Salvage Read Free

like who ? Owen wondered.
    The old man held Owen's hand firmly, his frail arm fully extended once Owen had stepped back. He was dressed in a cheap gray suit with moth-eaten cuffs, his white beard stained yellow-brown by what appeared to be cigarette tar. The handshake was palsied, his gray eyes quivering in their sockets as the old man struggled to maintain a nearly savage eye contact.
    Owen turned to Gerald on his right: Gerald, with his ginger comb over, was tall to the point of being gangly, a full foot taller than Owen. Even their facial features were nothing alike. Gerald's nose was wide and flat, and as red as his hair from years of drinking. His chin was bulbous, and his potbelly was a round thing below his nearly concave chest. "He's not my fath—" Owen started to say, but the old man released his hand and moved on, briefly shaking hands with Owen's mother, who seemed to be obliged to fight back a snarl.
    You look just like him .
    Owen shook the hand of another mourner, a woman he didn't know who offered another bland cliché. He looked down the aisle of shuffling men and women, all in black attire, but the old man was gone, lost among the crowd gathered to mourn the loss of Lori Jean Saddler, dead much too young at the age of thirty-two.
    Owen's uncle Ralph played "Greensleeves" on the pub's upright piano, the instrument nicked and scratched from years of shattered glasses and dart playing. The dartboard hung very near Uncle Ralph's head while he played, mesmerizing his audience, most of whom had postponed their drinking for the song's duration after realizing the man was no novice piano player.
    If there was ever a time to cry, it was then, and for a moment Owen thought he might be able to squeeze out a tear or two. But the song ended before he could conjure up the necessary emotion, and everyone who'd gathered around the piano was clapping and cheering. The moment had come and gone. His eyes remained dry.
    Lori's death a little over a week earlier had shaken him, yet he hadn't wept then, either. The words "Your sister's had an accident" had struck him like a bulldozer. He'd felt her death as an aching emptiness in his chest—a feeling that should have brought tears in a functioning human being, popping the cork that held back the waterworks. On an intellectual level, he knew he was sad. Lori had meant the world to him—had saved him, really. He'd been shy before her arrival in the world, withdrawn. But, in many ways, having her in his life had helped him bloom. Without her courage to inspire him, he might never have come out of his shell to acquire the few friends he'd made (and subsequently lost) over the years. Without her encouragement to dampen his doubts and fears—of rejection, of failure, of never being quite good enough for anything or anyone—he might never have graduated high school or gone on to university to become an architect or built homes and hospital additions and green roofs on skyscrapers hundreds of feet in the air. Even the wind farm, his current project located a few dozen kilometers north of the city, owed itself to Lori's prodding.
    Without having had Lori in his life, Owen might have been lost. Now, with her gone, he truly was lost. He felt untethered to reality, with only his mother left to keep him grounded. And still, the tears wouldn't come.
    "Don't you just wanna knock the smiles off all these fucking people's faces?"
    Trevor, one of Lori's childhood friends, stood beside Owen at the table of hors d'oeuvres . Uncle Ralph was playing an upbeat tune Owen didn't recognize. Mourners wore smiles and chatted again, raising glasses in toasts and moving their heads to the music. Owen chewed the mouthful of cracker and Hungarian salami—which he'd just shoved into his face before Trevor had interrupted—and swallowed it dry.
    "It's nice they're smiling," Owen lied. "Isn't that what wakes are for? To celebrate life?"
    "Sure, but look at them." His whisper was conspiratorial, a devil on