we got a replacement.” V glanced over. “Your little friend.”
“Balance, right?” Butch went back to looking out the front windshield. “It’s all about balance. Did you know your mom had another sister?”
“No. But there’s a lot I don’t know about her.”
“Well. There you go.”
As V’s phone went off with a text, he nodded at the unit in the console. “Check that will you. I’m feeling like I want to keep my eyes on the road tonight. Fuck only knows what happens next.”
Butch snagged the Samsung and put in his roommate’s passcode. As the thing came alive, he went into the text that had just come through. When he saw who it was from, he nearly put the screen back facedown.
Tossing the damn cell out the window also had an appeal.
Things were going so well. Couldn’t they have a moment’s peace—
“What is it?” V glanced over. “Something wrong?”
Butch sat up in the passenger seat a little higher. “Um . . . it’s, ah . . . here lemme open it. It’s a link.”
“From who?”
Yeeeeeah, maybe we’ll just wait on that, Butch thought. “Lassiter” was not a name he wanted to be tossing out all willy-nilly—
“What . . . the . . . fuck,” he breathed.
V’s foot came off the gas, that surgical RV they were trailing getting ahead of them. “What.”
Butch shook his head and restarted the video. “It’s Curt Schilling.”
Vishous’s recoil was so great, the other brother nearly snapped his neck. “The Curt Schilling?”
“TheCurtSchilling.” As in the Boston Red Sox right-handed, bloody-sock’d pitcher who had led the team to its first World Series Championship in eighty-six years, finally breaking the Curse of the Bambino after an agonizing drought. “The fucking Curt Schilling!”
“What’s he doing on my phone!”
“I don’t know!”
Okay, fine. It was quite possible the two of them were sounding like ten-year-old little boys. But it was TheCurtSchilling.
“Play it! Play it! Play—”
“I am! I am! I am—”
V wrenched the R8’s wheel to the right and slammed on the brakes, halting them on a shoulder of the road. Then the pair of them knocked heads as they leaned down to the screen.
Curt Schilling—TheCurtSchilling—looked into the camera that was videotaping and seemed a little confused as he spoke.
“Well, this is a new one. But hey, I’m game. Ah—Vishous?” Then on a mutter, “Helluva name you got there.” More normally now, “This is from your good friend, Lassiter. He wanted you to know that he’s really sorry for what he had to do. It was for your own good, and you know this, but he probably could have handled things better.” Another mutter, “Hope this doesn’t involve a woman.” Normal again, “Anyway, he wants you to know that he respects the hell out of you, and he said to tell you congratulations on your historic win. You and your roommate have saved everyone who matters and he promises that he’ll stand by both of you, forever.” Mutter. “Seems like a nice guy.” Normal. “Oh, and he tells me that not only are you and your roommate, Butch, watching this together, the two of you are diehard Red Sox fans. Go Sox!”
Schilling turned around and fiddled with something behind him. “One more thing. He paid extra to Cameo for this. He said it would mean the world to you both.”
From out of a stereo speaker, the unmistakable strumming and horns started.
Then, Neil Diamond’s famous voice: “Where it began, I can’t begin to know . . .”
The anthem of the Sox. The song that every Sox fan knew by heart. The lyrics that took you back to your first game at Fenway, and the hot dogs, and the sunshine on your face as you cheered for your team, and prayed that maybe this year, after so many years, after so many struggles, after whole generations of fans had been denied the victory, now this year it would happen and the faith and the hope and the loyalty would be rewarded.
With the win everyone wanted.
“Fuck,” Butch choked out.
“Goddamn it,” V muttered.
“—was in the spring,” Diamond continued, “Then spring became the summer . . .”
As tears started to fall, messy, nasty, thank God-they-were-alone-in-the-dark tears, V grabbed for Butch’s hand—or maybe it was the other way around.
And then, all three of them, TheCurtSchilling included, sang at the top of their lungs: “Sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet Caroliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiine . . .”
In the aftermath of unexpected, hard-fought, and hard-won victory, Butch held on to his very best friend, and sang the one song that could have broken through his manly shell to expose the