Jonah confesses in a whisper.The boy wizard has been doing a weird thing lately: he comes home from school, dumps the books out of his knapsack, then grabs a dusty rejected can from the back of the cupboard—fava beans, mandarin orange slices, cheddar-bacon soup—something given to them when they pick up boxes at the food shelf in the basement of the Congregational church during times of true desperation. Once he’s got his can, he leaves the apartment and doesn’t come home until dark.“Are you feeding animals or something?” Dahlia had asked the first afternoon he did it.“Sort of,” he had said, shrugging his shoulders and escaping before she could question him further.So today, after watching him drop a can of creamed corn and two Twinkies into his bag, Dahlia demanded to know what was going on and said she hoped for damn sure that Jonah wasn’t wasting Twinkies on raccoons.“The String Man?” she says, narrowing her eyes like she doesn’t quite believe him.Jonah shifts from foot to foot, fiddles with the straps of his knapsack.“Honest,”
