“Tell me about the TV thing,” she said.

“It’s real good money.”

“But is it a good job?”

“Yeah, awesome,” Wahoo said, thinking: When you’re broke, any job is a good job.

Mickey Cray piped up: “Hey, my turn. Give it here.”

Wahoo told his mother goodbye and went outside with a five-gallon bucket of cat food for the raccoons. He was the only kid in school whose father was a professional animal wrangler, and life in the Cray household definitely wasn’t routine. Still, despite his missing thumb, Wahoo was able to do most normal things. He’d taught himself to write, shoot baskets and throw a baseball with his left hand. He could even turn a clean three-sixty on his wakeboard, when his dad had time to take him out on the boat.

One normal thing that the Crays couldn’t do together was go on summer vacations. Mickey didn’t trust anybody else to take care of the animals. One time, when Wahoo’s aunt Rose had passed away, the whole family flew up to West Virginia for the funeral. Mickey had asked Donny Dander to look after the critters, which turned out to be an expensive mistake. The Crays were gone only three days, but during that short time two rare parrots escaped, a lemur caught the flu and Alice bit the tail off of a crocodile.

“Where’s the darned aspirin?” Mickey hollered from the house.

“On the kitchen counter next to the coffee machine,” Wahoo called back.

The raccoons were always excited to see him because Wahoo’s arrival meant it was mealtime. When he entered the enclosure, they clustered around him, chittering noisily and tugging with their hand-like paws at his pockets. He poured the cat chow equally into four separate dishes, one for each corner, so that the hungry animals would split up. Whenever they stayed in one group, vicious fighting would erupt over the food. So loud was the screeching and snarling that one time a neighbor had phoned the police because she feared a gruesome murder was taking place behind the Cray house.