The Guardians

Randy and I shuffle up the steps at St. Andrew's, flipping up colars against the cold drizzle. We're the last ones in, and while the nave is not large, the pews are no more than a sixth ful. I suppose I was expecting more of a crowd, something along the lines of a high-school memorial assembly, as if Ben were the seventeen-year-old victim of a tragic accident and not a forty- year-old suicide.

As the minister plods through the program of murmured prayers and hymns, I try to identify some of the other mourners. There's Todd and Vince, as promised, along with a couple of other Guardians, a startlingly obese Chuck Hastings next to Brad Wickenheiser with home-dyed hair the colour of tar. Aside from Mrs.

McAuliffe (a shrunken version of herself, inanimate and colapsed as a puppet after you pul out your hand), nobody looks particularly familiar. I search the rows for Carl. Though I know he's not here, I can't help feeling that if I look hard enough I'l find him.

The minister delivers the brief eulogy. A sterile recitation of Ben's staled resume: his 'lifelong commitment' to his mother, his love of fantasy books and the

'excitements of the imagination,' the loss of his father. There is no reference to the surveilance he conducted from his attic roost, nor to the vacant house across the street he believed to be the devil's pied- a- terre in Grimshaw.

After the service, everyone files past Ben's mom, the old woman offering a hand to be clasped. Yet when Randy and I reach her, she blinks us into focus and touches our cheeks. I ask if I can come around to the house in the morning to look over Ben's legal papers or do whatever an executor is supposed to do.

'Come anytime, Trevor,' she says, straightening my tie. 'I'l make tea.'

'I'l cal first.'

'If you like,' she says, shrugging. 'But I'l be there whether you cal or not.'

We take another cab down to the Old Grove. Ben's grave is next to his father's. The McAuliffe name engraved in stone at the head of both their places, their tombstones citing only their dates of birth and death, the latter events both at their own hands, whether counted as such on the official record or not. Even fewer have gathered for the burial than at the church, a clutch of shiverers shifting from foot to foot, the soft earth sucking at their shoes.

The minister is here again, though he does little more than run through a memorized 'Ashes to ashes, dust to dust' before they lower the casket into the ground.

'That's it,' Randy says next to me, and when I turn to him I see quiet, clear-eyed tears that mix with the spitting rain so that, from the other side of the grave, he would appear merely in need of an umbrela. 'That's it.'

'It makes it real, I know. Seeing him go.'

'Real? It's like I'm the one at the bottom of a hole. I can hardly breathe, man.'

I guide Randy a few feet away to the shelter of a maple. The two of us stand there watching the others drift back toward their cars. Some look our way as they go, perhaps recognizing us from some prehistoric geography class or peewee hockey team. Only one looks not at us but at me.

My body remembers her before I do.

A woman my age wearing a lace-colared blouse and beneath it a skirt that displays the powerful legs I have always associated with fresh-air-and-fruit-pie farmers'

wives. Almost certainly

a mom. Filing out her Sunday best with a few more pounds (welcome, to my eyes) than the day she bought it a couple of years back. A good-looking woman who belongs to a vintage I recognize (the same as mine), but not any particular person I know.

And yet, her eyes on me—friendly, but without invitation or promise—starts an immediate rush of desire. Not mere interest, either. Not any casual appraisal of a stranger's form, the kind of automatic sizing-up a man performs half a dozen times walking down a single city block. This has nothing to do with finding someone attractive. I smile uncertainly back at her and there it is: the almost forgotten clarity of lust. The only word for it. It is lust that races my breath into audible clicks, unlocks my knees and throws my hand out to Randy's shoulder to keep my balance.

'Is that Sarah?' I ask him. Randy looks over at the woman, her eyes now averted so that she stares into the dripping trees.

'I believe it is.'

'Sarah. Good God.'

'Look at you,' Randy says. 'Al moony like it's grade nine al over again.'

'It is,' I say, and take a deep breath. 'It is grade nine al over again.'

I start over to her with my hand extended, but she doesn't take it, kissing me once on each cheek instead.

'They do it twice in the city, right?' she says.

'You've got al the bases covered.'

She puls back to take a ful, evaluating look at me. 'So this is how my first love has turned out.'

'Must make you glad I wasn't your last.'

'I don't know about that. This is Grimshaw. For women over thirty, men with a pulse who don't smack you around are objects of desire.'

There is a whiff of divorce about her. The leeriness that comes from wondering if every kindness is a trick, coupled with the lonely's wilingness to hear out even the most obvious lie to the end. She's tough. But it's a toughness that has been learned, a buffer against charm and premature hope.