Cynthia Kadohata: The Thing About Luck

Still, next to Noon I wrote Sandwich eating .

Jiichan pounded on the paper. “Lunch!” he cried out passionately. “Not ‘sandwich eating’! It called ‘lunch’!” He clutched at his heart. “You kids go to kill me.” Apparently, about once every couple of weeks, he thought we were going to kill him.

“What kind of sandwiches would you like?” I asked Jaz, still worrying about those. “I don’t want to make the wrong kind.”

“I’ll ask around at school. I can’t believe this is happening. I’m really going to have a meeting-party.” He got up to look at himself in a mirror over our fake fireplace and said, “You are going to have a meeting-party.”

Jiichan was now standing and staggering away from us with his hands on his heart. Jaz and I watched him calmly. “I die, scatter ashes,” Jiichan said. “No keep in hole in wall at cemetery. You hear me?”

“Yes, Jiichan,” we said.

“Good. Then I die happy.”

I wrote down LEGOs, one o’clock. My brother had approximately one thousand dollars’ worth of LEGOs. Seriously. I counted once. LEGOs were one of our biggest expenses and the only thing we splurged on.

“Good plan!” Jiichan said. “That brilliant!” I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic as he peered over my shoulder from his death throes.

“How long is the meeting-party?” Jaz asked.

“I think most parties are two hours,” I answered. “So I guess that’s the end of the agenda?” Nobody answered, so I made a line underneath the agenda and laid down the pencil.

“Who should I invite?” Jaz asked. “Should it be just kids who I think might come, or should it be kids who might not come but on the other hand you never know? Should it be just kids in my class, or should it be all the kids in my grade? Should it be boys and girls or just boys? Should it be only kids who might not even know who I am even though I know who they are? Should it—”

Jiichan held up his palm to quiet Jaz. “Invite whole fifth grade,” he said wisely. We all looked at him, and he nodded. “That way hurt nobody’s feelings.”

Jaz stared at him doubtfully for a moment, but then his face turned from doubtful to ecstatic. I could almost hear him thinking, Wow, the whole school might come to my meeting-party!

Then my grandparents wanted Jaz to draw invitations. He was a good artist in kind of a weird way. Like, he never drew pictures of anything recognizable, but if you needed a totally psychedelic design, he was your man. But he wanted to buy invitations because he thought they were more official. We ended up driving thirty miles to a 99-cent store in a larger town. After loud and passionate debate, we bought several boxes of dinosaur invitations. On Monday, Jaz distributed them to all the kids in the fifth grade at his school.

So as not to jinx the party, we weren’t supposed to talk to one another about it. But we could pray all we wanted, in front of several sprigs of silk cherry blossoms on the coffee table. We did this the night before the party. Cherry blossoms, as the harbingers of spring, were important to Japanese farmers. My grandmother mumbled in Japanese as I knelt beside her. I could make out a word occasionally—like unmei for “destiny.”

As Obaachan muttered on, I prayed in my head: Please let my brother have a successful meeting-party. Let the kids have fun, let him make at least one friend, preferably two. Please, please, please.

That night I drew in my notebook like I always did. I didn’t draw very well, so each picture took me weeks. I copied them from photographs of mosquitoes I found.

One time I thought I had a perfect drawing, so I sent it to a mosquito expert, and this is what he said: “Looks like an Anopheles, but the proboscis is ‘hairy’ and the palps look like a thin line, so this is not a good representation, but could easily be changed (make palps more than a line and get rid of bristle on mouthparts and you have an Anopheles female). The problem is that most (but not all) Anopheles in the U.S. tend to have spots on their wings, which these drawings lack.” Wow, epic fail on my part!

It was strange because I knew that if I had almost been killed by a car, I wouldn’t have become fascinated with cars. If I had almost drowned, I wouldn’t have become obsessed with water. But the more I looked at mosquitoes, even the same type that had infected me, the more delicate they seemed. Fragile, even. And yet one had almost taken my life. It was like now we couldn’t be separated. I mean, if I saw one on my arm, I wouldn’t hesitate to smash it or even run screaming down the highway. They terrified me. But still, we were inseparable.

Three boys from Jaz’s class had said they could come to the party. Nobody else had RSVP’d. But it didn’t matter. Three boys! We were so, so excited. At eleven on Saturday morning my friend Melody came over in case we needed help.

“What should I do?” Mel asked Obaachan.

“Vacuum living room.”

“Obaachan,” I said, “she’s a guest.”

“She here to work.”

I shook my head at Mel to let her know she didn’t have to vacuum. But we couldn’t have a for-real conversation with Obaachan and Jiichan listening. So we just talked about the coming harvest.

Let me finally explain about custom harvesters. Many wheat farmers don’t cut their own wheat. They bring in custom harvesters like the Parkers, who hire independent contractors like my family to drive the giant combines that cut the wheat. They also hire drivers of big rigs to haul the wheat to grain elevators. Grain elevators are usually tall reinforced-concrete buildings that you may have seen but never really thought about. The elevators are where the grain is stored.

The custom harvesters are the ones who own or lease the really, really expensive equipment. They’re usually family-owned companies. A new combine can cost $350,000, so you need to have really good credit to get a loan from the bank to buy or lease your equipment. Shoot, our house cost a quarter of that. During the harvest season these companies travel from farm to farm, from Texas to Montana or North Dakota, and even up to Canada for some harvesters.

Anyway, enough about custom harvesters (for now). I made two chicken-breast sandwiches, and Mel made two. Every so often, I slipped Thunder a piece of chicken, so he sat his best sit as I cut the sandwiches in half and inserted toothpicks topped with colored cellophane into each half. Then I put a sprig of parsley on each plate, which is kind of fancy, but I wanted to make a good impression.

Melody, Obaachan, Jiichan, and I sat at the kitchen table waiting while Jaz sat in the living room. “Summer, get your hair under control,” Obaachan said. “You look like Yoko Ono, 1969.” I had the bad luck of being in that small minority of Asian people with frizzy hair. Usually I wore it in braids, but I hadn’t done that today.

I braided my hair in the bathroom. Melody came with me. “I have a bad feeling about this whole party thing,” I said.

“What do you mean?” Mel asked.

“I don’t know. At least we’re going on harvest pretty soon. Kids are less snotty on harvest. They’re desperate for someone to play with. Me, I’m mostly worried that everyone at school will forget me.”

“I won’t forget you if you promise you won’t forget me,” Mel said.

“Deal,” I said.

“Deal,” she responded.

So at least I would have one friend to come back to. We hadn’t gone on harvest the previous year because my parents had found local work, so this would be my first harvest since I got sick. Lately, I’d been lying in bed at night, thinking on the one hand, about all the mosquitoes I would see on harvest, and on the other hand, what it would do to my health to be smearing on the insecticide DEET every night for several months. Supposedly, DEET was known for not being bad for humans, but whenever I first put it on, Thunder didn’t like to be near me.