Lucky for Good

by Susan Patron

  24. getting into heaven

  “I’ve got fifteen pellets,” Lucky said to Justine the next day. “I found another place where owls regurgitate them.”

  Justine had newspaper already spread out on the table. Lucky admired her gelled, spiked-up hair, which was the same coppery color as Miles’s but a shade darker. It was certainly very convenient hair because it never got in your way and could be washed in about one second and required no barrettes or scrunchies. “Fantastic! Oh, this is great, Lucky, the more the better. I’ll help you get the bones out if you want me to,” she offered, but Lucky could tell she didn’t really want to.

  In fact, Lucky enjoyed dissecting them herself. “It’s okay,” she said as she dumped the pellets onto the newspaper. “So Miles is still doing his Adopt-a-Yard thing again today. The Beag thinks the vest and the special equipment mean it’s some kind of game. She gets really excited when she sees him like that.”

  “We got into another fight this morning when I wouldn’t let him wear the vest to school.”

  “Yeah, he told me on the bus. He was talking about hell again. I don’t know what to tell him when he asks me questions about it. Maybe it’s against your religion or something for me to say this, but I, like, usually don’t go around all the time thinking about hell, or at least not that often. So he asks me stuff and I’m, like, ‘I don’t know, Miles.’”

  Today Justine sat at the breakfast table like a normal mom, instead of on the floor. Well, her collection of Popsicle sticks, a cereal box full of them, was maybe a little unusual, but not in the sense of abnormal. She was just different. “Lucky, it’s simple and easy. You need to believe that Jesus came to die for your sins, and you ask Him to forgive you. That’s how you go to heaven instead of hell. Hand me that glue.” Her fingers, with their tiny nails, looked like they belonged to a young girl; Lucky liked watching because they were very precise, skillful fingers. They were fingers that knew exactly what they were doing. She spread white glue on the ends of several Popsicle sticks and began arranging them in stacks. “And if Miles asks questions you don’t know the answers to, just tell him to come to me. You too, Lucky. You know you should feel free to ask me questions anytime.”

  “Well,” Lucky said hesitantly. “Okay. Here’s one thing I was wondering about—it’s about after I die, if I go to heaven, would I get to meet Charles Darwin in person? Because he was this very, very great scientist and he was kind of spiritual, almost like he thought every single living thing had God inside it. And in this book I’m reading it says he and his wife had different religious beliefs. She was pretty religious, but I don’t know if Darwin actually believed what you said. You know, that Jesus died for his sins. So, does that mean he wouldn’t be able to go to heaven?” Lucky considered meeting Charles Darwin as a huge bonus, in terms of being dead.

  “Especially not him,” Justine said, shaking her head.

  This felt the same as when someone shoves their knees into the backs of yours and makes them buckle. It doesn’t hurt, but it’s annoying because it takes you unfairly by surprise. “Why especially not him?” she demanded, tearing a pellet apart with her toothpicks.

  “Evolution,” Justine said. “What Charles Darwin came up with. It’s a lie, Lucky. He sinned, just like we all do, and I guess it’s like any other sin to God, but to me his sin was compounded because so many people have been turned away from God by his theories.”

  Lucky watched Justine’s small fingers carefully stack the Popsicle sticks, squaring them before the glue could dry; alternating the arrangement so that the sticks supported each other and began to form a smooth strong surface about a foot square. This was going to be the base for the pellet bone project, apparently. “But they teach us about evolution in school. We have textbooks. Everyone knows Charles Darwin was the greatest scientist who ever lived.” Lucky hoped that by explaining these things to Justine, she would realize that maybe she needed to relook at the whole getting-into-heaven criteria.

  Justine shook her head at Lucky. “I didn’t make the rules,” she said. “It’s all in there.” She pointed the bottle of glue at her Bible. “This is the word of God and it’s all we have to go on. But once you take Jesus into your heart, you’ll be saved. ‘Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning.’ Think about that passage, Lucky, from the book of James. You’ll see that it’s comforting.”

  Lucky still hadn’t gotten over Charles Darwin being denied entrance into heaven, like a goof-off kid held back at the entrance to Disneyland. Charles Darwin should be in charge of heaven! Then Lucky had another thought. “Pete’s a Christian, but he’s also a geologist and he believes in evolution. And what about people who maybe grew up studying another religion completely, where they don’t even have Jesus? Or they have their own sacred book, not our Bible, but just as holy to them. Can’t any of those people go to heaven either?

  “And what about me?” Lucky kept finding questions, like the tiny bones in the pellets. “If I have a good heart, I’m kind, I don’t cheat, I ‘do unto others,’ I’m not evil or bad.” In fact, deep down, Lucky knew that she was not very good. She could be mean and sometimes she didn’t recycle or she left lights on and used up energy unnecessarily. Paloma was much better at stuff like not harming the Earth; she was a truly good person, whereas Lucky herself had many faults. And sometimes very bad thoughts. But she figured that hypothetically by the time she died (of old age) she’d be making better choices and decisions. And that meant that God or whoever was in charge of the universe would very, very likely welcome her into heaven. And Charles Darwin, too!

  Justine, wiping off some extra globs of glue with a piece of toilet paper, said, “You want to know if you can be saved and live with Christ in heaven by doing good?”

  “Yeah,” Lucky said. “Wouldn’t God be okay with me, even if I’d never read a page of the Bible? Or if I belonged to another religion?”

  “No, Lucky. There is only one door into heaven,” Justine said. Standing, she gave Lucky the exact same imploring look as HMS Beagle when she had an urgent need—to eat or to play or to go out. After a second, Justine turned to the counter behind her; she punched on the radio and pulled an iron out of a cupboard. “I want so much for you to go through that door, for you to be saved.” She placed the iron on the Popsicle stick platform and left it there; Lucky saw that it would weigh down the structure while it was drying.

  Lucky had heard the song on Justine’s Christian station before—it was a sweet ballad. She half listened to it, thinking about two things she longed and longed and longed to talk with Charles Darwin about. One was the death of his daughter, Annie, at the age of ten. Lucky wanted Charles Darwin to know how sad she felt about that, and how she planned to name her own daughter Annie Darwin. And she also wanted to tell him about certain coincidences, such as how she and Charles had both been eight when their mothers died, and that Charles was born on the exact same day and year as Abraham Lincoln, for whom her friend Lincoln was named; Lucky found these to be extraordinary coincidences, and proof of some kind of spiritual connection between them.

  Lucky decided to discuss questions about heaven and hell more thoroughly with Lincoln at some point. Which reminded her: “I hope,” she said, “that Klincke Ken will remember to use Lincoln’s latch, that little noose he made, to keep his new gate closed. Otherwise Chesterfield is going to keep wandering around town and getting into trouble and dangerous situations like on cabin-moving day. He might even leave completely and go find his old burro buds in the desert. Miles loves Chesterfield so much I think that would just about kill him.”

  Tapping a Popsicle stick against the table in time to the music, Justine said, “My guess is, if that burro wants to get out, he’ll get out. If he feels like he’s locked up, no little noose latch is going to stop him. But if he decides to stick around, if he’s given up the wild life he had before, well . . . and I heard about how much he loves
that little ginger cat. Is that true?”

  Lucky smiled. “Lincoln and I were watching them together the other day, and it sounds crazy because they’re different species and everything, but it’s like they really need each other.”

  “Then Klincke Ken probably doesn’t even have to use the latch.”

  Lucky had a feeling Justine was right about that, even if she was wrong about other things. She said, “I like that song a lot. So, listen, you promised to tell me what the owl pellet bones are for.”

  “A sculpture!” Justine said, like someone calling out, “Cold watermelon!” on a hot day. She sang along with the chorus, “‘He’s right here in this room, the helper of the fatherless, a father of the fatherless . . .’”

  “A sculpture? You mean like a marble statue with no arms?” Lucky had seen one like this in Dot’s backyard, which she’d gotten cheap at the garden supply store because it had a little crack in it. Dot said her statue gave the place a very classical aspect that appealed to her beauty parlor customers. But Lucky didn’t see the connection between a statue like that and rodent bones. “I don’t think these bones will work, Justine,” she said.

  Justine laughed. “No, not a statue of a person. It’s going to be a staircase, a miniature staircase, one with a handrail, built entirely of these tiny bones. I’ll need hundreds and hundreds more of them.”

  “Okay,” Lucky said. She tried picturing Justine’s sculpture, but it was too strange to imagine. “Um, but who is the staircase for? Why are you making it?”

  “Because I have to. I can’t really explain. I see it in my mind and I have to make it.”

  Lucky said nothing. She gently stirred the box of bones with a finger, thinking of the words of the song, how God was the father of the fatherless. She wondered whether God knew about that time she had that what-if thought, What if Brigitte’s Hard Pan Café suddenly disappeared? But if her Higher Power did hear what-ifs, she hoped he’d know that they were not little unintentional prayers. Mostly what-ifs are hopes or anxiousness or even bad thoughts that need to be gone over by a person privately. Lucky’s what-ifs were extremely personal, none of anyone’s business, even her Higher Power’s. Anyway, she reasoned, a Higher Power has much more important things to do than pay attention to those questions in her head.

  25. saving on kleenex

  The walnut shells rattled and Mrs. Prender shouted, “Justine? Give me a hand with these bags?”

  Lucky and Justine jumped up to relieve Mrs. Prender of two big grocery bags from the Buy-Mor-Store. Mrs. Prender sank onto a chair as Miles wandered into the kitchen and opened the fridge door. “Long day,” Mrs. Prender said. She always spoke very loudly, and Lucky used to think this was because she herself might be hard of hearing. But Mrs. Prender always heard every word Lucky said, even whispered words, so Lucky concluded that Mrs. Prender, for whatever reason, set her personal voice volume louder than most people.

  “Miles, get out of the fridge, please,” Justine said.

  Miles grabbed a handful of grapes from a bowl, stuffed them in his mouth, and slammed the fridge door. He turned to his mother and stood in front of her, chewing the grapes, opening his mouth wide with each chew.

  “Quit that, Miles!” shouted Mrs. Prender. “Why is he always acting up the minute I come home?”

  “He’s like that all the time,” Justine said.

  “No, he’s not,” Lucky put in. “He’s only been like that since—” She stopped. It would have been rude to say the truth: He’d only been like that since Justine arrived in Hard Pan.

  Miles pawed around in the grocery bags, then went to sit next to Lucky on the kitchen chair, pushing her so that each of them had half the seat. She let him, even though there was an empty chair next to them.

  “I brought you some books from the Sierra City Library,” Mrs. Prender told Miles. “The librarian helped me pick them out. She knows you’ve read most of what they’ve got for your age group and she thought you’d like these. They’re out in the car—backseat.”

  Miles jumped up and shot through the walnut shell curtain. In a minute he shot back through and flung a pile of books onto the kitchen table.

  “I have to look at those first, Miles,” Justine said.

  “Awww, Justine!” Miles said.

  “Miles . . . you know the drill.” Justine gave him a look.

  Miles sighed and told Lucky, “She needs to make sure they’re appropriate. Dinosaur books aren’t appropriate. I can’t read those anymore. Some geology books are bad because they say the Earth is much older than it really is. Like I had a book about the Grand Canyon, but we had to return it because it said the canyon was formed, well, parts of it, two billion years ago. That’s wrong. I can read about the human body as long as it doesn’t talk about you-know-what.” Miles had an innocent, open way of explaining all this, but Lucky knew him as if he were her brother. Even though Miles hated it when his mother and grandmother argued, she could tell he was trying to get his grandmother, who’d raised him and had always let him read everything, to start an argument with Justine.

  And sure enough, Mrs. Prender started in. “Justine, reading isn’t going to make Miles into a sinner. He’s already read more books than I read in my whole life. They said he’s a genius at the school there in Sierra City. You really think God would give him such a good brain and then not want him to use it?”

  “Mom, please stop. We’ve been over this. He’s my kid, and I don’t want him reading books that go against anything God teaches us.”

  “Well, he’s your kid, but since I raised him so far, he’s also my kid. So what I’m saying,” Mrs. Prender shouted, “is give him some slack. I’m sick of this and I’m too old for it.”

  Justine had been facing the sink, her spiky boy-haircut bowed, and Lucky wondered how much the tattooed cross on the back of her neck had hurt. Then Justine turned around, her face covered with tears, looking to Lucky so young that she could have been a student at Einstein Junior High. “Well, I am sick of it too!” she said. “You don’t get it! If it weren’t for God, I’d be a drug addict and I’d probably be on the streets. He saved my body and He saved my soul in prison. You can’t understand that, but that’s what guides my life now.”

  Lucky actually did understand, because she had eavesdropped at twelve-step meetings when she was younger. The meetings were a way for people to stop being addicted by doing a fearless and searching moral inventory and being honest and asking forgiveness of those they did harm to. There were more steps, but that was the gist of it that Lucky remembered. Also she knew that Mrs. Prender attended those meetings as a recovering smoker. By eavesdropping, Lucky had learned all about what it was like for people to hit rock bottom because of their addictions, and then find their Higher Power and get well. God was Justine’s Higher Power.

  But at the anonymous meetings there was no particular God everyone had to agree on—you could be any religion or no religion and just have a personal Higher Power, like Lucky did herself, without the Bible or a church. She remembered one man who wasn’t from Hard Pan. He used to show up for the Gamblers Anonymous meetings, and before the prayer at the end he would always say, “Oh God of our many understandings,” and Lucky would sometimes think of that phrase because it was so beautiful and mysterious. In some ways, eavesdropping on those meetings was like going to a sort of unofficial do-it-yourself church.

  “Miles,” Justine said, her tears gone, “I need to study the California Driver Handbook. Want to help? You can test me on the rules.”

  Miles had begun to cry when his mother did, but now he pulled up the front of his T-shirt and wiped his eyes and nose with it before following her out of the room.

  “You must save a lot on Kleenex,” Lucky said to Mrs. Prender.

  “Yes, and he’s also a walking napkin,” Mrs. Prender agreed. She heaved herself out of the chair and began to put away the groceries. Lucky gathered up her nondissected pellets and cleaned up the area where she’d been working. It hit her—how Justine’s
new life in Hard Pan was hard for her and hard in a different way for Miles, but it was maybe even hardest of all for Mrs. Prender. She wanted to explain that she kind of understood; she wanted to say the right thing but didn’t know how, so instead she said very softly, “They’ll be okay.”

  “God willing,” Mrs. Prender answered, and for once her voice was soft too. She pulled a tiny plastic pot from the grocery bag and handed it to Lucky. “Here, these rosemary seedlings were on sale. I got one for Brigitte.”

  Lucky looked at it worriedly. The little plant was so straggly she wondered if it would ever grow. Mrs. Prender noticed and smiled. “Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s hardier than you think.”

  26. small talk

  Lincoln and his parents would be leaving Hard Pan tomorrow at four a.m., driving to the airport in Los Angeles for an early flight to London. Lucky had gone over to the Kennedys’ after dinner to say good-bye, but there were a lot of other people milling around, and suddenly Lucky felt something in her chest like a black hole in space, and it seemed it was going to suck her into itself. The feeling made her give up trying to say just the right thing to Lincoln, the exact perfect words so he would know how much she was going to miss him.

  What people do, when a lot of folks are all talking and getting together for some special event, is they make small talk. Lucky found this a good description: small talk, where nothing much is said. It must be so restful to be some other kind of animal, she thought. You could hang out with your friends and no chatter or small talk would be necessary: You could nuzzle them, or you could let them lick your ears, or you could swim along beside them—but you didn’t have to think of anything to say.

  Short Sammy was explaining to Lincoln about the rate of exchange between dollars and English pounds, and Klincke Ken wondered if the wrist brace, with its metal splint, would set off the airport security alarms, and everybody admired Lincoln’s new leather jacket, excited to be sending him off on his big adventure. If only Paloma were there, Lucky would say, “Let me introduce you to Betty Lou, Mrs. Kennedy’s sofa,” and she knew Paloma would explode with laughter, and then people would want to know why they were laughing so hard, and Paloma would explain in that way she had that always made other people laugh too, even grown-ups.