The Guardians

shows no special interest in us either. She is simply, generously, unselfconsciously making our day and nothing more.

As the afternoon turns to evening, the pitchers come and go in steady succession. The sudden emotion that had gripped us earlier is replaced with easy talk, catching up. He takes me on a comic tour of the low points of his acting career ('I've got nothing but low points!'), the cattle cals and megalomaniac furniture-commercial directors and gigs as an extra on a handful of Holywood blockbusters, most notably as 'a bartender who slides a Manhattan over to George Clooney . . . which apparently I was doing wrong somehow, because they cut me out and spliced in somebody else's hand.' I tel him about my Parkinson's. How I sold Retox and was doing little but waiting for things to get worse. Somehow, though, I felt I related al this misfortune in the same tone Randy related his: plainly and without self- pity, each of us acknowledging that we had been visited by our measure of failure and regret, as everyone has at our stage of the game.

And through it al, we remember Ben. How his life was wasted on a pointless obsession. And then his death, so preventable and yet unsurprising, even fated. But we quickly shift away from the outcome of Ben McAuliffe's narrative to a greatest hits of scenes from his youth, his dorky visions, his sleepy goaltending. Soon Randy and I are laughing and coughing and laughing again, which we're thankful for, seeing as it makes our anguished tears look to the rest of the room like beer-fueled hilarity.

Some time later I make my way to the men's room and see how busy the place has gotten. The work crews kicking the mud off their boots, the girls-night-outers squeezed into their finest denim. Even a clutch of suits tossing back a couple of after-work quickies before heading home to the newer streets north of the river.

And then two faces I recognize. Stepping out of the crowd and offering hands to shake. A big felow in a Canada Post parka first, folowed by his stout, patchily bearded friend.

'Trev? Holy shit! I was right. It's you!' the first one says, and claps me in a bear hug.

'Todd?'

'Glad to know the grey hair didn't throw you off too much.'

' Todd Flanagan?'

'Last name too. Nice work.'

'How's Tina? You two stil together?'

'Long gone,' Todd reports. 'Tina was not a stick-around sort of girl.' Todd loops his arm around the bearded guy's neck. 'Here's another test. Can you recal the name of this walking sieve right here?'

'Vince Sproule,' I announce, catching in the toothy grin a glimpse of the eighteen-year-old he once was. 'Grimshaw's greatest goalie ever.'

'He was quick, wasn't he?'

'Not so much these days,' Vince says, pretending to snatch an oncoming puck out of the air. 'Three kids and too many Egg McMuffins can slow you down after a while.'

Todd and Vince were Guardians too, teammates on the high- school team. And though they were only two years ahead of us at the time, they look a decade older than we do now, bloated and shambling. But content too, I'd say. The added pounds that come with snacks in front of the game-of-the-week and unrenewed gym memberships.

'A terrible thing,' Todd says, his hand on my shoulder. 'About Ben.'

'It is.'

'Guess you're here for the funeral.'

'Randy too.'

'No shit?'

'He's sitting over there. In the corner.'

Todd and Vince squint over the heads of other patrons to find Randy waving back at us, like a long-lost cousin at airport arrivals.

'It's a goddamn team reunion,' Vince says.

'Wish it could have been for better reasons,' Todd adds, and I'm moved by how plainly he means it.

'We're going to miss him,' I say.

'Us too,' Todd says. 'It's a funny thing. I probably saw him more than anyone the past while.'

'You visited?'

'I'm a mailman,' Todd says, pointing to the Canada Post patch on the chest of his jacket as though to offer proof. 'Been delivering to Ben's neighbourhood pretty much since I took the job. I'd wave up at him in that window, Monday to Friday, before going up the steps to drop off the bils.'

'Did he ever come down? To talk?'

'Not a once.'

'Always was an oddbal,' Vince Sproule says, shaking his head. 'But then there's a point when oddbals turn just sad. You know what I mean?'

'I do.'

'Never much of a goalie, either,' Todd says.

'It's a good thing we had you, Vince.'

'You ever wonder how far we could have gone that year, Trev?' Todd asks.