SAL
Before Sal moved to his uncles’ place, he lived with his mother in a little blue house on Third Street in Marzen. It had two bedrooms, one small, the other smaller, and a front porch just wide enough for a rocking chair. In front the road was hard-packed sand, and in back the yard ran up against a hill. Sometimes rabbits came down the hill, and foxes. Sal’s mother wanted to get chickens, but she worried about the foxes, so she never did.
When Sal asked the social worker if he could stay in the little blue house after his mother died, she told him children couldn’t live without adults. He’d known that, of course, just as he’d known the house really belonged to Mr Simpson, the retired army man who lived on the corner. He’d only asked because he needed her to know how badly he wished he
