With a Little Luck: A Novel

In this life, you could grow old sitting around waiting to get lucky.

That didn’t come out right. What I meant is that waiting to accidentally run into Richard Branson in line to buy a burger at the very moment he’s desperately looking for a new Executive Vice President of Adventure and Party Planning (“You’ll just have to do,” he says as he whisks you away in the limo), or waiting for that falling safe to just miss hitting you before it smashes through the sidewalk and plummets into a sewer tunnel, or waiting for a wealthy, athletic, artistic, wise, unpretentious, multilingual, manly, sensitive contradiction of impossible handsomeness to lean over and say, “Excuse me—I believe I left my stethoscope here on the
way to the children’s hospital” … Well, let’s just agree you’re going to be waiting awhile.

Me? I don’t tempt fate. I don’t dare destiny.

I may talk about hitting the lottery, but the truth is I never play because deep inside—on some level that’s so far down it’s beneath where I keep the memory of the time I walked in on my parents showering—I know there’s no such thing as luck.

But I also have learned that believing there’s no such thing as luck is very unlucky. Like, the worst. Beyond stealing someone’s lucky four-leaf clover. (I know someone who did that and died. Seriously. Three years after doing it, he had a heart attack. And his great-granddaughter never forgave him—but I guess in some perverse way she got justice.)

If that sounds like a contradiction, I suppose maybe it is. But maybe not. Maybe I just don’t believe in
good
luck.
Bad
luck—particularly of the sort arising from ignoring intuition and superstitions—that’s another thing altogether.

The history of superstition is also a history of timing. We’ll never know whether a lone sober Trojan looked across the courtyard on that fateful night and said, “I don’t like the look of that horse thing. Bad luck.” But if he or she had, the protest would have fallen on deaf ears: The masses were completely tickled pink by the offering. History has shown that it pays to be suspicious of large, seemingly useless gifts from one’s sworn enemy. And that includes your aunt’s sketchy second husband.

Consider: If the captain of the
Titanic
had pulled out his tin bullhorn and announced, “Someone in first class just threw a shoe into a mirror and broke it, so I’ve got a bad feeling about this route—let’s slow down and head south,” then as a purely scientific matter, superstition would have saved that ship. I’m just saying.

And if I had only listened to my intuition—that socially acceptable
term for what is really superstition—I’d never have followed Emily Ottinger through that third yellow light (I swear it was still yellow) on the way to the mall and never would have ended up wrapping my mom’s new Audi around Mr. Pitrelli’s pickup truck when I was sixteen. Mean, old, grouchy, kid-hating Mr. Pitrelli, I might add.

One moment follows another. Next comes from previous. So you have to stay on your toes. Protect yourself. Listen to that little voice inside you that says, “Don’t do that! You won’t like the consequences.” Look at all the stuff that’s happened to you along the twisting road of your life—good and bad. Still think that all those seemingly disconnected, random events that have no interrelation, not even a simple correlation, have absolutely nothing to do with those best-laid plans crashing and burning in the face of your destiny? Tell my dad that. In a career spent chasing the elusive lucky score, he’s come up empty more times than a fashion model’s lunchbox.