter as she adjusted the seat and rear view mirror, and wondered at her height. She couldn't be much younger than the new girl they had working in the cafeteria, the one at the till during the first morning break. One day she was going to be pretty, not like her rough sister who already had lines caused by smoking.
Ed didn't wonder anymore what their mother would've thought about how their lives were going, or what she'd say about Liz moving out and Charlotte skipping school. It had been too long and it didn't matter. In the dimming car light he looked at the grease under his fingernails, which he could never completely clean away. They all got older.
He went to work and came home and the repetition of it didn't kill him like it did other people, so that was good enough. He wasn't on the line like his father had been, and that would be a tough day to get through after the seventh or eighth year. Working in the tool and die shop fixing the machinery that the men ran all day was good, and he enjoyed knowing that he could make everyone's job go smoothly.
Sometimes Ed enjoyed the odd drink with the guys from the old neighbourhood, men whose mothers cooked at the Ukrainian hall. He listened closely to their stories about working on a car together, fishing that weekend, or how they got a drunken call at two in the morning for a tow out of a snow bank. He didn't know any man who would call him for such a favor, and there was no man he would call himself.
There'd been Mike Boychuck back at South Simcoe High, but that was decades ago. They'd both belonged to the dance group at LVIV, and played basketball together in senior year, but after graduation they spent less and less time together. Then Ed got the job at GM and eventually they stopped talking altogether. Once when Liz was still living at home he thought of asking her why she never kept the same friends, and he wondered how she made new ones so
