![]() ![]() His grandpa had given it to him on his fifth birthday, not long after Nate came to live with him. ![]() ![]() Nate did three things every morning after listening to the mockingbird.įirst, he slipped his lucky rabbit’s foot from beneath his pillow. “It’s the eleventh of April on my eleventh birthday. “But it is my eleventh birthday,” Nate declared to the mockingbird. He did not hear anything that might account for the tiny flicker of hope fluttering like a moth in his heart. ![]() He heard the hum of the refrigerator and the steady thump thump thump in his chest. He heard the mockingbird singing its heart out in the magnolia tree outside his bedroom window. He heard his grandpa snoring on the couch in the living room of their tiny trailer. Nate awoke that spring morning of his eleventh birthday with an unaccountably light and fluttery feeling in his chest. Scrawnier than most, hunch-shouldered against the bad luck that rained down upon him, that boy was pure unlucky. Anyone in Paradise Beach would tell you that if one of their 313 residents was going to be struck by lightning - struck out of the clear blue sky on his birthday - that person would be Nathaniel Harlow.īecause wasn’t it Nate whose hound dog was snatched up by a tornado, doghouse and all, never to be seen again? And wasn’t it Nate who never, ever, in the history of his eleven years on God’s green earth, won a coin toss or found a prize in the bottom of his Cracker Jack box?īad luck seemed to dog Nate Harlow’s heels like his long-lost hound. ![]()
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