Cynthia Kadohata - The Thing About Luck

Mick leaned forward and said, “Robbie, can ya get me a couple of sausages?” That meant he was eating seven sausages so far. Seven! Then he turned back to me. “A crop circle is a huge, geometric pattern that appears in a field, usually a wheat field. They’re mostly in England, but we get them in Ireland, too,” he said.

“So why do people want to see them?” I asked. I saw Mrs. Parker leaning over the sausages and counting.

“Because no one knows how they got there. Every one is different, and some are as big as two or three hundred meters. Even the complicated ones are perfectly symmetrical,” he said, starting to get excited. “We don’t know if it’s the earth trying to communicate with us or what.”

“Some people are gobshites,” Rory said. “Gobshites” were gullible people. I had picked that up during the last harvest we’d worked. “But ya know, I think Mick is becoming a gobshite too. He actually believes everything he tells his customers.”

Jiichan looked up from his plate. “What ‘gobshite’?”

“It’s someone gullible,” I told him.

Jiichan looked surprised. “Nothing wrong with gullible. How you be happy if not gullible?”

Everyone looked at him silently for a moment, but he didn’t explain.

“Some circles are not a mystery. They’re made by humans as hoaxes. But others are mysterious, to be sure,” Mick went on defensively. “Personally, I believe the earth is talking to us, but we don’t know what it’s saying.”

“Tell her about that one couple, Micky,” Rory said.

Mick set his fork on the table. “One American couple gave me a four-hundred-euro tip at the end of the tour. Can ya believe it? They said they were transformed, they did.”

“Ya’re such an eejit,” Rory said. He hit the top of Mick’s head with his palm.

“What’s an eejit?” I asked.

“Ya know, an eejit. Someone who’s lacking in the brain department.”

“Oh, an idiot.”

“That would be himself.”

Mr. Parker walked in. “How’d you sleep, boys?” he asked. “It was so windy, our camper was shaking. Hard to get a good night’s rest.”

“Nobody can sleep, anyway, because Rory snores so loud,” Sean said, almost ruthlessly. “He’s useless, he is.”

“He’s an excellent worker,” Mr. Parker said.

“Ah, teacher’s pet,” Sean said to Rory.

Mr. McCoy rambled in, looking seriously like he needed more sleep. I felt bad for him. He even swayed a bit as if he were going to fall over. He took three sausages, and then Mr. Dark came in and took three more. Then Mick asked for more. Unbelievable.

Jiichan started chuckling. Everyone fell silent, again waiting for him to explain. But he didn’t say anything. Then he began laughing quite hard. Everybody was looking at him. “Got a good joke, then, Toshiro?” Mick said.

Jiichan looked at Mick in surprise. “Joke?”

“It’s just that ya were laughing so much,” Mick replied.

Jiichan said, “Oh, I laugh because one day two year ago, I drive all the way to grocery store before I remember I no need grocery. I supposed to go to dentist.”

“That no funny,” Obaachan said. “We have to pay dentist for missed appointment.”

There was another brief silence at the table.

Mr. Parker reached for four sausages. Finally, Mrs. Parker couldn’t stand it anymore. “How many sausages were cooked?” she blurted out.

“We made thirty, like you instructed,” I answered.

Robbie sat down and drank his coffee just like a grown-up.

Obviously slightly annoyed with me, Mrs. Parker said, “Well, Robbie loves meat. It’s his favorite part of breakfast. For this one thing, I give you permission to alter the number of sausages specified.”

“Yes, boys need meat. Very important,” Obaachan said. “It very bad tragedy if he no have meat for breakfast.” She shook her head. “Tragedy, tragedy.”

I knew Obaachan was being serious, because boys needing meat was one of her most important rules in life. But Mrs. Parker couldn’t seem to tell if Obaachan was agreeing with her or mocking her.

Mr. Parker pushed away his plate and said, “We’re in a tight situation here. One of our customers up in Oklahoma called this morning before dawn to say their wheat is ready to cut. And they’re expecting rain. We’ll need to work late tonight—probably until two again. If we don’t get up there soon enough, I’ll have to find other cutters to take our place, and I don’t want to lose that job.” He stood up and glanced around. Even though Jiichan hadn’t finished eating, he got up and stretched his back and neck to ready himself for work. Jiichan ate very slowly, so I was worried he hadn’t gotten enough to eat.

Mr. Parker didn’t say another word, but all the other workers got up too and readied themselves to leave, taking along the sandwiches I had already prepared for them for lunch.

Everyone left at once, except for Robbie. Obaachan got on all fours, resting the top of her head on the linoleum. This was something new. Robbie watched her with interest. I started stacking the dirty breakfast plates.

“Obaachan, are you okay?” I asked.

“No, I think I dying. This is it. Don’t forget make more meat next Sunday. If I die, I won’t be here to remind you.”

Robbie was studying my grandmother. “Shouldn’t she go to a doctor?” he asked.

“She’s gone to seventeen different doctors, six chiropractors, and three acupuncturists, and nobody knows exactly what’s causing the pain.”

I turned to place the plates in the sink.

“Don’t you ever stop working?” Robbie asked.

I spun around and was startled by how close he was. He was about a foot away from me, right inside my personal space. “Cooking is supposed to be my grandmother’s job, but she’s got her horrible back pains. She fell on her back when she was a little girl, but she wouldn’t tell me how. Jiichan said, however, that she fell climbing out of a window. He didn’t enlighten me as to why she was climbing out this window, but clearly she had been a troublemaker.” I could feel my face in flames.

He looked at me in a perfectly normal fashion, as if girls always blushed fiercely when they talked to him. I swallowed some saliva. Next he took out a quarter from his pocket, flipped it into the air, and caught it before slapping it on the table. He looked at the coin. “Heads. I guess I’m doing schoolwork.” He lingered a moment. “Are you going to cook Japanese for us one day?”

“We’re doing shabu-shabu one day. Your mom said we could.”

“What’s shabu-shabu ?”

“It’s thick noodles with thinly sliced beef and vegetables. I mean, the vegetables aren’t thinly sliced. You cook it in a pot in front of you, and after you’re done eating, you drink the broth, and, oh, I forgot to mention there are two sauces you dip everything in, and it’s just so good. We brought the sauces with us from home, and we’re going to cook it all on the stove before serving it. We even brought our special meat slicer. The reason we own a slicer is that my mother works cooking in a hunting lodge in the off-season, and a lot of the customers there like shabu-shabu , so we need the meat slicer for that. It’s a really good one. We paid, like, a million dollars for it, because we eat shabu-shabu once a week.” I couldn’t get myself to shut up. I was babbling like an eejit! I pressed down on my lips to keep myself from talking more.

“I had some cooked sashimi once in Oklahoma. It was pretty good.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. Cooked sashimi didn’t make sense, because sashimi meant “raw fish.” It was like saying cooked raw carrots. But I didn’t want to insult him. “I mean, it’s kind of unusual, but unusual things are really cool because of their unusualness, even if they’re, you know, unusual.” I was sounding dimmer by the moment.