by Susan Patron
Paloma laughed and draped an arm over Lucky’s shoulders. “You’re right,” she said, “which, I bet the person who thought up sofa naming was a guy. ‘Hey, this dark blue tweed high-armed, round-footed sofa isn’t just a sofa. It’s Bertha!’”
Lucky said, “So the other sofa people go, ‘Whoa, this man is a genius!’ “
“What man?” Lincoln asked, coming up to them, but they were laughing so hard they couldn’t answer.
An unfortunate casualty of the day was Ollie’s skateboard, which had been cracked by Chesterfield’s hooves and smashed by the loader’s massive tires. Plus, Ollie had collected some bruises and a sprained wrist, so Lincoln lent him a spare brace. But Ollie, explaining to Brigitte that she could call him Olivier if she wanted, because in fact it was true that his paternal side was full of French people, and that his great-grandparents had immigrated to the United States, seemed to have lightened up. Somehow his brief, eventful, heroic day and the discovery that he looked like a French ado had completely changed his outlook.
He ate a great deal of Brigitte’s pizza and mini quiches and submitted smilingly to a fair amount of her teasing. Ollie now saw quite clearly that people at Einstein Junior High just didn’t realize what a cool place Hard Pan actually was.
19. a very old story
You could smell how strongly the new kitchen cabin was becoming fortified against enemy invaders. A fresh coat of paint on the walls, mineral oil for the wood sills and moldings, and Murphy Oil Soap mixed with hot water for the floor. If Lucky were an ant, she wouldn’t dare set foot inside, but to her human nose, the mixture smelled like welcome.
She scraped gunk from a windowsill and dug a few facts about Triple T out of Brigitte, who had to be prodded and cajoled to talk about him. “My version of him,” she explained to Lucky, “is short, exciting, and it is sad.”
“I know,” Lucky had answered patiently. “Just tell me about meeting him and what he was like. Did he ever say anything about his parents?”
“Non,” Brigitte said, jamming her sponge mop into a corner, her back to Lucky. She was scouring every inch of the wood plank floor. “Except that his maman was not well for most of her life.”
Lucky already knew about that, thanks to Stick, and she knew her grandmother Fiona was born in Ireland. She poured a few drops of mineral oil onto her clean rag and rubbed it into the wood of the sill, careful not to allow any drips.
“So he was in Paris studying for a year at the university,” Lucky said, trying to get the engine of Brigitte’s memory started the same way the Captain usually got his van going by giving it a push downhill.
“Yes, at the Sorbonne. I am working at the pastry shop nearby, where he comes each day to buy a croissant. He is so American! Friendly but not in a flirting way, very polite.” Brigitte plunged her mop into a bucket of hot water and Murphy Oil Soap. “I do not know Americans before him, except for movies. To me—” She squeezed the mop, dipped it in the water, squeezed again. “To me, he is exotic because of being so . . . open. Normally in France we are more reserved. He smiles with all his teeth,” she explained, “like you.”
“Okay, so you went on a date?”
“Non, we just have coffee because I am not sure about him. His French is very good, but formal and old-fashioned. He uses some words from the nineteenth century that no one says today. They are like antique words.” She frowned, thinking. “He has a quality of being a gentleman, and I like this very much. Look up there, a faucheux—a daddy longlegs. Always in the corner is another daddy longlegs.” She went after it with her mop.
Lucky was very interested in daddy longlegs but refused to let the subject veer off into a discussion of them. “A gentleman like how?” She rubbed the wood window frame vigorously, as if only half-interested in the conversation. If she showed her eagerness, if she was not reserved like French people, Brigitte might cut the story short.
“Oh, I remember I tell him I have the dream to become a chef, but it is an impossible dream—very difficult to do this in France. The next day he brings me a present. It is a book, very old, of Escoffier, the first great chef of France.” Brigitte resumed mopping under the table. “I think with this book he is telling me how much he respects our tradition of cooking, and also that because I am French I inherit the tradition; that I can become a chef. It makes me fall in love—with that simple view of the world, and a little bit with him.”
“Hmmm,” Lucky said. “So then?”
“Oh, Lucky, it is a very old story. He is handsome, very smart—like you—he tells about California, how beautiful it is, how he loves me.” She plunged the mop down, hard, into the bucket again. “Here is the truth. It is my fault the marriage does not work.”
“Your fault? How could it be your fault?”
“I tell you already. Now listen, because I do not want to talk about this again.”
Lucky nodded, waiting, almost afraid to breathe. HMS Beagle, banished to the small front porch while Brigitte mopped, could be heard sighing loudly in her sleep.
Brigitte leaned the mop against a wall; her faded blue scrunchie had come loose. She removed it, tilting her head back and gathering her hair into a ponytail, looping the scrunchie around it. Lucky wished she could inherit Brigitte’s beautiful high cheekbones and finely arched dark eyebrows, though of course she could not, being adopted. But maybe she’d be able, somehow, to absorb Brigitte’s way of looking confident and radiant, even with a mop in her hands and a faded scrunchie in her hair.
“Before we marry I tell him I want to have a child. He does not want children, and he is very clear, very . . . emphatic. But I am young and I make the mistake of thinking I can change his mind. Secretly, I feel sure he will one day agree with what I want. I was wrong.”
“So that was it?”
“Well, not entirely. It was . . . very difficult because we have fun, we like the same music, my maman adores him and says he is a good husband for me. But I am too sad, thinking always of my life with no child. He will not change; I will not change. So we agree to divorce.”
Lucky thought, And then he came back to California and married Lucille, who must not have cared that Triple T didn’t want a child, because she became pregnant.
Brigitte was obviously thinking the same thoughts. She said, “And this is the wonderful paradox. He gives me a beautiful American child, after all: you.”
Lucky felt strangely like crying, partly because the story was so sad but also because it was so confusing. Triple T had not behaved as badly as she’d thought—he had been thoughtful and honest (and fun!) with Brigitte.
The window’s rough old wood frame had soaked up half a bottle of mineral oil; it now looked rich and smooth. Brigitte said she was smart, like her father, and Lucky breathed in that thought—mingled with the new kitchen cabin’s comforting scent.
20. when god was six
Miles kicked one of the four washing machines lined up in front of his grandmother’s house. “I’m not discussing dinosaurs with you, Lucky! Or you, either, Lincoln,” he said, gripping a half-eaten hot dog until his fingers left indentations in the bun and mustard and ketchup surged out onto his hand. “Except it says in the Bible that everything on Earth, including the dinosaurs, was created at the same time.”
Lincoln and Lucky sat eating their own hot dogs on two of the washing machines not being kicked. “But, Miles,” Lincoln said, “what about those books you read about the Jurassic and those other periods. Remember how you always told us about how the dinosaurs existed for millions of years before the early hominids? And the fossil finds where they discovered new species? What happened to all that scientific evidence?”
“Shut up!” Miles shouted. “Justine even showed me a museum you can go to online that shows how all the animals and everything were being created on Earth at the same time. All the animals.” Like everyone else, Miles called his mother Justine.
Lucky frowned. It was pretty unusual to see Miles so angry and upset. She said, “Well, the Bible was
written by people, right? And people make mistakes, don’t they? Like, in those days they hadn’t found any ancient skeletons or fossils and they didn’t know about evolution. They didn’t even know about the dinosaurs.”
“They weren’t making mistakes. The Bible is the word of God.” Miles picked up a fist-size rock and threw it, hard, at the base of the washing machine serving as a perch for Lucky.
“Hey, come on, quit that, Miles,” she said. “Listen, calm down and think about this for a second, okay? What if God was just a kid your age at the time of the Bible being written? Like say he was about six. So even though he’s God, he’s still figuring out how everything’s going to work. Because it’s, like, our Earth is his first project and he’s kind of making it up as he goes along.”
Miles lobbed another stone, but this time he aimed at an upside-down tin tub. It pinged off the side. “God was never six,” he said, but he didn’t sound sure.
“Well,” Lincoln put in, “but say Lucky’s right. He’s really young in God-years at the time of Adam and Eve.”
“God-years?” Lucky made an Is this supposed to be helpful? face at Lincoln.
“In the context of eternity, Lucky,” Lincoln said, with a Would you just listen for a second? look back at her. “Like a zillion of our years might be the bat of an eye for God, and the six days of creation would be zillions of our human years.”
“Kind of like we say dog years,” Lucky said slowly, catching on. “HMS Beagle is middle-aged in dog years, even though she’s only six in our years, and you’re six too, Miles, but you’re still a kid. Or just think of what six years would be like to a daddy longlegs—say he’s doing his family tree, six years for him would be something like me having to go back a thousand generations.”
Lincoln added, “And Pete and the geologists don’t even think in years. They talk about eons because geologic time is in millions of years. Maybe God-years are like eons, so immense we can hardly imagine them. See what I mean?”
Miles didn’t answer. After a moment Lincoln continued, “Yeah, anyway. So God decides to make the Bible as a kind of owner’s manual or how-to guide. He tells certain people what to write and you get the books of the Old Testament and then the New Testament. Right? But maybe for some reason he decided not to tell them about the dinosaurs and other extinct animals; they had been living eons earlier, so I don’t know, maybe it wasn’t something God felt like going into right then.”
Lucky smiled at Lincoln. “He’d outgrown his dinosaur phase,” she said.
“Or he figured the early people had enough on their minds already.” Lincoln waved his hot dog in a big arc, indicating the vastness of the world. “Or maybe he wanted us to find out later, on our own, so he made us smart enough to invent science and to make instruments.”
Miles glared at them. “It’s really wrong to talk about God that way.” He opened one of the washing machines and threw the remains of his hot dog inside, slamming the lid and wiping his hand on his jeans. “Quit doing that and accept Jesus,” he went on, resting his cheek against the flaky greenish metal top of the machine, “so you can be here on the final day and enter heaven!”
“Miles,” Lincoln said. “Listen. Just think about this. Why wouldn’t God let Lucky and me into heaven?”
“We all sin,” said Miles. “Everybody. But it’s like Justine says—we can all be saved anyway, by taking Jesus into our hearts. And all the people who already died, if they took Jesus as their savior, they get to come back to life on Earth.”
“Well, that’s the other thing,” Lucky said, licking ketchup off the palm of her hand, “how crowded that sounds, with heaven being on Earth, if you have all those people who died coming back. I mean, if they took Jesus as their savior. Did you ask Justine how there’ll be enough room for everyone?”
Miles nodded, sideways, his head pressed against the machine. “Yes, but I don’t like explaining this,” he moaned.
“Come on, Miles—I don’t get it. There may be tens of gazillions of people. How is everybody going to fit?”
“No oceans,” Miles mumbled.
“No oceans?”
“They cover seventy percent of the Earth’s surface. Without them there’ll be room for everyone.” Miles recited this in a practiced way, Lucky thought, as if he had it memorized. But it sounded more like he was trying to believe it than like he actually did, and he reminded her of someone about to get a shot with a giant needle, looking the other way until it’s over.
21. how lucky would cope if she had to
Lucky worried a little bit, from time to time, that Brigitte would die. It was hard to think of the world without Brigitte in it, because Brigitte filled up a day the way air fills up a room. If she died, Lucky’s life would just suck into itself and collapse, like when you force air out of a Ziploc bag. So mostly when these worries came into Lucky’s head, what she had to do was envision Brigitte’s old mother. It seemed that as long as the old mother was alive, Brigitte couldn’t die—it would not make sense, because old people are supposed to die first.
On Sunday evening, after a long, hard, busy weekend of making jams and sauces that could be preserved, Brigitte pulled off her apron as if it were as heavy as the kind you have to wear when you get an X-ray at the dentist. She dropped it on the floor and kicked off her espadrilles, limping into her bedroom trailer. “Ten minutes,” she said, and fell backward onto her bed. Lucky stood there, amazed: They hadn’t even finished wiping down the counters. Brigitte fell asleep instantly, lying on her back like a doll, its lifeless head on the pillow. Lucky watched, alarmed and wondering if she should call Short Sammy, who was connecting the water lines in the new kitchen cabin next door. It was like seeing a limp goldfish: strange and scary. Lucky had never realized how Brigitte was all about fluid motion, so different from the nervous repetitive tapping of Justine. Brigitte’s face, limbs, and body moved as she talked and as she worked and even as she listened, but in sleep all that action drained into a deep stillness. Lucky leaned in close to reassure herself that Brigitte was still breathing and hadn’t died. And then, under almost translucent eyelids, the two round eyeballs twitched. Lucky tiptoed outside with her soapy sponge. She scrubbed the counters and then rinsed them with the clean hot water of pure relief.
But from then on Lucky knew how Brigitte would be when she died: just a body without life, not even a flicker of a dream under the eyelids. Deep down, she knew that Brigitte wasn’t really safe just because her old mother was still alive. People could die any moment, and when you least expect it.
Of course it wasn’t likely that Brigitte would have a fatal accident like Lucky’s birth mother, Lucille, who had been electrocuted by a fallen high-tension wire. Brigitte’s regular, ho-hum accidents and little colds and minor headaches were okay because that kind of thing wouldn’t kill her: Lucky counted on the statistical improbability of any girl having two mothers suddenly die from accidents. So she soothed herself out of those death thoughts for a while.
But then they would come back, and Lucky finally had to make herself envision Brigitte’s total death. She ran a little story in her head about the funeral and all the sad French people, Brigitte’s sisters and her old mother, coming to Hard Pan and trying to comfort Lucky, but she would not be comforted no matter what they did. In the little story of Brigitte’s funeral, Triple T would arrive in his dark glasses, and Lucky would yank those glasses off his face so she could look her father in the eyes. Often the story would end there, because Lucky didn’t know where to take it, or she had to give HMS Beagle a bath, or it was time to do her homework, and anyway she’d gotten tired of imagining Brigitte’s death.
And Lucky had a secret backup plan in case Brigitte did die, because sometimes she needed to calm herself by studying all the possibilities of something bad happening, and what things would occur and what she could do. So her secret plan was that she would make her father take care of her. He didn’t want her, which she knew for sure, now that she was eleven and a half and no longer ha
d childish hopes that maybe he just didn’t realize how great a daughter he had, that if he got to know her he’d like her very much. No, she was now a total realist as far as her father. He didn’t want her: okay.
But she’d make him take her, or at least take care of her so she wouldn’t have to go to an orphanage. She knew enough about him to back him up against a wall and say, “Hey! Your parents didn’t make you go to an orphanage! They sent you to school in Europe! So don’t try to weasel out of it with me!” Lucky saw herself as fierce and unyielding, and she saw her father (without his dark glasses) bowing his head.
Plus, plus, she thought she could convince Stick to stick up for her. She’d get Stick to get her lawyer to talk to Triple T’s lawyer and maybe sue him or something. Couldn’t you sue your father for mental anguish if he abandoned you? You should be able to, she decided. That was her secret backup plan, how she would handle everything, if Brigitte were to die. She would use the little suitcase that Brigitte brought with her to America, and she would wear her ruby necklace that had been her adopted great-great-grandmother’s, and when she arrived at the Paris airport, her aunts (pretty, but not as pretty as Brigitte) would meet her and take her to a fancy French school (not an orphanage!) with red geraniums in the windows. In the last scene of this story, Lucky would be looking out the window, down to the street below, and all the women would look just like Brigitte from above, but none of them would be her.
And sometimes she discussed the whole problem with her Higher Power. She always needed to be outdoors to do this, and it was fine for HMS Beagle to be there but no humans. At these times, she’d just have a little conversation with her Higher Power, explaining the situation.