Lucky Breaks (5 page)

“You know we can’t, Miles,” Mrs. Prender bellowed. “We talked already. I can’t do with a lot of people at my place. It’s too small, and I can’t afford it anyway.”

“But I’m
finally
turning
six
!” Miles explained patiently, as if his grandmother just wasn’t getting the point. “If you add us up, Lucky and I are turning
seventeen
!”

Lucky wondered what kind of celebration most eleven-year-old birthday girls would want, and decided probably not a combined party with a cute, very stubborn, genius-IQ six-year-old. Suddenly she saw herself in a fancy ski lodge at Mammoth Lakes with high ceilings and candles. She was wearing her hair in a gorgeous swept-back way so it didn’t have its usual garden hedge look, with a headband made of glittery rhinestones, and a blue-sequined dress, and shiny matching blue eye shadow. She saw herself in the fancy hotel’s marble bathroom with her guest, Paloma, who would have a mascara wand in her purse that she
would show Lucky how to use. And Lucky would confess to her about staring at Pete-the-geologist’s scratchy cheeks and wanting to touch them.

Lucky knew the problem with her ideal birthday dream: It would be too expensive, way too expensive.

Brigitte said, “Yes, Miles, and you will love this party, another very Californian barbecue like tonight, and for dessert there will be some more some-mores.” No one corrected her. They all knew she’d need plenty of coaching to learn to say s’mores the right way.

After a while Miles nodded. He seemed to accept the situation of a small birthday party instead of a big celebration with the whole town. He stood at the Weber, mechanically turning his skewer, his head bowed, his back to the group. Lucky noticed that the marshmallow was finished cooking, but Miles just stood there, turning and turning.

“No, man,” Short Sammy said suddenly. “Let’s have the party up at my place. I only got three chairs, but there’s room for everyone in the town and then some.”

Brigitte looked doubtful, and Mrs. Prender shook her head. Mrs. Prender seemed to be speaking for both of them when she
said, “Nice a you to offer, but I still can’t afford no food and what-not for forty-three people, even with Brigitte and me sharing the costs.”

Short Sammy adjusted his cowboy hat and stretched his legs in their pointy-toed boots. “Naw. I mean I’ll
host
the party. I’ll cook up a big stew.”

Miles’s marshmallow caught fire, but he didn’t notice. He turned it, unseeing, and waited.

“That house of yours would need festivating,” said Dot. “It looks like a water tank.”

“Well, it
is
a water tank,” Short Sammy said.

“It’s a water tank with a great big box by the front door,” Dot said darkly. Lucky held her breath, wondering what would happen now that the whole situation had been brought out in the open. Dot plowed on. “That box gonna stay there, or what?” she demanded.

“Nope,” Sammy said. “Gonna take what’s in the box out of the box, man. Then I’ll sink that thing in the ground about halfway. It’ll be a surprise. And that’s all I’m saying about it right now.” He crossed his arms in front of his chest and pulled his cowboy hat down over his eyes. Everyone knew you couldn’t get Sammy to say another word when he did that. It was like a
CLOSED
sign in a store window.

“But Sammy,” Lucky said, “can’t you tell us at least if it’s a good surprise or a bad surprise?”

Sammy tilted his head back, looking at Lucky from under
the brim. “I imagine for some folks it’ll be a shocker and cause a lot of fuss; for others, maybe, pretty funny; and someone else’ll probably like the idea so much they’ll steal it from me. But I don’t want the whole town talking about it, deciding if it’s good or bad, until I’m ready. And that, man, will be the day of the party.”

There was a long silence. Lucky thought and thought about what Sammy had said, trying to figure out what he meant. If it was a casket, why bury it only halfway? That would just be too weird. Lucky looked around, but everyone was staring down at the ground, as if they were trying to understand too, or as if they were praying.

Finally Lincoln cleared his throat. “I’ll help you decorate, Dot,” he said. “I’m good at climbing ladders. You can tell me what to do. We’ll get the Captain to haul folding chairs up from the museum so people can sit out front in the yard.”

“Seems like a lot of fuss—,” Mrs. Prender began.

Brigitte said, “Next weekend we are busy at the Café with quite a few lunch reservations. Can we have this birthday for Miles and Lucky in the evening on Sunday? I will help you with the food, Sammy, and I will make a big cake because it is too many people each to make their own some-mores.”

“Good by me, man,” Sammy said, pushing his hat back off his forehead. “But I got the stew covered. Cake sounds about right.”

“Better practice blowing, you two,” Dot said to Miles and
Lucky, “to be sure you blow out all seventeen candles and get your wishes.”

Lucky wished that wishing really worked. If it did, her wishes would be that Short Sammy’s box had never arrived, that Paloma would be there for the party, and that Lincoln would not leave Hard Pan. And way in the back row of her wishes, slouched back there because it could probably never come true, was the one about her father. He had been married to both of her mothers: first to Brigitte in France before Lucky was born, and then to Lucille. They had both divorced him, one after the other, but they must have loved him too, at least at first. And he
must
—kind of, in his own way—love
her
, Lucky thought, because he had convinced Brigitte to come all the way from France to take care of her when she was eight and Lucille had died. He sent money every month and had helped Brigitte financially a little bit with starting up the Café. But even though
Lucky
hadn’t divorced her father, he never saw her or talked to her or wrote to her, and she didn’t understand why. And she wished she did understand, wished so strongly that it made her heart feel like a hard little forgotten scrunched-up ball of a washcloth with all the water squeezed out of it.

“My first wish,” Miles said, pulling Lucky back from thoughts of her father, “was to have a great big Hard Pan party, and that wish is already coming true.” He smiled the sweet way he did when you gave him a cookie, the way that made you give him a second one. Then he said something that echoed exactly
what Lucky had been thinking. “My other ones are the kind of wishes where they never come true but you wish them anyway. Do you ever have those, Brigitte?”

“Of course,” Brigitte said. “Adults have big, big wishes that we do not expect to come true. That is why we need so many more candles on our cakes.”

Everyone laughed and started talking all at once about wishes, everyone except Lucky. Sometimes what wishes do, Lucky knew, especially the big, big wishes, is churn up all the confusion and longing that sloshes around forever inside of you.

Lucky ate her s’more and listened to the others. But she didn’t want some more, and she didn’t laugh with them. She felt unseen, a lamp with its cord unplugged from the socket. No one really understood her, and partly the problem was that Lucky didn’t understand
herself
. She knew that deep in her heart she loved her family and her extended family and the town where she lived. It was fine that Brigitte wasn’t a regular sort of mother, and Lincoln wasn’t a typical kind of friend, and Miles wasn’t an actual little brother, and Short Sammy wasn’t a real grandfather, and Dot and Mrs. Prender weren’t blood-related family. But all of that was somehow not
enough
.

She leaned back and gazed up at the inky-black sky, crammed with stars. The moon looked like a happy-face smile on its side. “What I don’t get,” she said suddenly, “is the Milky Way.”

“Our galaxy,” Lincoln said, pointing at it with his metal skewer.

Everyone leaned their heads back to study the sky, which from this spot in their desert valley was like the inside of an immense black domed Weber lid. As if, Lucky thought, maybe God had a pesky second cousin once removed who’d played with the lid when she was a child, and she’d jabbed it a billion times from up above with her s’mores skewer. And we humans look up and see what we call stars, but really they are just bits of the immense light from beyond, shining through the jagged holes she made. If someone lifted that domed lid, the light would be so intense and so beautiful that all the people looking up would lie down on their backs, tears pouring out of their eyes, and die. Lucky decided to save this idea for later. It was the kind of strange and personal story that you couldn’t go around telling to just anyone.

“The part about it that I don’t get,” Lucky said, “is—”

“The Milky part?” Lincoln asked. “Dust particles,” he said, clasping his hands behind his head and leaning back into them.

“Not that,” Lucky said. “What I don’t get is how the Earth can be a member of the Milky Way galaxy when
we’re
over here and
it
is zillions of light-years from us, out there. Plus, our whole solar system is here—I mean, look at Venus.” Lucky pointed off to the side. “It’s not even close to the Milky Way! So how does it work that we’re
in
a galaxy that we’re
not
in?”

“When we were kids we learned all the planets in the solar system in order,” Dot said. “‘My very efficient mother just sewed us new pants.’”

Everyone turned to stare at Dot. She had plenty of news and gossip flowing into and out of her back-porch beauty salon, a lot of stuff you could never Google, but sometimes what she said sounded a little bit off.

“It’s how we remembered the placement,” Dot explained. “Starting closest to the sun, you take the first letter of each word in the saying. My/Mercury very/Venus efficient/Earth mother/Mars just/Jupiter sewed/Saturn us/Uranus new/Neptune pants/Pluto.”

“Pluto isn’t a planet any longer, man,” Short Sammy said. “They took it out a couple of years ago. Too small.”

“That’s not fair at
all
,” said Miles, whose own smallness often made
him
feel left out.

“Well, plus it ruins the whole saying,” Dot complained. “You can’t say, ‘My very efficient mother just sewed us new.’ Doesn’t make sense.”

“Wait, but nobody even gets my question,” Lucky said, “which is: How can the Milky Way be our
home
, and our solar system’s home, when it’s zillions of light-years away from us?”

There was a short silence as everyone thought this over. Then Mrs. Prender shouted, “It’s like a fried egg.”

“What is?” Miles asked.

“The Milky Way.”

Short Sammy spoke up. “And the Earth is like a grain of salt in the fried egg.”

Dot frowned and asked, “Where in the fried egg is the grain of salt?”

Short Sammy considered this. “In the yolk,” he said.

“No, it would be in the white part,” Dot reasoned. “The yolk would be the Black Hole.”

“Then it’s more like a doughnut than a fried egg,” Short Sammy began, as he put the lid on the Weber and closed all the vents. “Saves the coals, man,” he said to Brigitte. “They’ll stop burning, and you can relight them next time.”

Lucky had had enough of Hard Pan astronomy, which was confusing and not really about the Milky Way. She wished Paloma were there, so they could be by themselves and make their stomachs ache from laughing over fried eggs and black holes and doughnuts and Dot’s very efficient mother. No one else would understand. Miles was too young, the adults were too old, and Lincoln was too serious.

The guests began gathering up their plastic cups and metal skewers, agreeing that they’d all had a wonderful time, Dot getting in a last word about dwarf planets and how Pluto should be allowed, someday, to rejoin the solar system.

“It’s not that Pluto isn’t in the solar system, man,” Short Sammy explained. “It’s just not an official planet any longer.”

Lucky sighed. She helped Mrs. Prender find her flashlight in the bottom of the bag full of sticky skewers, uneaten graham crackers, and mushed-up marshmallows. Then everyone except Lincoln was leaving, following the thin blades of their flashlight beams to their cars.

As Lincoln helped Brigitte carry stuff inside, Lucky took the bag of trash around behind the trailers and dumped it in the
bin. She stood there in the pool of light from the kitchen window, listening to Lincoln and Brigitte’s laughter.

The “Way” in Milky Way doesn’t mean “way” like in,
Here’s the way to cook a marshmallow
.
Path
is what “Way” means. So, Lucky thought, instead of our Earth being a member of some other, easier galaxy, like the Clear Way or the Simple Way or the Turn Right at the Big Dipper Way, what we got for our very own home in the universe was a cloudy, confusing, smeared-milk Way. Lucky looked up at it again, so remote and distant, yet somehow our home.

HMS Beagle stood there, waiting to see if anything would drop out of the trash bin and to find out what would happen next. Lucky rubbed behind her dog’s ear. “Beag, is your Way a clear, uncomplicated, simple, easy Way?”

HMS Beagle gazed back at her. Yes, with Lucky there, it was.

“Good,” Lucky said. “Maybe, if I remember, I’ll Google the galaxy tomorrow, see what’s up.”

HMS Beagle agreed, but she forgot all about it the next day, and so did Lucky.