Lucky Breaks (13 page)

Lucky smelled the stew all the way from the top of the hill. It was a tender-meat-and-vegetable smell that made you want to grab a bowl and a spoon. But as soon as the water tank house came into view, Miles came crashing toward them, and HMS Beagle charged toward Miles. “Where
were
you?” demanded Miles, his arms full of dog. “I waited and waited for you! My mom called! She’s coming home in April! Only seven months!”

Seeing Miles like this made Lucky understand the expression, “He was beside himself.” It was like Miles was so excited his skin couldn’t handle the job of keeping him contained inside it. He went on, “The party’s starting, and Short Sammy won’t come out of his house, and Brigitte brought the ’ologists, but it’s okay
because the Captain says there’s enough stew for an
army
. Plus, I was
worried
, Lucky. You shouldn’t make me worry so much like that, especially when it’s our birthdays.”

“I know,” said Lucky, grateful that at least
Miles
had worried about her. “I shouldn’t have been gone so long.” His hair had been cut in a way that let you see the darker soft under-coat, a thick cushion for the coppery curls on top. His neck seemed very small and vulnerable. Lucky curled her hand gently around the back of that little-boy neck. “Happy birthday, Miles,” she said.

Miles looked up and frowned at her. “Did something happen to you, Lucky?” he asked.

Lucky laughed the kind of laugh when it’s not about something funny, and then said, “Let’s just say I’ve had my ups and downs today, Miles.”

“No one
ever e
xplains things to me,” Miles complained. “Even though I’m a whole year older, I still don’t understand anything.”

“Don’t worry, Miles,” Lucky said, her voice now sad and resigned, like a grown-up’s. “Neither do I.”

“But guess what! We found out what Short Sammy’s box had in it! A bathtub! The Captain explained it to us, because Sammy’s in his house with the door closed.”

“A bathtub? What would Sammy do with a bathtub?”

“Well, later, when he uses it
as
a bathtub, he told the Captain he’ll soak under the stars and listen to the L.A. traffic report
and have the best bathroom in the world—outside! He’ll fill her up in the morning, cover the tub with a sheet of black plastic, and pretty soon the water will be heated by the sun. Plus, he can drain it to water his plants. And it’s half-sunk in a hole, but resting on cinderblocks, so he can build a fire underneath the tub in winter—it’s cast-iron. That’s why it was so heavy.”

Lucky was absorbing all this, and her heart squeezed and squeezed itself with relief that it was not a casket after all. “But what did you mean when you said, ‘when he uses it as a bathtub’? What else would he use it for?”

“Can’t you smell it? He and the Captain cooked a stew with fourteen chickens in it! And onions and carrots and potatoes and celery, Lucky. A big army-regulation birthday chicken stew.”

“But—in a bathtub?”

“Come
on
, Lucky,” Miles said, pulling her hand, pulling her toward the laughter and the celebration. “It’s a real old tub,” he explained as they walked, “but Short Sammy had the inside re-enameled by a buddy of his, so it’s like a brand-new cooking pot. Brigitte took pictures and said it was the most amazing American thing she ever saw.”

And at that moment, Brigitte herself came running toward them, wearing an apron and a worried scowl—a lot like the gaze that could pin you to your chair and see the bad thoughts hidden in your mind.

“Miles,” Brigitte said, pulling off her apron, “please take this to the Captain. Tell him I come back soon to help, after I talk with Lucky.”

“Wait,” Lucky said. “Take HMS Beagle with you and give her a bowl of water, okay? I’ll be right there.”

“Okay, but hurry!” Miles said, and, followed by the dog, he ran back to the party.

Brigitte sat on the ground and pulled Lucky down next to her. “Are you all right, Lucky? You smell funny, like inside a tomb. And I see that you were crying and you are covered with dirt. You have been doing what?” Brigitte held Lucky’s face close to her own face, peering into her eyes as if Lucky were a precious fragile doll.

“Nothing. Just fooling around. I got a splinter.”

Brigitte examined Lucky’s palm, said that the splinter would come out easily, then looked again with her blue-green
eyes into Lucky’s light brown ones. Lucky tried to twist away but Brigitte held her face, waiting. Lucky tried to stare back, but it was like looking at the sun. It seared her eyeballs and made tears well up behind them. Calm and steady, Brigitte still waited.

“I climbed down into an abandoned well,” Lucky said finally. “The ladder broke and Paloma went for help and she got lost but Lincoln found her and then they came and fished me out with his net.”

“Oh,
ma puce.
” Brigitte sighed and wrapped her arms tightly around Lucky.

“But now Lincoln hates me,” Lucky said, beginning to cry. She felt as if she’d been laboring all day long: trudging around in the desert, crying hard, being mad, being scared. She felt deeply weary.

“Why does Lincoln rescue you if he hates you?” Brigitte asked.

“He’ll always rescue people, even ones who are hateful.”

“This is confusing, Lucky. You and Lincoln do not hate each other.”

Lucky didn’t answer. She shook her head against Brigitte’s shoulder.

Brigitte said, “You are smart,
ma fille
, but not always sensible.”

Lucky loved it when Brigitte called her “my daughter.” “I know,” she said, and she truly did.

After a while Lucky stopped crying and Brigitte said, “I hope Paloma does not have this smell of earth too. Her
maman
will not like it.”

“No,” Lucky said. “Paloma was smart
and
sensible. I should have listened to her.”

“Mmmm. Good. I think the next time you will listen to Paloma if there is a question of danger. And maybe you will listen to your own big heart when there is a question about Lincoln. Now we go to the party and eat a very good dinner from a bathtub, and later tonight you will tell me more.”

“Yes,” said Lucky, and made to get up. But Brigitte said, “Wait,” and pulled a small hinged box from her pocket. “It is very old,” she said. “It first belongs to my
arrière-grand-mère
, the mother of the mother of my mother. My mother give it to me when I am eleven and now I give it to you for your birthday.”

It was a sparkling deep red jewel, a ruby, Brigitte explained, in a gold setting on a thin gold chain. The necklace, light and delicate, had been worn for years and years, for
generations
, by Brigitte’s relatives. Now Lucky realized that she herself was also connected, that the links of the chain reached across distance and time to encircle her with those relatives. She lifted her hair so that Brigitte could fasten the clasp at the back of her neck. She felt, suddenly, a little bit French. During all the time that Brigitte had been becoming more American, Lucky never once thought that she, too, might change. She traced the outline of the ruby
against her skin and had a sensation of having evolved in some invisible way. She carefully stowed the box in a safe place in her backpack and kissed Brigitte on each cheek, exactly the way a French daughter would do.

Brigitte put her hands on Lucky’s shoulders. “One more thing, Lucky. Since I am only a beginning parent, I am not sure of what will be your punishment. Maybe you can give me advice, when we talk. You will explain to me what other mothers will do when their daughters do not obey. When there is broken trust. What do you think, Lucky?”

Lucky knew Brigitte was both serious, the part about her punishment, and teasing, because of Lucky’s frequent reminders that she was only a beginning parent. “Okay,” she said.

And then suddenly Lucky had a question. “Brigitte, why does my father hate me?”

Brigitte scowled. “It is true that he behaves very badly, horribly; he is not a father to you at all. But I know he does not hate you, Lucky. I think he—” She shook her head and looked off to the side.

It was Lucky’s turn to look into Brigitte’s eyes and hold her gaze. “You think he what?”

“I think he is…afraid. Afraid not of
you
, but of being a father, being responsible. He fears for you to love him because if you do, he will have to love you back. So he is acting in a way that will make you not want to love him.” She raised a shoulder. “It is not your fault that he is this way. Do you understand that, Lucky?”

Even though she still had plenty of questions, Lucky sort of did understand. She nodded and touched her necklace, and for the first time in her life, she felt sorry for her father. After a while Brigitte got to her feet and reached for Lucky’s hands, pulling her up. Then they stood leaning against each other, looking down the hill at their little town of Hard Pan.

While Brigitte went to help the Captain, Lucky cut around behind the guests to Short Sammy’s water tank house, which was wearing a garland of balloons tied to a rope completely encircling the top. It smelled like a good mixture of metal, dog, bacon grease, and Sammy. Lucky felt both hungry and not hungry for explanations; reasons why she should be happy, but wasn’t.

The front door was firmly shut, so she made her way to a rear window, which was a square hole cut into the tin, and peered inside. Sammy had his back to her, but she could see he was bending over his little table, rubbing something onto the paws of a small dog who lay there on its side. Hearing or sensing her, the dog raised its head and looked right at her, smiling a goofy dog-smile that Lucky had seen before. She had seen that dog-smile often on a photograph in a sardine-can frame, hanging from a nail on Sammy’s wall.

It was Roy. The dog that saved Sammy’s life and got bit on the scrotum by a rattlesnake. Sammy, who blamed himself for the injury, had pledged to quit drinking if Roy were to get well, and Roy did recover because he was given the antivenom in time. But Sammy’s wife had walked out on him, and she had taken Roy with her. And as far as Lucky knew, Sammy had never seen Roy again until today.

But why had Roy been out on the highway, so far from where Sammy’s ex-wife lived in Sierra City?

Suddenly Sammy, too, turned his head and locked eyes with Lucky. “Well,” he said.

Realizing that she’d been caught peering into Sammy’s house without his knowing it, Lucky improvised. “I was looking…,” she began.

“Who are you looking for, man? Someone in here?” Sammy gestured toward the empty round room. He sounded mad.

“I was in big trouble and I needed you,” she said. Even to her, her voice sounded wrong. It sounded accusing.

Sammy gathered the dog in his arms, straightened up slowly, and came to the window opening. He looked into Lucky’s eyes. She studied the uneven edge of the cutout window. He should tack up screens. All the pests in the
world could come in those openings and bother him. Lucky kicked a rock against the tin wall of his house.

“I’m sorry, man. Been kind of busy. Are you okay now? What happened?”

Lucky sighed deeply. “Oh, Miles told me the story of the lost brooch and I was looking for it and got trapped. But I made it out and I’m fine. I guess.”

“Oh, man, you didn’t climb down into that well, did you? Oh, hell, Lucky, you did.” Sammy shook his head. “Brigitte know about it?”

“More or less, yeah.”

“How’d Lincoln get you out? It
was
Lincoln, wasn’t it?”

Lucky folded her arms up against the corrugated metal wall and rested her forehead on them. She spoke looking down at the ground. “Hauled me up in his net. I thought it wouldn’t work and I’d crash through and fall and break every bone in my body.”

“You didn’t trust
Lincoln
? He knows more about knots and nets than Miles knows about cookies. He’d never do anything risky when it comes to that kind of operation.”

Lucky didn’t answer. She knew he was right. Sammy mentioning trust ignited a sudden little fire of shame in her heart and sent the heat of it to her face.

Sammy sighed. “Poor old Roy.” His voice wasn’t mad any longer. It sounded sad. “Sometimes we get this great gift, man, and we just take it for granted. We only figure it out, how much we lost, when it’s gone.”

Lucky felt like sobbing and kicking rocks at the same time. She reached through the opening and touched Roy’s small head. She didn’t mention that she knew all about Roy and what he had done for Sammy.

“Is he going to die?” she asked.

“Well, yeah. We all are. But not yet; we still have time. He sure wanted to be home with me. What about you, man? Have you found whatever you’ve been looking for?”

“Are you talking about Lincoln or Paloma?” Lucky couldn’t be sure of anything. She wanted to be only six, like Miles, so she wouldn’t have to face all these complicated situations.

“You tell me, man.” Short Sammy shifted Roy’s weight, carefully supporting the dog’s body.

Lucky was silent, and after a moment Sammy said, “Roy walked a long way to find me. He can’t explain why, but me and him, we both understand.” Sammy looked out past Lucky for a moment, as if seeing all those miles of highway Roy had traveled. “You have to pay attention. It’s not as easy with people, man, but it’s possible.” Sammy turned away from her. He lowered Roy gently onto a pile of old towels and T-shirts, a Sammy-smelling makeshift bed for his dog.

Lucky went to find her friends.