Susan Patron - The Higher Power of Lucky

They never changed the sign, though, Lucky realized. But because Brigitte came, it was still a true sign after all.

Brigitte squeezed into the banquette next to Miles.

“Did you find Lucky then?”

“No. When I get out of the car I see that it is very, very hot—as hot as today, but I had not ever been so hot in France.” Brigitte told the story in her excited French way, which was a way, Lucky thought, that made people listen more thoroughly. “So I go up to this house and it has a glass tower on the roof. I do not know it is the Captain’s house, of course. I do not know any person in America except Lucky’s father, who is in San Francisco. I am afraid to speak bad English, so I do not know what will happen. The man at the door has long gray hair and he is wearing some kind of big shirt with a rope for the waist. His dusty leather sandals and his beard make him seem like a person from the Bible.”

“The Captain doesn’t look from the Bible,” said Miles. “He looks normal.”

“To me, my first day in America, he looks actually like someone who has lost his marble. Later, I discover how nice he is, when he drives us back from Sierra City in his van after we return the rental car.”

“Don’t they have people like the Captain in France?” asked Miles.

“Not exactly,” said Brigitte. “Next what happens is I say, ‘Lucky?’ and I explain everything in French, but he does not understand. Then he says, ‘Oh! Oh! LUCK-y!’ because I have been saying this name with my accent the way I did before, ‘LU-key.’ Then he takes me up the hill to an old metal tank with a door in the front.”

“Short Sammy’s water tank!” Miles said.

“Yes, and Sammy comes out, but I do not know who he is. I see a tiny man with a hat like a cowboy—but a miniature cowboy. I think, no one has told me America is so strange.”

Lucky remembered this part brilliantly because she had been there, peering out from inside Sammy’s water tank house. Her first sight of Brigitte reminded Lucky of the beautiful ladies on Short Sammy’s calendar. Every month there was a different lady, looking very sparkly and smiley, and not wearing too many clothes. Brigitte’s dress fit her more like a bright red slip, except the twirly skirt gave you thoughts of dancing. Plus her blond hair was shiny and bouncy, and her lipstick was the perfect, exact same red as her dress. Her high-heeled shoes and creamy clean neck made Brigitte look way too French, and too…fancy for Hard Pan.

But the thing she remembered most strongly was that something bad to do with her mother had happened and she was at Short Sammy’s and her mother wasn’t there.

“Did Lucky know you were her Guardian?” Miles asked, smoothing the plastic of his Buy-Mor-Store bag, as if soothing a cat.

“No,” said Lucky. “She wasn’t, yet.”

“I was going only to stay a short while,” Brigitte explained. “Just until Lucky can be placed in a foster home. I promise her father that. I tell him that I must go home to France after.” Brigitte fanned herself with a piece of the waxed cheese carton.

Miles asked, “Was I born yet?”

“Yes,” said Brigitte. “You were a fat little boy of three years old then, almost a wild child, running everywhere in the town. Your grandmother is always looking for you.” Brigitte shrugged. “I try to understand American customs, but they are so different from mine. And Lucky for a long time cannot sleep unless I am with her. She is of course very sad and missing her maman .”

“Was I allowed to do anything I wanted?” asked Miles. He tucked the plastic sack tightly around his book.

“I thought it was perhaps the way of all American children to be so free,” Brigitte said. “I wanted Lucky to have a good American foster family who is letting her be a little bit free and also giving her some discipline.”

“Will Lucky have to go to a foster family where they make her take care of all the other little foster brothers and sisters?” Miles had asked Lucky about this before. It was something he had seen on a TV program.

“For a long time we cannot find any foster family for Lucky. Then her father tells me all the paperwork for California will be easier if I become her Guardian, especially because Lucky and I, we have already the same last name of Trimble. I say okay.” Brigitte got up and continued to put the Government Surplus food away, frowning at the canned pork.

Lucky was thinking that even though Brigitte said okay, she meant only until they did find a foster family. And if she had to take care of all the crying orphaned babies in her new foster family, that would mean leaving Hard Pan. Then the sign that still said POP. 43 would really be wrong.

But what Lucky wanted most was for that sign to stay the same forever, with no subtracting allowed.

7. Tarantula Hawk Wasp

After Miles left, while Brigitte went through a stack of bills to take to the post office later, Lucky thought hard about how to keep from having to go away and live with a foster family. Maybe if Brigitte realized that one day Lucky would become a world-famous scientist like Charles Darwin, she would stop missing France all the time. She would have the extreme glory of being a world-famous scientist’s Guardian.

Before she could become a world -famous scientist, Lucky needed to turn herself into a famous Hard Pan scientist, and the way to do that was to get lots of people to come to the Found Object Wind Chime Museum and Visitor Center. It was her job of cleaning its patio that had given Lucky a brilliant museum-improvement idea. The problem was that it wasn’t museumy enough . It was just glass cases against the walls with old mining equipment and old photos and a few old bugs, but not enough bugs or birds. Plus you couldn’t lean on the glass cases, which you needed to do in order to get a really good close look.

Lucky’s idea was that, even before she became really famous, people in other countries, and especially in France, would hear about the museum’s amazing new scientific display—Lucky already envisioned the display exactly—and they could come for a visit. Brigitte could talk French to them and explain that it was actually her ward (meaning Lucky herself) who had made the display. All the French mothers would wish they had wards like Lucky.

The timing to work on her secret museum-display idea was perfect, because at ten o’clock everyone in Hard Pan went to the post office for their mail. Since there was no market or restaurant or even a gas station in Hard Pan, people liked to stand around getting the latest news in town while they waited for the Captain to distribute the mail into each P.O. box. So Brigitte would be gone for at least half an hour, enough time for Lucky to get a good start on her display.

She was in her canned-ham trailer gathering her specimens together when Brigitte called from the connecting kitchen trailer.

“Did you put all your dirty clothes in the machine, Lucky? I am starting a wash.”

“Yeah, everything.”

“Can you listen for the end of the cycle and put the clothes in the dryer if I’m not back yet from the post office? I want these towels to have the California softness.”

“Okay.” California softness was Brigitte’s way of saying fluffy, dried-in-the-dryer towels, as opposed to straight, crispy, hung-on-the-clothesline towels.

“Do not forget, please, Lucky. I have to do the sheets after.”

“’Kay.”