I don’t remember much of what the Dean said in the twenty minutes that he lectured me following the reading. I do remember that I kept putting my head between my legs, which I’m sure the Dean interpreted as a show of shame but was really an attempt to keep from passing out. Just before I left his office, Mort returned the letter to me. “I’m going to be honest with you, Dunphy,” he said. “I didn’t want you here in the first place.” He pointed at me with his bandaged hand. “I know your type. You won’t make it. However, as far as your slate here goes, I consider you clean. I don’t care how much dope or booze you’ve had in the past, I’ll treat you like everyone else until you show me otherwise. But, of course, you will show me otherwise.”

For the first few weeks at Cornwall, all I could think about was my brother. Jackie had come home six months after his accident with a wheelchair and a few railroad tracks running down his back. We stayed in and read magazines about the outdoors. At night we listened to the Boston or Providence College teams on the radio. It’s not that our house had suddenly become a luau, it’s just that the city was a nightmare. The people, the weather, the sidewalks, the traffic—it wasn’t a good place for a kid in a wheelchair.

By the next fall we’d started getting out a day or two each week. On Saturdays we had a job packing donations at the Salvation Army bin near the old man’s shop. We’d been getting our stuff there free for years so we did it for nothing. And each Sunday that the Patriots had a home game we’d pack a lunch and a radio and thumb twenty miles up Route 1 to Schaefer Stadium.

You’d be amazed how difficult that is. Thumbing with someone in a wheelchair, I mean. I guess most people either didn’t want to deal with getting the chair into their car or they were afraid he was going to piss all over the place. The first couple times Jackie felt bad for himself and said it was probably his fault that cars weren’t stopping. “You’re crazy,” I told him, “it’s definitely your fault.”

Whenever there were a lot of empty seats the security guards let us right into the stadium. Usually, though, we sat in the parking lot and listened to the game on my brother’s transistor radio. Jackie loved hearing the roar of the crowd when there was a big play.