Free The Guardians by Andrew Pyper

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’ll make tea.”
    “I’ll call first.”
    “If you like,” she says, shrugging. “But I’ll be there whether you call 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 umbrella. “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-collared blouse and beneath it a skirt that displays the powerful legs I have always associatedwith fresh-air-and-fruit-pie farmers’ wives. Almost certainly a mom. Filling 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. “All moony like it’s grade nine all over again.”
    “It is,” I say, and take a deep breath. “It
is
grade nine all 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 all the bases covered.”
    She pulls back to take a full, 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 overthirty, 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 willingness 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.
    “I’m sorry,” she says, and for an absurd moment I think she’s