The Higher Power of Lucky

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.

That is what Lucky imagined her mother was doing—sniffing up the morning and feeling the cool ground with her toes—when she stepped on a downed power line, was electrocuted, and died.

And this is how Lucky became a ward, which is the person a Guardian guards. A ward must stay alert, carry a well-equipped survival kit at all times, and watch out for danger signs—because of the strange and terrible and good and bad things that happen when you least expect them to.

4. Graffiti

Even though it was only Friday afternoon, and her report on the life cycle of the ant wasn’t due until Monday, Lucky got out her notebook, thinking she could finish by dinner. Then Lincoln phoned.

“Hi, Lucky,” he said.

“Hey.”