by Susan Patron
And then she and Paloma and Lincoln would escape out the back and make normal talk. Lincoln, being Lincoln, would get them thinking about poor Stu Burping having to endure a lifetime of people laughing at his name, and Lincoln would mention how he himself being named for four presidents wasn’t always a picnic either. And Lucky would feel again that amazement at Lincoln’s friendship. No matter how mean she was, like laughing at Stu Burping’s name, he never criticized her and always liked her.
But Lucky couldn’t handle the small talk when what she needed was big talk. She needed to say important things but couldn’t, so she made her way through the crowd to the door. Then she turned back, hesitating, and found Lincoln looking at her intently, as if he were trying to communicate something across the room through ESP. She waved and smiled, and in a sudden impulse, she blew him a kiss, like a movie star of the olden days. The theatrical gesture was supposed to be ironic, as if to say of course she would miss him a little but the time would absolutely zip by because they would both be having so much fun!
When you spend your entire childhood with someone, there are certain things you can do impulsively, like blowing kisses, which you would never do with some boy you knew from school, who would misinterpret and think you were doing it because you were madly in love with him. Lucky was confident that Lincoln would understand exactly, and would know it was just a movie-star pantomime to make him laugh.
But he nodded at her, very serious. As Klincke Ken and Short Sammy flipped a coin, settling some dispute, Lincoln brought his hands together, making a gesture low to his waist. It was a private, brief hand sign that no one saw but Lucky, his fingertips pointing down and touching in a V shape, and his thumbnails pressed together back-to-back. Then Lucky got the hidden meaning, not in Lincoln’s fingers but in the shape created by them: a heart. She smiled at him: Yes. And she slipped out, closing the door quietly.
“Look,” Lucky said in a low voice to HMS Beagle later, when Brigitte had gone to bed. “It’s not a big thing.” HMS Beagle looked up from her rug on the floor by Lucky’s bed. Lucky stared back. “What,” she said, “you think he was sending some kind of love message? Oh, please. We were both just joking around.” HMS Beagle sighed, and then put her head down between her paws.
But even though she said that to her dog, Lucky felt some deep pressure around her, like being inside a tube of toothpaste while someone squeezed it. She put on her old sleeveless summer nightie and turned off the light.
Lucky woke up deep in the night, when it feels as if the world is breathing more slowly and the nocturnal creatures come out to have their day.
She went from deeply asleep to fully awake; she lay still, listening, trying to figure out what woke her. HMS Beagle raised her head from the rug, looked at Lucky, and then scrambled to her feet, smelling at the crack at the foot of the door.
Lucky followed. Holding the Beag’s collar, she opened the door.
It was Lincoln.
“Hey,” he whispered. “Can you come out a minute?”
He was wearing jeans and his new leather jacket, soft brown suede; it made him look cool and tough and handsome and grown-up, like a person who could figure his way around an airport or actually ask someone out on a date. Lucky felt like a little girl in her faded nightgown. “What time is it?” she asked.
“Two thirty,” Lincoln said. “I snuck out.”
Lucky nodded. The night was moonless and dark, but there were stars enough to see by. Moths fluttered, a bat swooped around, and the crickets made a racket. She leaned against the aluminum side of her canned-ham trailer bedroom. “This’ll be good,” she said, meaning the whole trip to London, the chance to tie knots with Geoffrey Budworth, work on Knotting Matters.
“Yeah. It’ll go fast. Next time we see each other, in a couple of months, you’ll be eleven and—” Lincoln took Lucky’s hand and put some coins in her palm. “Eleven and—”
She looked at the coins. “Three quarters,” she finished, grinning. “Right.”
Lincoln swung his sprained arm a little.
“Isn’t your wrist getting better? I bet it didn’t help when you jumped up onto Klincke Ken’s loader.”
“If all of you children,” he said in a perfect imitation of Dr. Strictmund, sounding exactly like a principal, “had stayed behind Short Sammy’s orange traffic cones, none of this would have happened.” In his normal voice Lincoln went on, “No, it’s better.” He wiggled his fingers to show that he could. “Ollie turns out to be okay, you know?”
“Yeah . . . I think he has a thing for Brigitte.”
“Who doesn’t?”
Lucky laughed. “My mom, the heartthrob.”
“What I’ll really miss—” Lincoln broke off as HMS Beagle came to stand next to him, pressing her body sideways against his legs. Lucky saw this and knew that the Beag was responding to strong feelings from Lincoln. It was the comforting thing HMS Beagle did when Lucky felt sadness or yearning or longing—sometimes she didn’t even know for what. Lincoln stroked the Beag with his uninjured left hand. “Yes, girl, I’ll miss you.”
Lucky wondered what Lincoln had been about to say. She clutched the three quarters as if it were her fare for a special kind of ride that she was about to go on. An owl called out, a series of short single hoots, and she thought of all the pellets she’d dissected. “Lincoln,” she said finally, “do you think I’ll go to hell when I die?”
He laughed. “If you do, I’m going too, because who wants to go to heaven if they won’t admit you?”
“No, I’m serious.”
“So am I,” he said. “Jeez, Lucky, maybe heaven and hell are happening right now. You know what I mean?”
“No.” But she did, sort of.
“Maybe it’s not what happens after we die. Maybe heaven and hell are when we’re alive, and we get some of both during our lifetime. But it’s the way we see all the things that happen to us, I guess, and the choices we make. Did Short Sammy ever tell you that old chopsticks story about it?”
She shook her head. In the dark, her hair was like dandelion fluff, reflecting starlight, floating around her head as if it would blow away with the slightest breeze. A zinging sensation shot through her as Lincoln touched her hair with his fingertips.
“Well,” he said, “I’ve heard him tell it a bunch of times. There’s a Chinese man who wants to find out what heaven and hell are like, and he gets the chance to check them out. First he goes to this place where the tables are covered with food, really good stuff, but everyone’s starving and miserable because their chopsticks are three feet long—they can’t get the food into their mouths. That was hell. Then he goes to another place and it’s exactly the same: lots of food on the tables; again the chopsticks are three feet long. But here everyone is happy and feasting, because they’re feeding each other across the table. That was heaven.”
HMS Beagle remained pressed against Lincoln during this story. She seemed to sense that he had a powerful wistfulness or eagerness, some strong wanting of something, and she tried to give comfort with her body.
“She can tell that my stomach is full of knots,” Lincoln said. He laughed. “You’d think I could handle knots by now.”
They both leaned in to touch the dog; Lincoln smelled like leather and spicy hair gel and a sharp scent Lucky couldn’t name—she guessed maybe it was the smell of adventure. “Well,” she said reluctantly, “you should go home before they start looking, and I should go inside. The Beag can’t figure out what’s going on. To her it’s like, why are we out here in the middle of the night?”
“She doesn’t know if she’s in heaven or hell, I guess.”
“Me either,” Lucky said. “And I can’t find my chopsticks anywhere.”
“Actually, we don’t need them,” Lincoln said, and put his arms around her. For a long moment, before he jogged away into the night, she could feel his smile at the sweet curling edge of their kiss.
27. a heart problem
Your father has been very ill.
[Stick e-mailed]
He asked me to come here to San Francisco. I did because he said he wanted to finally settle our differences, the two of us, no lawyers.
He had had heart surgery and was in the hospital when I arrived.
We did settle matters between us, a very great weight off my mind. But mainly what I want to say is that I told him you got in touch with me and we had been e-mailing. I told him about your wanting to be a scientist like Charles Darwin.
Taggart is scheduled for more surgery tomorrow, and the doctors are guardedly optimistic. I’ll keep you posted.
—Stick
That afternoon, perhaps because she’d been up the night before, Lucky fell asleep while reading on her bed. She dreamed she was in some kind of a ward, confined to her bed, and Lincoln brought her a small red bowl filled with soup. It smelled like wontons.
“Is it Chinese?” Lucky asked.
“It’s Forgiveness-Flower soup,” Lincoln said. “You don’t need chopsticks. Just slurp it.” He grinned at her. “It’s good, and it’s good for you!” He sounded like a TV commercial. He had braces on both his wrists, and suddenly there was a naaaat, naaaat sound of buzzers going off.
“I set off the security sensors with the metal splints in my bandages,” he said, winking at her. “But don’t be alarmed. Get it? Don’t be alarmed, Lucky.”
When she woke a short time later, Lucky lay in bed wishing Lincoln were there. She didn’t remember anything about her dream except that he had been in it. Then she sensed something, and it was odd because it had never happened before inside her canned-ham trailer. It was her Higher Power.
It filled up the trailer like a swirl of warm afternoon air, and it made her feel weightless and serene, like when she went out in the desert to think about things when no one was around.
Suddenly she remembered her father in the hospital. Tears came to her eyes, as they always used to do when she thought of him; when she wanted him in her life even though he was a dreadful person and a terrible father. Now a strange new feeling poured through her.
For the first time she thought of Tag not as her father but just as a person. He had lost his mother to illness, he’d lost his half sister to a long, long argument, he’d lost both his wives. So he must have thought, okay, that’s it, no kids; not taking any more chances, not with this heart. Usually she’d be angry, thinking these thoughts about how he didn’t want children, but now she understood that for his whole life his heart was just a poor battered tender aching thing that hurt and hurt and hurt. How could any heart keep on beating with so much pain in it?
She felt sorry that she could not comfort him. Her Higher Power surrounded her, a kind, understanding, immense presence.
Lucky closed her eyes. She was filled with grace and encircled by it. Her own heart felt large and strong, and with it she forgave her father. An hour later she received another e-mail from Stick.
I am so sorry, Lucky, dear. Your father died this morning, a few minutes ago. His heart could not be repaired.
Taggart didn’t want any services. I shall respect his wishes and take care of everything here.
He left instructions for me regarding something he wants me to send to you. More on this later.
I know that he loved you in his own way.
—Stick
28. no matter what it is, it won’t be right
Once the school year was over everything seemed suspended, as if, Lucky thought, time itself waited to find out what was going to happen.
Lucky missed Lincoln. She missed Miles, who spent a lot of time studying the Bible. She missed Paloma between the as-often-as-possible weekend visits. In a strange way, she even missed her father. It was because of the strong, pounding fact that he was no longer on the Earth; he was gone. It took her a long time to realize the true meaning: that she would never see him again, ever.
Then two packages, postmarked San Francisco, arrived for her. On the return label was scrawled TTT C/O S. T. KELLY with Stick’s Portland address.
Apart from a monthly bank notification for Brigitte that an automatic deposit had been transferred to her account from Triple T’s account, these boxes were the only thing that had ever come from her father, even though it was Stick who had actually mailed them after he died.
Lucky stared at the boxes, hesitating. They were big enough for a large microwave oven to fit inside, and extremely heavy. She wanted to tear into them, find out what he had sent. At the same time, she feared that whatever it was would be wrong: too young for her, or too old, too cheap or too expensive, too not-what-she-wanted-or-needed, too clearly a thing from a stranger to a stranger, too late and too little. She didn’t want this gift, this offering, to change the way she thought about him, which was that he was a sad man who died of a bad heart. Even though she had forgiven him, she was afraid. Because why had both Lucille, Lucky’s first mother, and also Brigitte, her adopted mother, why had they loved him and married him? If she learned the answer, was there danger that Lucky would love him too?
Lucky did not want to love her father, especially now that he was dead.
She left the packages on the Formica table all afternoon. Sometimes she glanced at them or frowned at them. Part of her wanted to throw them, unopened, in the trash, but another part of her, the part that won, needed to see what he possibly could have sent: what he imagined she would want, what kind of person he believed her to be, what he wanted her to understand about him. Finally she gave up and went to the everything drawer for the scissors.
She slid one scissor blade along the tape, that bright shiny wide sticky tape that cannot be torn but is easily cut.
A surge of disappointment washed through Lucky. The boxes were both filled with books—adult books that looked dull and difficult. In one box there was a sealed envelope marked “From Stick to Lucky.”
She opened it.
Dear Lucky,
You probably wonder why your father did not make any attempt to enter into your life. I cannot explain it, except to say that he thought it was the right thing to do. He thought you would be happier not knowing him.
However, the contents of these two boxes represent his legacy. He earned his living as a technical translator, but this is what he loved. He wanted you to have these books.
If you are ever in Oregon, I hope you will come to see me. It would be a great pleasure to meet you.
Yours, Stick
29. something discovered about triple T
Lucky didn’t get it. She pulled out three or four books and looked at the covers. They were adult novels and poetry collections by different authors she had never heard of. The jackets were boring and shabby and they smelled dusty. It was seriously disappointing, especially after she had built up in her mind how this gift, his only gift, was going to somehow reveal something important about her father. But it was just the books he’d had.
There were two short knocks on the front door and Pete’s voice saying, “Lucky?” He stuck his head in. “Just wanted to say I was sorry to hear about your father.”
Pete had come to help with the new kitchen cabin, and he’d been working over there with Brigitte, Klincke Ken, and Dot, installing shelves and cupboards. They were getting it ready for the Café’s new opening the following weekend.
“Thanks.” Lots of people had told her that it was lucky she hadn’t really known her father, as if that meant his death were less important, which made Lucky angry. She was grateful that Pete did not say this.
He came in carrying two oranges in one hand and a large white plastic bag in the other. He tossed one of the oranges to her. “Here, try this. From my tree in L.A.” Pete drove up to Hard Pan more and more often, almost every weekend, and everyone knew it was because he liked not only Brigitte’s cooking but Brigitte. Lucky benefited from this because Pete enjoyed Paloma’s company for the three-hour trip, and Paloma’s mother had quit worrying so much, so the girls were able to get together pretty often. But this was one weekend Paloma hadn’t b
een able to come.
Lucky felt a little sad and a little crabby. She returned the books to the boxes and pushed them to the end of the table, against the wall. “Why do you think my father asked his sister to send me these books of his?” she asked Pete. “It’s a horrible present.”
He slid into the banquette opposite her and began to peel his orange, the plastic bag on the seat beside him. “Well, I guess that’s the paradox. If you had known him, you’d know why. Maybe they’re books he wanted you to read someday when you’re older, books he liked a lot. They must have been important to him.”
“Stick said that. She said they were his legacy to me.” Lucky piled her own orange peels in a neat stack on the table.
“Speaking as a geologist, I know I wouldn’t really understand until I looked inside,” Pete said.
Lucky rolled her eyes. “Oh, please. Right now I’m almost done with a really good book called Charles and Emma. I don’t want to read Triple T’s old books.”
“We need paper towels,” Pete said, and got up to yank two off the roll. The trailer was filled with the scent of oranges. “I didn’t say read them. Just have a look. Like, why these particular books? What is it about them that he liked so much?”
Lucky didn’t want to know, but she did want to know. She frowned.
“Mind if I look?”
“I guess not,” Lucky said. Yet she suddenly felt possessive of these books that she didn’t want. It was weird.
Sometimes Pete had a silly aspect to him, as if there were a little boy hiding inside his grown-up body, and Lucky could imagine how cute he’d probably been, with very mischievous dark sparkly eyes, the kind of small boy whose mother is always laughing and flapping her dishcloth at him. He stuck an orange segment between his lips so that it looked like he had orange teeth. Lucky rolled her eyes at him again, but then she did the same with her own orange segment. As usual, his cheeks were dark because of his fast-growing beard. Lucky always wanted to touch those cheeks. Pete reached into the box.