Harold Lundy was dead and we were at his funeral. My father, brother, and I were all wearing wrinkled dress shirts and dirty sneakers. We stood by awkwardly; our bodies slumped at the shoulders, our hands crossed in front of us, our heads bent, staring into the dirt. Harold was my father's best friend. Other than us, there were three workers from the complex Harold was staying in and the nurse that took care of him while he was dying of cancer. There were three Marines dressed in their uniforms and shiny shoes, holding the American flag.

I felt out of place.

None of us belonged except for my father, with his dingy work pants and disheveled shirt. My father was the only one there who wasn't required to be. The American flag looked stiff and cheap. I couldn't get over how itchy it looked, how hard it was for the soldiers to fold it into a triangle. We'd been to another funeral a few weeks before for our friend's father and they gave him a twenty-one-gun salute. His flag was silky and so colorful I thought the color was going to run right off into his wife's hands when they handed it to her. There were hundreds of mourners there.

Harold had my father.

Afterwards, standing with the nurses, my father kept telling stories about Harold. He talked about Harold being a Korean War Vet. He bragged about how smart his friend had been, how generous and caring. Harold was the reason my father got into photography, my father said. And he talked about how Harold, in his hand written will, had left my father everything in his one bedroom apartment, all the old books and faded clothing, and the gadgets, TV's and stereos that my father and Harold worked on in their spare time.

Shortly after that we went back to Harold's and we looted his place. I took a few paintings and books, two stools and a jacket. My brother took a set of speakers. We joked about taking the oxygen tanks yet to be removed by the hospice people. We fought through the smell of urine hovering over Harold's bed, and my brother and I listened close as my father told us those stories about Harold again. My father was a Vietnam War Veteran. His best friend was dead. I feared his funeral might someday look like Harold's had.

My father touched everything in the apartment, offering it to us. But in front of his sons he took nothing. He kept moving back and forth between the bedroom and the kitchen making sure we were looking at things and building small piles. My father went back on his own. I liked to think of it as a final secret between them, my father and his best friend. My father took the things that were important to Harold. I saw them, days later, in his apartment: a painting of a Vietnam War Vet Harold had done, the books on radio repair and electronics, sweaters and shirts and jackets that barely fit him. I imagined him alone in that apartment that smelled like his friend, and I could hear my father repeating the words he'd said to us, "Take anything you want, take everything you can."

Jon Chopan's work has previously appeared in Glimmer Train, Redivider, Swink, and flashquake. He is currently working on a collection of essays set in Rochester, New York.