"She was the only one who didn't coddle me. But she died pretty soon after that. That was the last thing she ever gave me. So I learned how to make it pretty well."

And Jim can definitely see why his counterpart left home. He'd certainly thought about it many times over the next few years. Every night he'd spend looking for an easy fuck in another backwater drinking hole. Every weekend he spent in jail for some misdemeanor or another. Every time he came home beat to hell and collapsed on the couch in the empty house his Mother was no longer in. He wondered about leaving.

What good would it do? Where would he go? The itch for exploration was buried then under a protective coating of alcohol and one night stands. Keeping him numb from his troubles and satisfied enough with the pleasures of the flesh not to push himself for anything more.

He'd proven on Tarsus what he was good for.

Jim didn't need to go anywhere to live up to that.

"I tooled around the neighboring states here and there but somehow I always ended up going back home. I wasn't living then, though. I was just existing from day to day."