J E N N Y M A N Z E R
10
short for Jackie Robinson, the great baseball player.
My dad had told me all about him. J.R. seemed
confused that we had moved. I guess all the smells
were different.
“You want go out, buddy?”
He did. He trotted to the front door, his fluffy
tail dusting the furniture as he went.
“Caz,” my mom said as she poured herself, like,
her eighteenth cup of coffee. “If you meet people in
the neighborhood, say hello.”
“I will, I will,” I muttered. J.R. looked so happy
to go out that I nearly felt happy too. I’d be just
another boy in the neighborhood. A boy with a
secret. But maybe all boys had secrets.
The rain had let up a bit, and sun tried to burn
through the gray beard of clouds. Redburn was a
suburb of SeaTac, which was a suburb of Seattle.
We were in a sub-suburb. We’d moved here because
Redburn was a small, friendly place, my mom said,
close to my dad’s job at the airport. Wikipedia had
told me that Redburn has a population of sixteen
thousand. It said nothing about baseball teams.
J.R. and I walked for a couple of blocks, past all
the parked minivans and lawns as green as billiard
tables, and I watched my sneakers move forward.
When we lived in Toronto, I never spent much time
