The Boy from Left Field Read Free

apartment on the Upper West Side, but she refused to have anything to do with her father. It seems he had offended her by disapproving, in no uncertain terms, of her fiancé, the man she loved. The couple had broken up years before as a result of her father’s interference, and she had never married, for which she blamed Mr. Rizzuto. Over the years she had avoided him — she wouldn’t even answer his emails, never mind take his phone calls or see him in person.
    “I can’t go to that city anymore,” he told Hawk. “It makes me too sad. I can’t enjoy baseball there — or anything. Just think! Me, a relative of the great Rizzuto, and I can’t even visit that place. Sure, I can go sit in the park they named after him in New Jersey, but I just haven’t got the heart to go anywhere near my Angelica. It’s the sadness of my life.”
    Hawk felt a lot of sympathy for Mr. Rizzuto, but he didn’t really understand the problem. It was like a lot of things with grownups — they seemed to tie themselves into knots when they didn’t have to. He knew how bad he’d feel if his mother moved away and wouldn’t talk to him — ever. But then he was a kid, and he needed his mum. If he was a grown-up like Mr. Rizzuto, and didn’t have to live in a broken-down taxi, and had two houses, a store, a nice car, and tickets to all the Blue Jays games, he didn’t think he’d feel so bad.
    Hawk glanced up at the dingy old sign that said RIZZUTO SHOES REPAIR , pressed his face against the window pane, and tried to see who was inside. He caught a glimpse of Chick, the old man’s sturdy assistant, working away at a bench behind the counter at what looked like a leather-stitching job. Chick usually wore a T-shirt with the Rizzuto number 10 on it to please his boss, but Hawk couldn’t see much through the smeared glass. He pulled back, rubbing his wet cheeks with the top of his slimy poncho.
    At that moment a bike bell rang behind him. He jumped as a girl’s voice shouted his name.
    “Hawk! How are you doing, bird-boy? Going to get your shoes fixed at last?”
    A blue bicycle zoomed up and braked so suddenly that Hawk thought the bright red panniers would fly off the back and the rider might follow them in an arc through the shoe-store window.
    She managed the stop very well, however, and seconds later she turned to him, a slender Asian girl with dark eyes, a bright smile, and a manner that seemed eager, almost restless, even though she was standing quite still.
    Hawk saw that she was busying herself with a white fluffy thing that squirmed and whimpered in the bike’s front basket.
    “It’s okay, Chew-Boy,” she said, patting the very small dog that seemed a bit taken aback by the jolting stop. “We’ll be home in a few minutes. Just giving him a ride,” she told Hawk. “He misses me sometimes.”
    “I’m Panny Chang,” she explained. “I saw you in the Rawson playground. Your shoes were worn out, and you fell and lost a sole. I notice you’ve got new ones, though.”
    Hawk remembered barging into a bunch of kids from the gifted class when he was playing dodge ball during lunch break a few weeks before. He’d crashed down against some tree roots in a far corner of the yard and lost a shoe, but instead of getting angry and shouting at him, the nerds just made a few witty jokes, tossed him his damaged shoe, and went back to some complicated game they were playing with cardboard origami figures.
    “Have you been at school recently?” Panny asked. (Hawk had heard that she got her nickname because of the colourful panniers she sported on her bike.) “Somebody in your class said you were living in a taxicab. I didn’t believe that, though.”
    “Believe it,” Hawk said. “It’s not too bad, really. Except on rainy days like this. I’m not in school now. Mrs. MacWhinney hates me and my mother wants to push her off a bridge. I want to get back to school, though. My mum’s trying to get me into gifted.”
    “Good