Excerpt: Current Affairs (working title)

Karen stood in the mis-named Family Room, and looked at the vase full of lilies that some well-wisher had sent to the funeral home. She'd argued with Frank about this, but finally she'd given in to the needs of her husband - and really, the rest of the family and the kids who had been on the trip with Steve.

She hadn't wanted a big ceremony for three reasons. One was that she didn't want to accept Steve's senseless death and move on. He was her only child. She was nearly fifty now; there was no way she could replace him, and she thought she could deal with it better if she just thought of him as gone rather than dead.

The second reason was more practical, and in a lot of ways harsher. There was nothing to have a funeral with. What they had sent back of Steve had been packed into a crate that was less than a foot on a side, mostly ashes, a couple of pieces of half-melted jewellery and a few teeth. Her son had been at the bottom of what was - by the end of it all - a seventeen vehicle pile up that had left a total of thirteen dead and eight wounded. There wasn't enough of him left to be burying. She could have fit it into an index card box and left it in the kitchen on her spice rack.

The third, final, and hardest reason was the other people. It would have been one thing to quietly inter him in the chapel columbarium with her husband, but his teacher had asked if there was going to be a ceremony because the other students were having a lot of trouble dealing with the death. Especially Sonja, who Karen had discovered was more or less Steve's girlfriend and had been pushing him hard to be intimate with her before hey had some kind of fight and he'd been killed the next day. It wasn't her fault any more than it would have been Santa Claus', but she was a sixteen year old girl whose first serious crush had to be identified by dental records. While Karen could understand her being messed up, she wasn't sure how it was her reponsibility to go through this circus to assauge her guilty conscience.

And the whole thing was a circus, Karen thought angrily as she glared at the innocent lilies. Once confirmation of Steve's death had ended up on the ABC affiliate, there had been a Facebook page and a memorial at the school and all of the ridiculousness that goes along with having a famous person die. Her and Frank had been interviewed several times by the various news media in the city and she supposed there would be another round after the funeral. It seemed like everywhere she went, some stranger would feel compelled to approach her and put their hand on her shoulder, telling her how sorry they were.

Karen Williams no longer gave a shit how sorry anyone else was. All she wanted was to be able to grieve her boy's death in peace. Unfortunately, her husband of twenty years had come down on the bread and circuses side of the argument and agreed that having a big funeral so everyone could come together and have a good cry and get it out of their system would be a better idea.

Thus, she was standing in the Family Room, without a family, giving death glares through her tears to a pot full of lilies, and trying to figure out how she was going to endure an hour and a half of total strangers moaning about how much they missed her son.

HER son. Not theirs.

But somehow in the process, he'd become theirs. Steve was just - well, she couldn't call him normal and be honest about it, because he wasn't - an average teenage boy. Not an icon. Not a figurehead for others to gather around. Not a focus for a whole city's false sympathies.

It was the way so much of it rang false to her that offended her the most, and the reason she hadn't wanted to do this to begin with. People she'd never known, never seen, never heard her son mention, approaching her like they had some right to her sorrow.