The Guardians by Andrew Pyper Page 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 still 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 recall 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. “Beendelivering 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 bills.”
    “Did he ever come down? To talk?”
    “Not a once.”
    “Always was an oddball,” Vince Sproule says, shaking his head. “But then there’s a point when oddballs 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.
    “I don’t really think about it.”
    “It was tragic. What happened. But maybe not just for, you know, those
involved
. You were a pretty good sniper yourself.”
    “It doesn’t—”
    “Who knows who would have noticed you. You could have—”
    “I told you, I don’t think about it. I do my best not to think about a lot of things.”
    “Sure. I can understand that,” Todd says, nodding as though at an insight into his own condition he’d long been blind to.
    Then something happens that delivers a sharp stab of jealousy: our waitress, the pretty referee, walks up and gives Todd a kiss on the cheek.
    “Don’t you just love this guy?” she says before slipping back into the crowd, and though it’s just more waitress banter, it’s obvious that she
does
love him. Lucky Todd Flanagan. Tina Uxbridge might have fooled around on him a few hundred times before dumping him. But if this referee is Todd’s new girlfriend, he’s bounced back quite nicely.
    Todd is grinning like a monkey. “You remember Tracey.”
    “Tracey?”
    “She was a lot smaller then.”
    Then I get it. The bundle of squawking joy Tina used to bring to the Guardians games.
    “That’s your daughter?”
    “You fancy-suit, big-city guys. They all as sharp as you?”
    “She was just a baby.”
    “Still is.”
    “Well, I have to thank you, Todd. You’ve just made me feel incredibly old.”
    “C’mon. You didn’t need me for that, did you?”
    I carry on to the men’s room, and when I return Todd and Vince have