Cynthia Kadohata - The Thing About Luck

“Because nobody’s as smart as you,” Jaz said.

“I’m not going to pick,” I protested.

Obaachan nodded her head a few times and turned left. We drove down the highway, surrounded by wheat fields. You just couldn’t get away from them.

Out of the blue Obaachan said, “Fifteen times four.”

She liked to test my math because I wasn’t very good at it. Of course, we were way past multiplication tables in school. “Sixty,” I said.

“No!”

“Obaachan, it is.”

She pulled the truck over and took out a pen and paper from her handbag. “Let’s see ... carry two ... Okay, you right. See? You say I never admit when I wrong. Take that back.”

“But this is the first time.”

“Take back and say you make mistake.”

“I take it back and I made a mistake,” I said. I didn’t see how she could turn her being wrong into me saying I made a mistake. So I added, “But you made a mistake too!”

“That subject finished,” she replied.

Jaz hit his head softly on the dashboard. With each thunk, he’d say one word. “I. Didn’t. Make. A. Mistake.”

Basically, Thunder was the only normal person in the truck, and he wasn’t even a person.

Jaz suddenly sat very straight and still, and then his shoulders relaxed again. Then he started talking.

“So last night I woke up and my action figures were alive. They were talking about a raging battle. The sergeant asked me if I wanted to go fight, but I didn’t want to because I was too sleepy.”

I looked out the window as Jaz’s voice continued. “The sergeant told me to take a cold shower to wake myself up. So I did that, but then I thought I still didn’t want to go to battle because I’m just a kid. Battles are for grown-ups.”

I leaned back as he went on, talking about what each action figure was wearing, what their dog tag numbers were, what their hair looked like, if they had skinny or fat fingers, and a million other details. My parents had taken him to three different child psychologists in Wichita. One psychologist said he had ADHD, one said he had PDD-NOS, and one said he was OCD. I wasn’t sure what the initials stood for except for OCD, which meant “obsessive-compulsive disorder.” That was why he would use only his three special cups. All three doctors wanted him on medication for his head-banging, but my parents refused. So did my grandparents. We had all learned to live with him, so what was the problem? It was just a part of life.

Though nothing was in front of us, Obaachan suddenly slowed down, and we all jerked forward with the momentum. My grandmother’s braking strategy was always a mystery to me. I was about to ask her why she’d braked but then thought better of it, because she would only say something that would somehow make it all my fault. I might not have been a genius in general, but when it came to Obaachan, I did have a smart thought now and then.

I leaned over Thunder and made little noises like most people would for a baby. Obaachan kept up her strange braking strategy. Finally, I couldn’t stop myself. “Obaachan, why do you keep braking?” I asked.

“Every time you make noise to Thunder, I think I about to hit something. It your fault. If you no like, call taxi.”

I ignored that.

There was no wind, and the wheat was still. I wondered what the fortune-teller would say about that. The sky filled suddenly with clouds, but they disappeared so quickly that you would have had a hard time convincing someone it had just been cloudy.

I peered through the back windshield at the highway curving through the wheat. Highway. Wheat. Sky. So simple. Compared to a city like Wichita, it all looked like a doorway to another world—our world. I always had this weird feeling as I stared out at the wheat, like the dust of my personality was settling a bit, like instead of me ever being confused or with my thoughts all over the place, I was just me, without any questions about anything or any worries or even any sadness. But that was impossible, because I didn’t even like wheat. Did I?

A mosquito zzz-ed in the air in front of me, and I smashed it by clapping my hands together. I looked at it. It was a male; it had the feathery proboscis.

In that old movie The Fly , Jeff Goldblum was half fly, half man. When I was so sick, that’s kind of what I felt like. I felt like I was turning into something that wasn’t me. Some scientists wanted to eradicate all the mosquitoes in the world, because they thought only good could come of that and it would prevent diseases like dengue, West Nile virus, and malaria. I wondered if that was true or whether every living thing had a purpose.

“What are you doing in here?” I asked the smashed mosquito.

“Obaachan, Summer is talking to dead mosquitoes again,” Jaz said, causing Obaachan to laugh.

Then Obaachan stopped laughing and said, “Summer and Jaz always make me forget pain.”

The supermarket was air-conditioned. Basically, it was paradise. Except for two cashiers at the front, it was totally empty as far as I could see. I didn’t get to go to a supermarket very often. At home we just went to the local grocer’s in town. There had been a big sign outside saying GRAND OPENING. Below that it said IF YOU BUILD IT, THEY WILL COME.

I was kind of surprised by just how big this store was, and how empty. Obaachan handed me some recipes for the rest of the week. I had to get all the ingredients that weren’t crossed out.

Mrs. Parker had miscalculated how much cereal everybody would eat. I put five boxes of Cheerios into my cart. Original Cheerios was the bestselling cereal in the country. It had been invented in 1941 and was called Cheerioats until 1945. I knew this because we once had to do a paper on one of the top ten crops raised in Kansas. Oats were much less important to the economy of Kansas than wheat, but I chose to write about oats because I figured I already knew a lot about wheat, and I just felt like learning something new. There were something like twelve different types of Cheerios the last time I counted.

In the dairy section I found buttermilk, fat-free milk, flavored milk, lactose-free milk, low-fat milk, reduced-fat milk, whole milk, almond milk, coconut milk, rice milk, and soy milk. Mrs. Parker wanted 2 percent milk. This really annoyed Obaachan because she was a firm believer in whole milk, especially for growing kids. So I bought an extra carton of regular milk for Jaz and me, even though it wasn’t on the list and even though Mrs. Parker had told Obaachan to get exactly what was on the list. I guess we were already going rogue.

Then we bought all the other stuff and checked out while the cashier smiled almost the whole time, even when nobody was talking. Then she smiled harder and said, “Thank you. We hope to see you again!”

The whole way back, Obaachan was growling “Errrr,” so I knew she was in a lot of pain. She took seven aspirin, then said, “If I die from aspirin poisoning, Parker fire us. Here. Take this.” She pulled over and handed the cell phone to me.

When we got a signal, I helped Obaachan call Mrs. Parker. “We almost back,” she told her. “Yes ... Yes ... Yes ... Yes ... Yes ... Good-bye.” She handed the phone back to me. “Make sure that turned off.”

I looked at the phone. “It’s turned off.”

“If you wrong and she hear me, you grounded. I keeping list of every time you grounded during harvest. Then you be grounded for long time.”

“It’s off,” I said again.

“I just want to say, then. I want to say that woman drive me crazy.”

“Well, she’s just very detail-oriented,” I said.

“I like detail too. I love detail! Detail my most favorite thing in world! But she drive me crazy.”

When we arrived at the Laskey farm, it was already afternoon. The combines were going strong. When we got back to the camper, I called in on the radio. “Mrs. Parker? We’re back. Should we make everyone sandwiches?”