Susan Patron - The Higher Power of Lucky

Yep, Lucky thought as she tossed her hat onto the backpack, already forgetting to work on her posture, probably the thing Brigitte would like most would be to go home to France and have a French baby with bony French feet like her own. She would call her French baby something lovely and tender instead of mon choux , which means “my cabbage,” or ma puce , which means “my flea.”

Lucky poured sun tea from a jar into a plastic glass and stood gulping it under the ceiling fan. The great thing about sun tea is that you don’t have to boil water and heat up the whole kitchen to make it—all you do is leave a jar of water with two tea bags in a sunny place. She raked her hair with one hand—hair that felt crusty from sweat and weirdly overcurly from a perm that would take at least two weeks to start looking normal. Dot never got it to look like the magazine picture. Instead of making it go out at the sides in a wedge, in a very original, cute way like the hair of the girl in the picture, Dot permed and cut it so that it looked like some kind of mushroom-colored garden hedge.

Brigitte laughed into the phone. She poured Tide into the washer and closed the lid. Lucky knew for a fact that Brigitte’s mother was working on a secret, sinister plan to lure Brigitte back to France. Even though Lucky had never met Brigitte’s mother, she did not like her one bit; she imagined her as looking like Brigitte but more stringy and tough, with bangs and hair in a barrette at her neck, but the hair gray instead of blond. The mother would never walk on the backs of her shoes or make noises when she sucked ice cubes. She would be strict and formal, like a school principal or the wife of the President of the United States. Lucky stayed directly under the ceiling fan, sucking an ice cube, making slurping noises, and wishing she understood French.

Probably the old mother was right now working on her plot to make Brigitte so sad and lonely that she would go back to France and stop being Lucky’s Guardian. She wanted all her grown-up children—Brigitte and her sisters—to live near her in Paris, which Lucky considered very selfish. Lucky was sure the old lady’s plan was working, because she sent little packages that made Brigitte cry.

The sad thing in the package last week had been a plastic tube like a toothpaste tube, except with a yellow cap, and instead of Colgate or Crest wording on it there was a beautiful little painting of a picnic basket and a loaf of French bread on a green, grassy place. It turned out to be a tube of mustard. When she opened the package, Brigitte had been sitting at the Formica table. She held the tube in her hand and smiled, but looked sad at the same time. She unscrewed the cap and squeezed a little dab onto her finger and smelled it and tasted it. Then she cried, which Lucky hated , and told Lucky it was because it reminded her so much of home.

Lucky sighed, put down the glass, and slid into the dinette seat. Once she finally got off the phone, Brigitte said, “First, maman send you a bisou , a big kiss, okay? Second, please put your backpack over there beside you on the seat so I do not trip on it.” Brigitte unloaded several little Tupperware containers from the fridge. The kitchen trailer was so narrow that she didn’t have to take any steps to do this—the counter, sink, stove, and fridge were all reachable from the same spot. “It is too hot to cook, so we have a cold salad for dinner—tuna, eggs, green beans, tomatoes, olives.”

Lucky hoisted her backpack off the floor and plopped it beside her on the banquette. “Do we have those olives I like?” she asked. She hated the strong salty wrinkled black ones.

Brigitte surveyed the many glass jars in the door of the fridge. “ Non, ” she said. “And it is too bad, because the little olives from Nice would be better, you are right. Sometimes we just have to make it do.”

“Make do,” Lucky corrected.

Brigitte sighed and nodded. “Make do,” she agreed.

3. Good and Bad

Out of the millions of people in America who might become Lucky’s mother if Brigitte went home to France, Lucky wondered about some way to trap and catch the exact right one. She was pretty sure she’d be able to, if only she had a Higher Power.

But when she envisioned her perfect mother, she kept thinking of traits and habits like Brigitte’s. That always made her think somehow not of the perfect mother but of the perfect child , which in most ways Lucky already was, but not in every way. Brigitte did not fully realize the ways Lucky was almost perfect, but she did notice thoroughly the ways Lucky was not.

Lucky did not want to speak French, for instance, which is a jumpy language full of sounds that you have to gargle in the back of your throat. The back of Lucky’s throat could not learn to make these sounds, no matter how hard it tried. Of course, she had learned to say Brigitte’s name the French way—Bree-JEET—instead of the American way, BRIDGE-it.

Lucky got Brigitte as her Guardian when she was eight years old. The reason was that Lucille, Lucky’s mother, went outside one morning after a big rainstorm, and she touched some power lines that had blown down in the storm. She touched them with her foot.

In her mind, Lucky worked on a list of good traits and bad traits in mothers.

Some aspects of life are strange or even terrible, but later something okay or even good happens that would never have happened without the bad/strange thing. An example was how long, long ago, a man who later became Lucky’s father went to France and got married to a French woman. Then they got divorced because he did not want to have children. Later, that same man came back to America (he was still not Lucky’s father yet) and met an artist named Lucille, who had silky-feeling shoulders. This was a thing he probably liked a lot—where you could put your cheek against the top of her arm and your cheek loved that comfortable feeling. Her fingers smelled like paint thinner, a very good smell and Lucky’s favorite smell, along with air-conditioned air. Lucille used to hum little tunes for different situations that made you think of certain ads on TV and laugh. So they fell in love and got married.

But he still didn’t want children, and Lucille divorced him too. It was too late, though. Ha-ha! Lucky was already born.

So when Lucky needed a Guardian to guard her during the time after the storm, Lucky’s father called up that first wife, the French one. She was still in France, but she said she would come to California. She came the next day. She turned out to be Brigitte.

Only a very big and terrible thing could make her jump on a plane and fly thousands and thousands of miles—because Brigitte did not love Lucky’s father any longer, and she didn’t even know Lucille, and she’d never even heard of Lucky before. Plus she had her own French life going along, full of plans, and her old French mother. That terrible thing was the thing that happened to Lucille when Lucky was eight, the morning after the storm in the desert.

Lucky loved rainstorms because of how wild and scary they are, when you are safe inside your trailer with the wind whooshing and blowing like crazy and rain pouring down so hard it turns the dry streambed into a river. Her favorite part was afterward, when it smells like the first day of the history of the world, like creosote and wild sage. The sun comes out and you look around at all the changes the storm has caused: the outside chairs blown away, the Joshua trees plumped up with water, the ground still a little wet.