The Higher Power of Lucky

Brigitte’s old leather sandals were on the step outside the kitchen trailer, which was why HMS Beagle had been waiting in her dug-out hollow underneath. Lucky and HMS Beagle both knew the shoes on the step meant that Brigitte had just mopped the floor and she didn’t want sand tracked in by the dog. Inside, Brigitte stood barefoot at the far end, feeding dirty towels into the washer and talking French on the phone.

Lucky dropped her survival kit backpack on the floor by the built-in table; the trailer smelled of Mrs. Murphy’s floor wax and hard-boiled eggs and the sprig of wild sage in a little vase over the sink. Brigitte always cleaned floors barefoot. Lucky noticed that Brigitte’s feet seemed to be filled with many more bones than other people’s feet; she had sharp, jutting-out ankle bones and toes that were almost like fingers.

If Brigitte were ever to have a child, that child’s feet would not look at all like Lucky’s sturdy, wide feet with their short, stubby toes. That child would also have very good posture, Lucky thought, squaring her hunched-in shoulders. Brigitte turned, pointed to the fridge with her chin, and said, “There is cold tea, mon choux; I am talking to my mother.” She smiled and shook her head in a tiny, quick way and raised one shoulder, which meant that she promised she’d be off the phone soon.

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.”