Susan Patron - The Higher Power of Lucky

“Then what happened? Did Chesterfield die?”

“Of course not,” said Lucky. “She decided to have a baby burro. So HMS Beagle and I told her it was better to return to the wild and live among her own kind. She’s still there, with her husband and child. Sometimes if there is a person in trouble out in the desert, she’ll suddenly appear, and if she likes them she’ll give them a ride to safety.”

Miles held a crumb of Fig Newton in two fingers. He gazed just beyond Lucky. Finally he whispered, “Would she let me ride her?”

“She might ,” said Lucky.

Miles blinked, looked at the last crumb, and slowly licked it from his fingers. He wiped his hands on the sides of his pants. “Could you read me Are You My Mother? now?”

“No! The deal was one Olden Days story, plus you got a cookie. Time to go.” Lucky clomped to the screen door and opened it.

Miles put his head down on the table. “I traded you for the cookie,” he said in a tragic, muffled voice.

“Out, Miles.”

Very slowly, as if his head were made of heavy metal, Miles looked up. There was a little oval of sweat on the Formica where his head had been. He gave Lucky the same exact look as HMS Beagle when she wanted a piece of bacon. “Could you just read the part about the Snort?”

Lucky had a little place in her heart where there was a meanness gland. The meanness gland got active sometimes when Miles was around. She knew that he knew he had to do what Lucky wanted, because if he didn’t, she’d never be nice to him. Sometimes, with that meanness gland working, Lucky liked being mean to Miles.

“No,” she said. Miles’s head fell back onto the table.

“Chuck-karr, chuck-karr, chuck-karr,” he warbled, a lost wild baby bird. Lucky noticed how small the thumb-sized hollow was at the back of his neck. “Please, please, please,” he moaned, “tell me the story of how Brigitte came to Hard Pan.”

As Brigitte’s Jeep pulled up outside, Lucky said, “Oh, get Brigitte to tell you.” When he looked up with his whole face filled with gladness, Lucky’s meanness gland felt better, like a heavy timber had rolled off it.

6. How Brigitte Came

Brigitte swung up the steps to the kitchen trailer carrying two plastic sacks full of Government Surplus commodities. “Even though it is only eight o’clock, I do not want to see the temperature in centigrade,” she said. “If I see it only in Fahrenheit I am not so shocked—I do not let myself know what it really means. Miles, do you want to wash your hands?”

“No, thank you,” said Miles. Lucky watched as Brigitte pulled Government food out of the sacks: canned pork, canned apricots, butter, and a chunk of something orange.

“What’s this stuff? Cheese?” she asked, picking up the orangey brick-shaped thing packaged in a waxed box like a milk carton. It said UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE on the wrapping. It felt soft.

The last Saturday of the month, free Government food got delivered to the town. You only received free Government food if you had quite a small amount of money. If you had too much money, they wouldn’t give any food to you. Most people in Hard Pan didn’t have regular jobs, and maybe they got a check every month out of having a disability or being old or from fathers who didn’t like children, but it wasn’t very much. Most everyone in Hard Pan qualified for the free food.

“We will see,” said Brigitte, slitting the carton with a small knife. She sniffed the cheese. Lucky leaned in and smelled it too. Usually the kind of cheese that Brigitte loved smelled like dirty socks and had to be tightly wound in Saran Wrap so it didn’t smell up the whole fridge. This cheese had no smell at all.

“I do not know about this cheese,” said Brigitte, frowning. She cut off a small corner and held it out to HMS Beagle. HMS Beagle stretched her neck forward, her black nose almost touching the piece of cheese. She studied it with her nose twitching, then sighed and turned back to her place by the door.

Brigitte made a pfff sound, a little blast of air, and tossed the small corner of cheese in the garbage can.

“No wonder it is free, that cheese,” she said. “No one will pay for it.”

Miles began pounding his heels against the banquette. “Lucky said you would tell me the story of how you came to Hard Pan to take care of her,” he said.

Brigitte shrugged. “You know already, Miles. I come on the airplane after Lucky’s mother died.”

“Why didn’t Lucky’s father take care of her himself?” asked Miles.

Brigitte poofed air out of her mouth in a way she did to show she thought something was ridiculous. “He is,” she said, “in some ways, a very foolish man, Lucky’s father.”

Miles looked at Lucky to see if she agreed with this or not. Lucky stuck her face closer to his and made big-eyes at him as a way of telling him to shut up. Miles stuck his face out and made big-eyes back at her as a way of saying he still wanted to know if Lucky agreed that her father was foolish.

Lucky said, “So my father called up his first wife, who he was married to before he got married to my mother. And guess who that was?”

Miles stared at her. “Who?” he said.

“Brigitte!” said Lucky.

“Her?” asked Miles. He turned to Brigitte, hugging his Buy-Mor-Store bag to his chest. He frowned at her and then at Lucky to show he didn’t want to be teased.

“Of course, me,” said Brigitte. She glanced up at a shiny metal thing like a vase on a high shelf. Lucky knew what was in it, but her mind did not like to stay thinking about it. Her brain went hopping off, like someone crossing a stream by jumping from stone to stone, quickly, so they wouldn’t have time to think about slipping and falling into the water.

“If Brigitte was married to Lucky’s father, then she is Lucky’s stepmother,” Miles said.

Lucky felt a little bit hypnotized, as if she were apart from her self and the self leaning on the sink was a totally other self. “No,” she said slowly. “Because they were married before .”

“Lucky’s father and I were married before Lucky was born, Miles,” Brigitte explained. “Her mother, Lucille, and I did not know one another. But Lucky’s father called me because he knew I would come.” She shrugged. “In France I have no job. Always I want to see California. He knew I will take care of Lucky for a while.

“So I agree. I say to him, ‘You buy me the ticket and I will come.’ ‘I have already the flight booked,’ he said. ‘You leave Paris tonight and arrive in Los Angeles tomorrow.’ So I fly to Los Angeles with my red silk dress and high-heeled shoes and only my one little suitcase.”

“What happened when you got to Los Angeles?” Miles asked. Lucky knew that Miles thought L.A. was a terrible place where people drove around in their cars all day, from morning to night. He and Short Sammy spent hours listening to L.A. traffic reports on the radio.

“Lucky’s father has rented a big American car that is waiting for me at the airport,” Brigitte said. “I drive and drive and drive and finally the city ends and the desert starts. Then I drive and drive and drive”—Brigitte air-drove a car, her hands gripping a pretend steering wheel—“until there is no more people, only desert, a lot of desert! I am a little frightened because there is too much space everywhere, and I almost drive into a cow and her little veal….”

“Her little calf ,” Lucky said.

“Yes, the cow and her little calf. They are in the middle of the highway! Finally I drive until there is no more road, only dirt streets. There is a little sign, ‘Hard Pan, Pop. 43,’ and I am sad because Lucky’s maman has died, so now it is Pop. 42.”