The Higher Power of Lucky (5 page)
“No! The deal was one Olden Days story, plus you got a cookie. Time to go.” Lucky clomped to the screen door and opened it.
Miles put his head down on the table. “I
traded
you for the cookie,” he said in a tragic, muffled voice.
“Out, Miles.”
Very slowly, as if his head were made of heavy metal, Miles looked up. There was a little oval of sweat on the Formica where his head had been. He gave Lucky the same exact look as HMS Beagle when she wanted a piece of bacon. “Could you just read the part about the Snort?”
Lucky had a little place in her heart where there was a meanness gland. The meanness gland got active sometimes when Miles was around. She knew that
he
knew he had to do what Lucky wanted, because if he didn’t, she’d
never
be nice to him. Sometimes, with that meanness gland working, Lucky
liked
being mean to Miles.
“No,” she said. Miles’s head fell back onto the table.
“Chuck-karr, chuck-karr, chuck-karr,”
he warbled, a lost wild baby bird. Lucky noticed how small the thumb-sized hollow was at the back of his neck. “Please, please, please,” he moaned, “tell me the story of how Brigitte came to Hard Pan.”
As Brigitte’s Jeep pulled up outside, Lucky said, “Oh, get Brigitte to tell you.” When he looked up with his whole face filled with gladness, Lucky’s meanness gland felt better, like a heavy timber had rolled off it.
Brigitte swung up the steps to the kitchen trailer carrying two plastic sacks full of Government Surplus commodities. “Even though it is only eight o’clock, I do not want to see the
temperature
in centigrade,” she said. “If I see it only in Fahrenheit I am not so shocked—I do not let myself know what it really means. Miles, do you want to wash your hands?”
“No, thank you,” said Miles. Lucky watched as Brigitte pulled Government food out of the sacks: canned pork, canned apricots, butter, and a chunk of something orange.
“What’s this stuff? Cheese?” she asked, picking up the orangey brick-shaped thing packaged in a waxed box like a milk carton. It said
UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE
on the wrapping. It felt soft.
The last Saturday of the month, free Government food got delivered to the town. You only received free Government food if you had quite a small amount of money. If you had too much money, they wouldn’t give any food to you. Most people in Hard Pan didn’t have regular jobs, and maybe they got a check every month out of having a disability or being old or from fathers who didn’t like children, but it wasn’t very much. Most everyone in Hard Pan qualified for the free food.
“We will see,” said Brigitte, slitting the carton with a small knife. She sniffed the cheese. Lucky leaned in and smelled it too. Usually the kind of cheese that Brigitte loved smelled like dirty socks and had to be tightly wound in Saran Wrap so it didn’t smell up the whole fridge. This cheese had no smell at all.
“I do not know about this cheese,” said Brigitte, frowning. She cut off a small corner and held it out to HMS Beagle. HMS Beagle stretched her neck forward, her black nose almost touching the piece of cheese. She studied it with her nose twitching, then sighed and turned back to her place by the door.
Brigitte made a
pfff
sound, a little blast of air, and tossed the small corner of cheese in the garbage can.
“No wonder it is free, that cheese,” she said. “No one will pay for it.”
Miles began pounding his heels against the banquette. “Lucky said you would tell me the story of how you came to Hard Pan to take care of her,” he said.
Brigitte shrugged. “You know already, Miles. I come on the airplane after Lucky’s mother died.”
“Why didn’t Lucky’s father take care of her himself?” asked Miles.
Brigitte poofed air out of her mouth in a way she did to show she thought something was ridiculous. “He is,” she said, “in some ways, a very foolish man, Lucky’s father.”
Miles looked at Lucky to see if she agreed with this or not. Lucky stuck her face closer to his and made big-eyes at him as a way of telling him to shut up. Miles stuck
his
face out and made big-eyes back at her as a way of saying he
still
wanted to know if Lucky agreed that her father was foolish.
Lucky said, “So my father called up his first wife, who he was married to before he got married to my mother. And guess who that was?”
Miles stared at her. “Who?” he said.
“Brigitte!” said Lucky.
“Her?”
asked Miles. He turned to Brigitte, hugging his Buy-Mor-Store bag to his chest. He frowned at her and then at Lucky to show he didn’t want to be teased.
“Of course, me,” said Brigitte. She glanced up at a shiny metal thing like a vase on a high shelf. Lucky knew what was in it, but her mind did not like to stay thinking about it. Her brain went hopping off, like someone crossing a stream by jumping from stone to stone, quickly, so they wouldn’t have time to think about slipping and falling into the water.
“If Brigitte was married to Lucky’s father, then she is Lucky’s stepmother,” Miles said.
Lucky felt a little bit hypnotized, as if she were apart from her self and the self leaning on the sink was a totally other self. “No,” she said slowly. “Because they were married
before
.”
“Lucky’s father and I were married before Lucky was born, Miles,” Brigitte explained. “Her mother, Lucille, and I did not know one another. But Lucky’s father called me because he knew I would come.” She shrugged. “In France I have no job. Always I want to see California. He knew I will take care of Lucky for a while.
“So I agree. I say to him, ‘You buy me the ticket and I will come.’ ‘I have already the flight booked,’ he said. ‘You leave Paris tonight and arrive in Los Angeles tomorrow.’ So I fly to Los Angeles with my red silk dress and high-heeled shoes and only my one little suitcase.”
“What happened when you got to Los Angeles?” Miles asked. Lucky knew that Miles thought L.A. was a terrible place where people drove around in their cars all day, from morning to night. He and Short Sammy spent hours listening to L.A. traffic reports on the radio.
“Lucky’s father has rented a big American car that is waiting for me at the airport,” Brigitte said. “I drive and drive and drive and finally the city ends and the desert starts. Then I drive and drive and drive”—Brigitte air-drove a car, her hands gripping a pretend steering wheel—“until there is no more people, only desert, a
lot
of desert! I am a little frightened because there is too much space everywhere, and I almost drive into a cow and her little veal….”
“Her little
calf
,” Lucky said.
“Yes, the cow and her little calf. They are in the middle of the highway! Finally I drive until there is no more road, only dirt streets. There is a little sign, ‘Hard Pan, Pop. 43,’ and I am sad because Lucky’s
maman
has died, so now it is Pop. 42.”
They never changed the sign, though, Lucky realized. But because Brigitte came, it was still a true sign after all.
Brigitte squeezed into the banquette next to Miles.
“Did you find Lucky then?”
“No. When I get out of the car I see that it is very, very hot—as hot as today, but I had not ever been so hot in France.” Brigitte told the story in her excited French way, which was a way, Lucky thought, that made people listen more thoroughly. “So I go up to this house and it has a glass tower on the roof. I do not know it is the Captain’s house, of course. I do not know any person in America except Lucky’s father, who is in San Francisco. I am afraid to speak bad English, so I do not know what will happen. The man at the door has long gray hair and he is wearing some kind of big shirt with a rope for the waist. His dusty leather sandals and his beard make him seem like a person from the Bible.”
“The Captain doesn’t look from the Bible,” said Miles. “He looks normal.”
“To me, my first day in America, he looks actually like someone who has lost his marble. Later, I discover how nice he is, when he drives us back from Sierra City in his van after we return the rental car.”
“Don’t they have people like the Captain in France?” asked Miles.
“Not exactly,” said Brigitte. “Next what happens is I say, ‘Lucky?’ and I explain everything in French, but he does not understand. Then he says, ‘Oh! Oh! LUCK-y!’ because I have been saying this name with my accent the way I did before, ‘LU-key.’ Then he takes me up the hill to an old metal tank with a door in the front.”
“Short Sammy’s water tank!” Miles said.
“Yes, and Sammy comes out, but I do not know who he is. I see a tiny man with a hat like a cowboy—but a miniature cowboy. I think, no one has told me America is so strange.”
Lucky remembered this part brilliantly because she had been there, peering out from inside Sammy’s water tank house. Her first sight of Brigitte reminded Lucky of the beautiful ladies on Short Sammy’s calendar. Every month there was a different lady, looking very sparkly and smiley, and not wearing too many clothes. Brigitte’s dress fit her more like a bright red slip, except the twirly skirt gave you thoughts of dancing. Plus her blond hair was shiny and bouncy, and her lipstick was the perfect, exact same red as her dress. Her high-heeled shoes and creamy clean neck made Brigitte look way too French, and too…fancy for Hard Pan.
But the thing she remembered most strongly was that something bad to do with her mother had happened and she was at Short Sammy’s and her mother wasn’t there.
“Did Lucky know you were her Guardian?” Miles asked, smoothing the plastic of his Buy-Mor-Store bag, as if soothing a cat.
“No,” said Lucky. “She wasn’t, yet.”
“I was going only to stay a short while,” Brigitte explained. “Just until Lucky can be placed in a foster home. I promise her father that. I tell him that I must go home to France after.” Brigitte fanned herself with a piece of the waxed cheese carton.
Miles asked, “Was I born yet?”
“Yes,” said Brigitte. “You were a fat little boy of three years old then, almost a wild child, running everywhere in the town. Your grandmother is always looking for you.” Brigitte shrugged. “I try to understand American customs, but they are so different from mine. And Lucky for a long time cannot sleep unless I am with her. She is of course very sad and missing her
maman
.”
“Was I allowed to do anything I wanted?” asked Miles. He tucked the plastic sack tightly around his book.
“I thought it was perhaps the way of all American children to be so free,” Brigitte said. “I wanted Lucky to have a good American foster family who is letting her be a little bit free and also giving her some discipline.”
“Will Lucky have to go to a foster family where they make her take care of all the other little foster brothers and sisters?” Miles had asked Lucky about this before. It was something he had seen on a TV program.
“For a long time we cannot find
any
foster family for Lucky. Then her father tells me all the paperwork for California will be easier if I become her Guardian, especially because Lucky and I, we have already the same last name of Trimble. I say okay.” Brigitte got up and continued to put the Government Surplus food away, frowning at the canned pork.
Lucky was thinking that even though Brigitte said okay, she meant only until they
did
find a foster family. And if she had to take care of all the crying orphaned babies in her new foster family, that would mean leaving Hard Pan. Then the sign that still said
POP
.
43
would really be wrong.
But what Lucky wanted most was for that sign to stay the same forever, with no subtracting allowed.
After Miles left, while Brigitte went through a stack of bills to take to the post office later, Lucky thought hard about how to keep from having to go away and live with a foster family. Maybe if Brigitte realized that one day Lucky would become a world-famous scientist like Charles Darwin, she would stop missing France all the time. She would have the extreme glory of being a world-famous scientist’s Guardian.
Before she could become a
world
-famous scientist, Lucky needed to turn herself into a famous
Hard Pan
scientist, and the way to do that was to get lots of people to come to the Found Object Wind Chime Museum and Visitor Center. It was her job of cleaning its patio that had given Lucky a brilliant museum-improvement idea. The problem was that it wasn’t museumy
enough
. It was just glass cases against the walls with old mining equipment and old photos and a few old bugs, but not enough bugs or birds. Plus you couldn’t lean on the glass cases, which you needed to do in order to get a really good close look.
Lucky’s idea was that, even before she became
really
famous, people in other countries, and especially in France, would hear about the museum’s amazing new scientific display—Lucky already envisioned the display exactly—and they could come for a visit. Brigitte could talk French to them and explain that it was actually
her ward
(meaning Lucky herself) who had made the display. All the French mothers would wish
they
had wards like Lucky.
The timing to work on her secret museum-display idea was perfect, because at ten o’clock everyone in Hard Pan went to the post office for their mail. Since there was no market or restaurant or even a gas station in Hard Pan, people liked to stand around getting the latest news in town while they waited for the Captain to distribute the mail into each P.O. box. So Brigitte would be gone for at least half an hour, enough time for Lucky to get a good start on her display.
She was in her canned-ham trailer gathering her specimens together when Brigitte called from the connecting kitchen trailer.
“Did you put all your dirty clothes in the machine, Lucky? I am starting a wash.”
“Yeah, everything.”
“Can you listen for the end of the cycle and put the clothes in the dryer if I’m not back yet from the post office? I want these towels to have the California softness.”
“Okay.” California softness was Brigitte’s way of saying fluffy, dried-in-the-dryer towels, as opposed to straight, crispy, hung-on-the-clothesline towels.
“Do not forget, please, Lucky. I have to do the sheets after.”
“’Kay.”
