Robert Edward Kainan killed himself in the fall of 1999.

I wasn't there, but it's where my story begins.

It begins with Rob, 17 years old, sitting in a burning car in the middle of a crowded parking lot one Monday night in October.

He burned for nearly four hours before the police let the firemen near enough to

put out the flames and put out his body. I didn't know him. Not really. We lived in a small

town. I knew him by sight and knew his name. I doubt we'd ever exchanged more than a few

perfunctory words. It makes me feel funny talking about him.

Like I'm not justified doing it,

but I'm going to tell you about the spire.

It's unavoidable.

I have to tell you about Robert Edward Keenan

and how the suicide note he left behind

angled up my life with his.

Yeah. angled up my life with his. Back then, we both lived in a sleepy town in New England,

a little over an hour northwest of Boston,

just across the New Hampshire border.

The sort of place that's nice to live,

if you're the sort of person that doesn't like doing very much.

There's really only three reasons anyone's step foot in my hometown.

The first is that they're on their way over to Nashua, the shopping mecca of the northeast.

The second would be the ice cream.

You have a dairy farm where they sell the world's best ice cream.

...