Cynthia Kadohata - The Thing About Luck

“I think you should go in,” Jaz finally said.

“No, here she comes.”

Obaachan got into the truck with a paper in her hand.

“What took you so long?” I asked.

“We talk about wheat and Japanese woman his second cousin marry.” She started the engine.

“What does she have to do with wheat?”

“Nothing. He want to talk about it after he see me. I talk to him because he give good direction.” She pulled onto the highway again. “Big store in next town, but smaller one nearby. Keep eye open for Carver Avenue.”

We drove about a mile before we spotted Carver. Obaachan turned right, and we drove and drove and drove until she finally pulled over. She handed me the directions. “Read this. What I do wrong?”

I looked at the lines scrawled on the paper. “We were supposed to turn left on Carver.”

“He tell me right and draw left on map. I may not have photograph memory, but I know I right about this.”

When we finally reached the store, more than an hour had passed since we’d left the Laskey place. I had a sinking feeling that this was probably what the whole summer would be like as we searched for groceries in each new town, with me, Miss Talk So Good, asking clerk after clerk where the grocery store was. But it didn’t bother me so much. I knew we were here to save the mortgage.

By the time we got back to the farm, it was close to two thirty. Obaachan’s back was killing her. Still, she laid out a plastic cloth we’d bought with our own money and made the sandwiches on that. Obaachan was a perfectionist. Her sandwiches were works of art. She cut them into perfectly symmetrical triangles and always added a slice of onion so thin, you hardly knew it was there. And the meat was always in just the right place. You’d never take a bite and get too much bread and not enough meat. Then she’d use parsley to make it fancy, except she tore off parts of the parsley so that it looked more like a little flourish. I’d actually helped her write an article about sandwich making. She sent the article to a local paper, and when they didn’t publish it, she canceled our subscription.

The crew was probably starving to death. “You tell Mrs. Parker I finish. Don’t say ‘we’ finish,” she told me.

I climbed into the pickup and pressed the button on the radio. Mrs. Parker was still out driving one of the combines. “My grandmother is finished making the sandwiches,” I told her. “She’ll be right there.”

Obaachan had climbed into the driver’s seat with the sandwiches.

“What on Earth took so long?” Mrs. Parker asked.

“We had to find the store,” I said politely.

There was no answer at first, and then she said, “All right.” She clicked off, then clicked on again. “I forgot to tell you about the timetable. Starting tomorrow, we need breakfast at seven, lunch at noon, and dinner at seven. Why did it take so long to find a store?”

“We were unfamiliar with the area,” I answered.

“Couldn’t you ask someone?”

Obaachan yanked the microphone out of my hand and said, “Man at elevator where we get direction have to talk to me before he give me direction! It not my choice. You need talk to him.”

“What did he have to talk to you about?”

“His second cousin wife.”

No one said more into the radio.

“Mrs. Parker already drive me crazy,” Obaachan said. But I figured that before long, Obaachan would be driving Mrs. Parker crazy, so it would be even Steven.

Just for something to do, Jaz, Thunder, and I drove into the field with Obaachan.

Robbie was busy with what appeared to be a handheld video game or maybe a smartphone. Jaz would probably have sold me for a quarter if it meant he could get a video game. I thought about yelling hi to Robbie, but why couldn’t he be the one to call out to me? So neither of us said anything to the other, and after we gave Mrs. Parker the sandwiches, the combine roared away, Robbie disappearing into the fields.

When we got back, Obaachan groaned. “My neck is kill me, so you make dinner later. I may get up to help. Errrrrr.” She lay down on the ground, right where she’d been standing, in the shade from the pickup. First she dropped to all fours, and then she lowered herself carefully to her back.

I sat in the shade beside her and opened my sketchbook to a half-finished picture of a mosquito hanging in the air near a leaf. I had to draw his leg over and over before I could get it right. It was a male. A male mosquito has featherlike antennae that are fun to draw. The antennae of the female are more simple, and the palps are short. Palps help mosquitoes taste. Then there’s the evil proboscis. It’s like a living spear that stretches out from around a mosquito’s mouth. The females use it to stick in you and suck your blood and sometimes kill you. I had memorized this from Wikipedia: “Death is the permanent termination of the biological functions that sustain a living organism.”

Once, I had a very old dog, Shika, who one day followed me to the washing machine. I stopped to pet her, and I could sense that she really, really, really wanted to be petted. Then I pulled a comforter out of the washer and put it in the dryer. When I turned around, my dog was lying dead. I lay on the ground beside her and just held her until my mother found us. I didn’t even know how much time had passed, but the dryer had stopped. She’d known she was about to die and that was why she’d been so open to being petted.

My mother said that when I was dying and the nurse had left the room, Obaachan had lain beside me on the bed and held me. That was so hard for me to believe I thought my mother might be lying.

After I finished with my mosquito sketchbook, I picked up one of the books I had to read for school. It was called A Separate Peace. My teacher said I had to read three books over the summer. Even though it was for older kids, I chose A Separate Peace because it was the only book in English that Jiichan had ever read, and he wanted me to explain it to him. He was very troubled by the book and had been after me to read it all year. It was about two Caucasian guys who went to a boarding school during World War II. In other words, it was about a world completely alien to mine. I was already on page 30. Some kids I knew would read only books that were about something they could relate to. But I was interested in other stuff.

Jaz, in a huge straw hat, worked on his LEGO building right out in the hot sun. He was concentrating so hard on the building that I don’t know if he even realized he was in the sun. His construction was really very impressive. There were four floors, with balconies, and the insides were furnished. Nobody could talk to him when he was focused on his LEGOs, because he might have a meltdown. He might pound his head on something. He might throw a cup at you.

I looked around at the wheat in the distance. I knew there was also wheat on the other side of the highway. There was nowhere to go except to other wheat fields and nothing to do except walk through the wheat fields.

All three of us were drenched with sweat. I wished they had brought the employee camper first, but I also understood that working the fields was more important than whether or not I was sweating. I read the last few chapters of A Separate Peace. Okay, that wasn’t a good move. Now I felt even more confused. So I went back to where I was before to keep reading from there.