At first, Irene’s daughter Karen was something of a stock character in Trevor’s mind. Not a villain, exactly, but definitely a variety of jerk. Rini would mention her from time to time and Trevor, unconsciously, built himself a picture based on his own assumptions intermingled with the vague details Irene sometimes passed along. For example, the daughter lived in Toronto, so that was pretty much a strike against her right there. Toronto, as every east coast Canadian is raised to understand, is where the nation’s arseholes congregate. It is a place for people who care only about work — but not even real work. Not construction, or the fisheries, but some vague, glad-handy business that takes place in office towers and requires the wearing of suits and a lot of insincere smiling and shaking of hands. Such people live in towers identical to the towers in which they work. They spend what little free time they have shuttling themselves from one tower to the next, existing at the gloomy heart of a cluster of such towers, where the rays of the sun can never reach them. They don’t have fields or backyards, because fields and backyards are places for picnics and barbecues, friends and families. And these people may have friends — insincerely grinning, glad-handy friends exactly like themselves — but they don’t have families. And they don’t have families, one supposes, because they don’t have souls.

Not that Irene described her city-dwelling daughter in such terms, but Trevor, as we know, had a habit of presumption. From Irene he gleaned merely: A City Person. Work That Kept Her Busy. No Kids and Over Forty. And so a picture developed in Trevor’s mind.

And speaking of pictures, Trevor got to see a few. This was once things got cozy between him and Irene, once he found himself coming over fairly regularly for dinners, spending an hour or two in Kelli’s recliner-throne downstairs afterwards to catch the occasional hockey game. (And some nights, I learned, if he’d had more than a couple of beers, Irene would even insist he stay the night in the spare room downstairs.) One such evening, Irene was keeping him company, working on her photo albums as Trevor watched the game. When “Coach’s Corner” came on, he muted it and wandered over to the couch where Irene was sitting to peer at the snapshots she’d been chuckling over. He remembered two in particular.

There was the snapshot from Kelli’s twentieth birthday party — me with my arms wrapped tightly around her as Kelli laughed but, being Kelli, simultaneously pulled away. I was wearing a party hat on either side of my head, like colourful conical horns. “You looked like fun,” said Trevor. “You didn’t look like the person I’d been imagining.” I had been drunk, I remembered. I’d been taking nips of something in my room in anticipation of the dance I was planning to meet my friends at once I’d finished having cake with Kelli and Irene.