The Thing About Luck

by Cynthia Kadohata

  “I offered him three hundred dollars, and he was so nice, he only took a hundred!”

  “Not nice. He lie. Nobody pay him that much for chicken. But that stupid thing you did.”

  What? “I thought you wanted me to confess!”

  “I did. But sometimes you have to do something stupid to do right thing. But right thing more important than stupid.” She lay back down.

  “Are you proud of me?”

  Obaachan thought about that. “You did many stupid thing in a row, but I not ashamed anymore. Oyasumi.”

  “Oyasuminasai.” I got in bed feeling ridiculously lighthearted. I felt like I had saved the world or something. On a whim I untucked my sheet and put my pillow on the south end of the bed. Maybe I’d have even better luck tomorrow.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Obaachan let me sleep in the next morning. It turned out that Jaz had the flu, and Obaachan was worried I might get sick as well, so she didn’t wake me up. It was weird—one day she would scold me constantly, and the next day she’d worry I might be sick. But I was fine. It was your basic harvest day—long and quiet, with the whole crew out in the fields. I didn’t see Robbie all day, so I just wandered around alone, did some homework, and helped out in the kitchen.

  That night after dinner Mr. Parker said he wanted to talk about some things. Dozens and dozens of moths flitted around us. Mr. Parker offered everyone a Coke from the cooler, but Jaz and I couldn’t drink any because Obaachan said bubbly things make little explosions inside of children, which can kill you eventually. If that was true, wouldn’t there be a lot fewer kids around? Robbie, who’d ridden out on a dirt bike, was on his second Coke and nothing seemed to be exploding in him. Jaz was sitting with a goofy half smile. He was still sick, but he’d felt like getting out of the camper.

  I scooted next to Jiichan. “How is work going?” I asked him.

  “Take longer than expected. Land look flat, but bumpy underneath. My combine no have autocontour.”

  “Do you get tired working so late?”

  “Not so bad, kind of addictive. Like in arcade when you and Jaz play game and not want to stop,” Jiichan said. His eyes went glassy for a moment, then came to life again. “Big farm. Many work still to do.”

  Mr. Parker gave me a sharp look, so I stopped asking Jiichan questions. Mr. Parker rubbed at his scalp with the tips of his fingers. “So here’s the scoop,” he said, staring at the ground a moment, then glancing at his wife. He finished rubbing his scalp before continuing. “We’re definitely going to have to split up. Rain’s expected here, but some of us need to head to Oklahoma because rain’s expected even sooner there.” He sighed. “Yesterday the weather report said the rain was due early next week. Now they’re saying the weekend.” He looked around at everyone. “So here’s what we’ll do. We’ll all work late tonight and tomorrow, but then Wednesday at first light, Mick, Toshiro, and Toshiro’s family will head out for the Franklins’ farm in Oklahoma. Larry and Rory will go along with some of the equipment, then return here. Sean and Bill will stay here in Texas.”

  Crud. The way we were splitting up, I probably wouldn’t see Robbie for days. Seeing him was the highlight of my harvesting existence. Right then he was sitting and looking toward the fields, one of his legs impatiently shaking up and down.

  Mick stood up, placing his hands on his waist, and leaned backward. Then everyone else stood up and stretched, like they were getting ready for a yoga class or something. The workers headed back out without a word. Robbie whispered to me, “Meet me at my place.” He rode off. Jaz studied me, and I realized my mouth was a big O.

  Jaz’s head was lolling toward his shoulder, but he wasn’t too sick to say, “I think a mosquito flew into your mouth.”

  But I just laughed. “You okay?” I asked.

  “I wish I didn’t have to move ever again.” I’d noticed that he’d eaten a bit. He heaved a couple of times as if he might throw up. I placed my arms under his and helped him stand. We drove to the camper with him leaning heavily against me.

  Once inside our bedroom, Jaz said, “I can’t climb up there,” and collapsed onto Jiichan’s lower bunk.

  I hurried into the kitchen to clean up dinner dishes. I wanted to get to Robbie’s place. Someone kicked the door, and when I opened it, Obaachan was standing there with a handful of dishes. I held the door for her, and then went out and picked up pots and pans. The combines were already back at work. Close up, the sound was always thunderous—each of the machines we were using weighed more than thirty thousand pounds, and that was bound to make some noise. But actually, inside the cab of a combine was not as noisy as you’d expect. I watched as the machines moved side by side across the field. I heard the door open behind me, and Obaachan stepped down from the camper.

  She looked off at the horizon and muttered, “Too much work for old man,” and I knew she was worried about Jiichan.

  “He said it’s addictive,” I said.

  “What that?”

  “It’s like when you take a drug and can’t stop.”

  “Fields are drugs?”

  “I guess.”

  She nodded sagely. “He like working.”

  I was wired from thinking about going to see Robbie. Obaachan got on her hands and knees. “Do you want some aspirin?” I asked.

  “Errrr,” Obaachan said, her head upside down. “I way beyond aspirin. Need something from doctor.”

  “Do you want me to help you to bed?”

  “No, this best for now.”

  I went back into the kitchen, thinking how even though that conversation had been short, it was about the most civil one I remembered having with my grandmother. I worked as quickly as I could to get the dishes washed and the kitchen cleaned up. But I had to wipe the counters really carefully because if even the slightest spot was left, I would get a lecture from Obaachan.

  “Who touched my LEGO creation?!”

  I whipped around, and Jaz, looking sick, was holding up his LEGO building and staring at me.

  “I accidentally bumped it, but I didn’t see anything break,” I said.

  “I knew it! You made the cat fall off the tree! You could have just told me!”

  He held out the building as if he were thinking about dropping it to the ground. He’d dropped a plate of spaghetti to the ground twice in the last year when he was mad at me. Now he stood there with his arms out for a full minute. Then he pressed his lips together and walked away instead.

  By the time I finished all my chores, Obaachan had moved to her bed. She and Jaz seemed to be fast asleep. I couldn’t believe my luck. I was going to sleep facing south the rest of my life.

  It was nine thirty—not too late, I hoped, to go see Robbie. I went into the bathroom and remade my braids and splashed water on my face. I went to the kitchen and cut a beet in half and then touched it to my lips to make them red.

  At the Parkers’ camper I knocked on the door, starting to feel a little nauseous from nerves.

  When Robbie opened the door, he was in his pajamas. He seemed surprised to see me. “I thought you weren’t coming,” he said, yawning. “Come on in.” We sat on a little couch, our bodies touching. “Awww, man, harvest season is hard work.”

  “Really,” I said. Another brilliant response. I tried to do better. “I wish I could just hang around with my friends all summer instead.”

  “Yeah,” he said distractedly. Then he casually reached his arm around my shoulder. Ack! I just about had heart failure. “You have cool hair.”

  “Thank you.” I could hardly get the words out because I was so nervous.

  “Your grandparents seem nice,” he said. “Do they ever get really mad at you?” Robbie changed the subject a lot. He also seemed to never stop shaking one of his legs, as if he were impatient to get somewhere else.

  “Umm,” I said. I realized that as much as Obaachan and I disagreed, she never seemed really mad at me. I don’t know why she acted the way she acted. But it wasn’t really anger. “Not so much
,” I answered. “I mean, only when I fight with my brother. He has some . . . problems. I mean, one problem, which is his really bad temper. He gets furious and tries to hurt himself. But it’s not his fault.” That was a long paragraph, and I felt really pleased with myself.

  “Whose fault is it?”

  I didn’t really believe it was my parents’ fault. I didn’t know whose fault it was.

  “Sometimes it’s mine,” I said. At least that was what my mother once said when she was mad at me. “My mother says I need to be gentle with him.”

  “I like to be gentle,” Robbie said, and he suddenly leaned over and kissed me. I was so shocked, I made a little noise. I didn’t know what to do with my lips. Should I just make them into a kissing shape and not move them? And if I did move them, what exactly should I do? One thing I knew was not to hold them hard like the Rock of Gibraltar.

  As I was thinking all this, Robbie suddenly stopped. “I have to get to bed because I need to get up early and clean the combines.” He yawned again. “I’ll kiss you again tomorrow,” he added, almost as if he was bored. I wondered if boys generally let you know ahead of time that they’re going to kiss you. “I’ll teach you how.”

  Oh no! That meant I hadn’t done it right. On the other hand—yay! He was going to kiss me again!

  He stood up and walked with me to the door. “See ya,” he said, and closed the door.

  I stood there, my hands shaking when I held them out in front of me. “These are my hands,” I said, just to ground myself. “This is me.”

  I couldn’t move. I turned to stare at his door and replay the last few minutes in my head. Sometimes my friends and I talked about kissing, but so far, it had only been talk. Still, around the time I was leaving, the girls and boys in my class had started to notice one another in a new way. I wondered if this was part of the change my mother said was coming. Maybe I didn’t have to spend the summer at home to experience this change. If I had a phone, I could call Melody and talk to her. I made a mental note to sneak out with Obaachan’s cell phone one day.

  When I got back to our camper, I expected to be lectured by Obaachan for being gone, but my luck was still holding because she was still asleep. Jaz was awake, though. He didn’t seem mad anymore. He never stayed mad for long. I went to the bathroom and put on a long T-shirt. When I got to the bedroom, I felt my way through the dark.

  “Where were you?” Jaz asked softly.

  “Robbie’s,” I answered quietly.

  “Does he like you? Did he kiss you?”

  I swear, sometimes I thought he had ESP that he’d inherited from our grandmother.

  “MYOB,” I told him. But I felt giddy.

  “I’ll take that as a yes. I think it would make me throw up to kiss you.” He didn’t say that in a mean way. He was just stating a fact.

  “That’s because you’re my brother. It could be I did kiss him, but I’m not going to tell you. And don’t talk so loud—I don’t want Obaachan to wake up.”

  “Summer? Seriously.”

  “What?”

  “What will happen when I grow up?” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Will I have friends? Will I have a job? Am I too much of a weirdo?”

  I paused. Once in a while he’d just abruptly ask me questions like these. It all revolved around the fact that he didn’t have friends. For a moment I couldn’t think of a thing to say. Then he said, “I’m sad.”

  Ohhh. I felt a rush of love for my brother. “Your life won’t be sad,” I said. “I’m positive.”

  I saw a luna moth the size of my hand on the window. I couldn’t tell if it was inside or outside. It was so graceful, more like an exotic leaf than an insect. Luna moths did not feed because they had no mouths, so the one I was looking at would be dead soon. What a crazy world!

  “Why do you think that?” Jaz asked.

  I couldn’t really help him much because I had never been a grown-up, so I didn’t know what it would be like. Finally, I said, “Sometimes you’ll be happy and sometimes you’ll be sad, just like anyone.”

  “But I’ll be more sad than happy, won’t I? Just like now.”

  Then I had a brainstorm. “With you, it won’t matter if you’re happy or sad. You’ll just be intense, like you are now, and then your life will be perfect.”

  He thought that over. “I’ll accept that for now.”

  What was that supposed to mean? Sometimes he seemed like a complicated adult instead of a little boy. I thought about it some more. He was kind of unplaceable, actually, neither young nor old.

  I climbed up to my second-level bunk and Thunder leapt up with me.

  Obaachan said, “I never go to sleep.”

  “What?” I nearly tumbled off the mattress.

  “I never go to sleep. I no need.”

  She was trying to tell me she had heard the whole conversation. So be it. I fell asleep.

  I think we all slept lightly until Jiichan came in. I heard the squeak of his feet on the kitchen linoleum, and that small noise woke me. I didn’t know what time it was. “Hi, Jiichan,” Jaz and I both said.

  “You two up still?”

  “I was thinking about life,” Jaz said. “I’m in your bed.”

  It was very dark, but I heard the sound of Jiichan climbing into the other second-level bed without changing. “I tell you a story about life, and then you go to sleep. When I live in Wakayamaken, I get lost. I walk, but I think of school instead of think of walk. Then I don’t know where I am. Everywhere is mandarin orange farm. Which way to go? It starting to be night. I see stars. I finally walk to farmhouse. I knock on door. Biggest man I ever see answer door. Mean face. I think he want to eat me, and I run away. I spend night outside, sleeping with oranges. My parents find me next day. They say school number one important, but even number one you don’t have to think of all the time. When you walk, think of walk. Oyasumi.”

  “Oyasuminasai, Jiichan.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The next afternoon the temperature hit 103 degrees. It was also grocery shopping day, but Obaachan said I had to stay home to study and also to take care of my brother. Jaz didn’t have to do anything at all because he was still sick. But he was bored, so I read him A Separate Peace.

  “Summer, do you have any other books? This is the most boring book ever written.”

  “I have two books about girls.”

  “Is that it?”

  “Yep.”

  “Okay, keep reading.”

  I kept reading, listening to my gravelly voice. Maybe someday I could do voice-overs for commercials. That’s what I was thinking about when I realized Jaz had fallen asleep.

  We were cooking chili for dinner. I had cleaned and soaked the kidney beans overnight, so I took them out of the fridge. I poured the beans into a big pot and brought them to a boil, then turned them down to a simmer. Even with the air-conditioning, sweat beaded on my face. Mrs. Parker had brought a pressure cooker, but Obaachan didn’t want to use it because she was afraid it might explode. “Pressure most powerful force in world,” she had said. Then she’d seemed to be in an argument with herself: “Of course, nuclear bomb powerful too. But pressure make things blow up, so that just as bad. I think about this and get back to you.”

  The beans had to simmer until they were soft. Every so often, I would stir them and check to see if they were ready.

  It was kind of relaxing while Obaachan was at the store. I spent my time reading an article that Jiichan had given Jaz and me copies of. He did that sometimes when he happened across something interesting he’d read. The article was called “Opinions and Social Pressure,” and it was dated 1955, first published in Scientific American.

  “Opinions and Social Pressure” was kind of hard to understand, but not as hard as you might think. It was pretty straightforward and didn’t use a lot of big words. Basically, it was about research on peer pressure and showed how this kind of pressure could literally change what people saw with their own
eyes. They would think a long line on a large white card was short and a short line was long, just because everyone else said so. And once you started down the road of giving in to peer pressure, you couldn’t escape. The research showed this. You might never know what you saw with your own eyes.

  I knew Jiichan was making us read this article so we wouldn’t give in to peer pressure. Peer pressure was a big fear of his. And, strangely enough, Jiichan seemed more worried about Jaz than about me. I thought this was odd since Jaz was so different that he would always be completely out of step with the other kids in his class. He could never give in to peer pressure, because he could only be himself. But Jiichan suspected Jaz was more vulnerable, because having a friend made him so happy that he would start to see the world the way the friend told him to if that was the best way to keep this friend.

  Obaachan returned from the store in an hour and a half and went straight to our room. I knew she wanted to be with Jaz because he was sick. I chopped the onions and measured out all the ingredients. The onions made me cry like crazy. Supposedly, Monsanto, a huge agricultural biotechnology company, was developing an onion that wouldn’t make you cry when you chopped it. Jiichan had read this in the newspaper and was so upset that Monsanto would change onions into something that weren’t exactly onions anymore that he wrote about twenty different letters to various people and organizations, protesting Monsanto. He got back twenty polite letters that didn’t really commit to one thing or another, then thanked him for his interest.

  I cooked and crumbled the ground beef and threw all the ingredients into a giant pot, where it had to simmer for an hour and a half more with occasional stirring. Making chili was a major time commitment.

  Because Robbie had kissed me last night, I wanted to get dressed up for dinner, so I changed into the only skirt I’d brought, which was a couple of inches above my knees and the color of the sky. Just before eight p.m., we drove into the field and set up dinner. Rory plunked onto a canvas chair and leaned his head back. “I don’t know why, but I’m just banjaxed today.”