Len and Norma Lose a Body

Chapter 3

Brian was 31 years old, a couple years younger than her dad, but they had formed an easy and solid friendship when Michael and Sharon moved back to town. Brian had only been in grade 9 when Michael was in grade 12. Their school was small enough that even with the three year age difference they had some similar friends. Not to say that Brian and Michael were friends in high school, but they had had a relationship that was friendly enough. Brian had played some hockey and on a few occasions had actually played with Michael's team. Brian remembered watching Michael play from the bench, impressed with Michael's speed and the uncanny way that he had to always be in the right place at the right time on the ice.

Michael Olson was a natural athlete that could have made himself into something, if he had tried a little harder. He had been invited to a Junior A hockey camp last season, but had been sent back down so that he could get more playing time to develop. In his grade 12 year Michael had been invited back to the same team's camp with a great chance of making it, but didn't even bother to show up for tryouts. Lots of the men in town at that time were saying that Michael was throwing his life away and wasting his talent staying on his home rep team, but Brian had always suspected that Mike wanted to remain a big fish in a small town rather than get swallowed up in a sea of other talented players.

Michael stood out on his home team not just as a great player, but as a great guy. He seemed to have everything, including Sharon. Brian had had a crush on his captain's girlfriend since he had been in grade seven, and he wasn't alone. The guys in the locker room used to always get Michael to talk because we all assumed that they were doing it, but Michael would just shrug it off explaining that the better you were at hockey the better looking girlfriends you got. "Pure scientific fact," Michael would continue, "which is why shitty players like the rest of you guys date dogs." Although they loved bantering amongst one another, the other senior players would eventually lose interest trying to pry anything out of Michael and move on to other topics, like parties and trucks."

Brian and Michael had seen each other habitually over the years after Michael graduated. At first Brian would see Michael at house and bush parties almost every other weekend, but as Brian's high school career continued he started seeing Michael less and less. Brian hadn't thought much about Michael Olson now that he was out of sight and out of mind. Brian continued high school playing hockey and having fun, and it wasn't until he had heard that Sharon was pregnant that he had sat down and thought about his old teammate.

The town was buzzing with the news of Sharon's pregnancy. Michael and Sharon had been dating forever, but still they were only 20 years old. For the last two and a half years Sharon had been going to university in Regina which allowed them to hide the fact that they were going to be parents until Sharon was already six months along. In a town this size, this was juicy news. Even the old men on coffee row where talking about it, adding details, repeating things that they had thought that they had heard, or simply just adding things that they wanted to have heard.

The most popular stories were the whispers that the baby wasn't Michael's at all, and that Sharon was duping poor Michael Olson. The people who talked about the pregnancy the least had been Diane and David Olson, Michael's mom and dad. Diane had been stoically livid on hearing the news and less than a week after she had been informed the whole town knew. She could sense when people were just dying the ask, but before they could get the words out of their mouth Diane would make a peripheral kind of eye contact, slightly cocking one eyebrow and fall into a tight lipped nod that relayed that, "Yes it's true and I don't want to talk about it."

The men of coffee row were notoriously the worst gossips in town convening every morning and every afternoon at the only café in town. The row consisted mostly of self employed men: the farmers, the men who practiced trades and of course the retired. If you wanted to know anything about anything you had to be on the row. David Olson was a regular on the row. The morning after he had heard the news about his son and his girlfriend he had hesitated for the first time at the front door of the café. David felt the heaviness of the café door and winced at the clamour of the three brass bells hanging in the doorframe that notified the kitchen staff of customers coming and going. "Was every entrance always that loud?" David thought in his head. But surprisingly no one seemed to notice the racket, David received a head nod, then two as the previous conversation continued and a verbal greeting would have been too big a break in the progression of the story at hand. Nobody knew anything; David could sense it in the reactions of the row. Relieved that they hadn't stopped talking at his arrival, David ordered a coffee, two cream.