pattern as he had in middle school. The difference between loner and loser was one letter.
Which was he?
“Oh, Jackie!” his mother said as she hugged him for the umpteenth time since he’d dropped the bomb about finding the body. “Wil my miracle boy be
able to sleep tonight?”
“It’s Jack, Mom.
He’d been cal ed Jackie—at least at home—for most of his life. But he was heading for high school now where he wanted to be
proving the hardest to break of the habit.
As for “miracle boy”—forget about it. He’d come along when she’d thought she was through with having children, thus the name. She’d no doubt cal him
that on her deathbed.
Mom dying … he brushed the thought away. He couldn’t imagine it. He expected her and Dad to live forever.
He had her brown hair and brown eyes, and her love of music, although their tastes were nothing alike. She listened to the same Broadway albums over
and over—
“Synchronicity” off the new Police album.
She used to be thin but now complained about putting on weight these past couple of years. He’d heard her blame it on “the changes.”
“Okay, yes,” she said smiling at him.
“Just think: Whenever you’re about to say ‘Jackie,’ cut it in half.”
She laughed. “I’l try, I’l try.”
She turned on the dishwasher and headed for the living room to read. She loved novels and belonged to both the Literary Guild and the Book-of-the
Month Club. He’d noticed she was reading something cal ed
Jack had the kitchen with its dark cabinets, Formica counters, and Congoleum floor to himself. The house had started as a three-bedroom ranch and
probably would have remained so if not for Jack. Not so many years after his arrival, his folks had added dormers and finished off the attic into a master
bedroom suite. They moved upstairs, leaving the downstairs bedrooms to the kids.
He retrieved a bag of pink pistachios from a cabinet and sat down at the kitchen counter to shel them. Rather than eating one at a time, he liked to
col ect a pile of twenty or so and gobble them al at once. As he shel ed, he thought about dinner, just recently finished.
The hot topic of conversation around the table had been—no surprise—the body. Tons of speculation on who it was, how old it was, whether it was an
ancient Lenape Indian mummy or the victim of a mob hit transported down here from New York in a trunk and buried where they thought it would never be
found. Or that maybe it was Marcie Kurek, the sophomore who’d disappeared from SBC Regional last year and never been heard from since. That idea
had silenced the table.
Otherwise it had been kind of fun listening to al the theories. One of those increasingly rare family dinners when everybody was present. What with Tom
back and forth to Seton Hal law school and Kate getting ready to start med school at UMDNJ in Stratford, that hardly ever happened anymore. Most
nights lately it had been just Mom, Dad, and Jack.
Of course the event wouldn’t have been complete without the inevitable lecture from Dad about the dangers of kids wandering through the Pine Barrens
without adults. Jack had listened patiently, trying to look interested, but he’d heard it so many times he could recite it by heart. Dad was a good guy, but he
just didn’t get it.
Yeah, the Barrens had its dangers. Some of the Pineys were what they cal ed inbreds—what his brother Tom liked to cal “the result of brothers and
sisters getting too frisky with each other”—and maybe a little unpredictable. And you could come upon a copperhead or timber rattler, or lose some toes
to a snapping turtle if you dangled a bare foot in the wrong pond. But you learned to keep your eyes open … you became Pine-wise.
