The Higher Power of Lucky

Lucky sighed. Her brain was clogged up with questions, and she didn’t even know exactly what they were.

Short Sammy had gone back to frown at the block of cheese on his table. “The only thing left, man, is to fry this thing in bacon grease,” he said.

10. The Urn

On Sunday morning Lucky woke up wanting to ask Lincoln something important. She phoned him, and they decided to meet right after breakfast up at the post office, since it was closed and nobody would be around.

Lucky wanted to talk to Lincoln about an urn she had. Not everyone who dies gets buried in the ground. Some people are cremated, which Lucky had not known about until her mother died. She found out that being cremated is where they take the dead person to a place called a crematory and put them in a box like a casket. The box goes through a special process—Short Sammy explained this—and afterward all that is left are little particles and ashes.

Then they put the particles and ashes into something called an urn.

If you never saw an urn before you would probably think it was a shiny metal vase for flowers, except it has a hinged lid with a latch to keep it solidly closed so nothing can spill out if it gets accidentally knocked over.

Two days after Brigitte had arrived in Hard Pan with her little suitcase, a strange man in sunglasses and a suit came and gave the urn to Lucky. She had thought that was a mistake, because she was only eight at the time and didn’t know what she was supposed to do with it. So she tried to give it back.

The strange man had said to her, “These are your mother’s remains. There will be a memorial service where you can fling them to the wind.”

Lucky had stared at the man. She did not understand what he was talking about.

That was two years ago. But still now, every so often—and today was one of those times, while she and HMS Beagle trotted to the post office to meet Lincoln—Lucky worried about the urn.

Seen from a little distance, Lincoln looked better, in Lucky’s opinion—you could imagine how he’d look when he grew into his ears. Like, as he got older his head wouldn’t look as big and his neck would definitely look less scrawny. So far he didn’t look like a president, which was what his mother was hoping and which was why she named him Lincoln Clinton Carter Kennedy. Lucky knew he’d rather be president of the International Guild of Knot Tyers. Mothers have their good sides, their bad sides, and their wacky sides, but Lucky figured Lincoln’s mother had no way of knowing at the time he was born that he would turn out to be so dedicated about knots.

“Lincoln,” Lucky said, squatting down to look at the lines he’d drawn in the dirt, “do you remember when my mother died?”

“I don’t remember her very well, but I do remember the…what do you call it. Not the funeral but the—”

“Memorial.”

“Yeah. Don’t you remember it?” Lincoln scratched HMS Beagle’s soft chest.

“Kind of.” It was almost exactly two years ago. Lucky did remember most of it strongly, but she wanted to know what Lincoln would say. “What do you remember about it?”

Lincoln squinted at her and went back to his sand drawing, which turned out to be some kind of hitch. Even when Lincoln glanced at something for only a tiny second, it was a piercing and thorough glance, like with X-ray eyes. “Everyone in the whole town went,” he said. “All the cars and trucks in a slow line, some dogs following along. It was at the old abandoned dugouts, on the open desert outside town, so there wasn’t any shade. But the sun was going down and it was cooling off and people stood around and Short Sammy played the guitar. He played ‘Amazing Grace’ and everybody sang along and it was really sad and beautiful.” Lincoln frowned at the ground. “I remember how, especially out overlooking the whole desert, there was that special smell from after it—” Lincoln’s cheeks and the tips of his ears suddenly got red.

Lucky finished what Lincoln was going to say. “After it rains. I know, okay? That smell reminds me, too. You don’t have to completely never mention rain. It wasn’t like it was the rain’s fault that it happened.”

“Okay,” he said, gouging his lines in the sand more deeply.

“I was supposed to spread her ashes in the wind,” Lucky said. “Because I was the next of kin.”

“Why didn’t you?”

Lucky didn’t answer right away. She was remembering that during a secret time in her bedroom, just before the memorial, she had opened the urn to look inside. The particles were like different sizes of whitish sand. But when she looked closely she could tell that they were little pieces of bone.

Lucky’s hand fit inside the opening at the top of the urn. She had reached in. She was scared and excited, as if doing this was both right and wrong at the same time. Her fingers felt some dry, feathery stuff, and a lot of light, brittle bits.

They were the remains. The remains of her mother. She had very carefully closed and latched the lid of the urn and put it on her bed. She lay down on her side and curled herself around it.