Friday, July 15, 2005, was a date marked on the kitchen calendar. We didn’t often mark dates on the calendar. But this was the night that Dean and I were going to a Red Sox game.
We could not have picked a more auspicious date. Boston, the defending World Champion, was in first place in the American League East with a 50–39 record. They had finally erased the Curse of the Bambino the previous autumn in a four-game series sweep of my beloved St. Louis Cardinals. That was cool; Dean and I were die-hard Bosox fans now. The visitors were their ancient rivals the New York Yankees, in third place at 47–41, but just two and a half games behind Boston. Johnny Damon, with his flowing mane, was hitting a ton for the Sox at .346. Alex Rodriguez was leading the Ancient Rivals at a .316 clip. The game had all the makings of a showdown.
I had secured two tickets to this game several weeks earlier. I would pick Dean up at his newspaper office in Montpelier; the two of us would share the driving down to Boston and then back home the same night. None of the family had ever been inside Fenway. The closest I’d come was that motel across the street on my visit to Kevin the previous spring, when I’d listened to the invisible crowd release its home-run roar.
The portly southpaw veteran David Wells took the hill for the Town Team against journeyman right-hander Tim Redding of the Bronx Bombers that night. The Sox chased Redding in the second inning with the bases loaded and none out, and leading 3–0. Yankee reliever Darrell May got a force-out at third base on a ground ball by “Papi” Ortiz, with Mark Bellhorn scoring; but then Manny Ramirez golfed a fly-ball double off the Green Monster in left to bring home Edgar Renteria, “the Barranquilla Baby.” Trot Nixon, next up, lashed a screaming drive past Melky Cabrera to the center-field wall that was good for an inside-the-park home run. Ortiz and Ramirez circled the bases ahead of Trot, and it was 8–0 Red Sox before all the fans were in their seats. Before it was over, Papi unloaded a grand slam into the right-field seats, his twenty-third round-tripper en route to forty-seven for the season. Dean and I never made it to the game.
Friday was garbage-pickup day in Middlebury. I awoke not long after dawn, as usual, to haul the bloated black vinyl bags from the kitchen down the basement stairs and through the garage to the driveway, where they would await the noisy trash-compacting white truck.
It was on my second trip down the stairs, just before I turned left to enter the garage, that I grew aware of a presence off to my right in the basement gloom, and I turned.
There was Kevin, his head bowed, a familiar posture. A dusty little window just under the ceiling, on his far side, allowed some weak morning light to play on his hair, not enough to fire up the gold. For just a fraction of a second I thought I had found him getting some early-morning practice in. Then I realized that he had not moved, and no sound came from his guitar.