by Susan Patron
Justine shook her head. The light streaming in the window lit her from behind, so she looked as if she wore a glowing spiky-haired halo, like a really strange angel. This made Lucky wonder about angels as an aspect of evolution—like maybe during the time people were evolving a bigger brain, angels were evolving a bigger capacity for grace, that quality Justine sometimes mentioned. Lucky wished Lincoln were there so she could discuss this with him. Lincoln, in fact, now that she thought about it, probably had an angel among his ancestors, somewhere on his family tree, maybe one of his great-greats. If that were true, she decided, then angels might not even know they were angels.
Justine was saying, “No, I already have one. Jesus is my agent.”
After a moment Mr. Wellborne said, “Well! None better! Then we’ll come back and visit your work here in Hard Pan at the museum, right, Carmen? We hope there will be more to see.”
“A mosaic is what I’m imagining,” Justine said. “Quite large.”
“What’s a mosaic?” Paloma asked.
Mrs. Wellborne said, “You’ve seen them in Rome, dear, in some of the cathedrals. Where they take little pieces of stone or pottery or shells and fit them together to make a picture. It’s a very ancient art. So,” she said to Justine, “would this be a floor mosaic?”
“No, it’ll be on a wall, I think. A mural about ten feet high by twenty or thirty feet across.”
“Good heavens!” Mr. Wellborne exclaimed. “That’s incredible! Is there a wall that big that you can use inside the museum?”
“What I envision,” Justine said, dipping her head to the side and squinting a little at the ceiling, “is an outside wall, facing west, facing the setting sun.”
Mr. Wellborne stared out the window, hands clasped behind his back. He turned around. “May I ask what materials you’re thinking of for this mosaic? Stone, I would guess, since there’s rather a lot of it around.”
Justine slowly shook her head. “No. I was thinking glass. There are shards and pieces of broken glass all over the desert. Different colors, some of it quite old glass, but lasting, and there would be that shining effect when the sun hits the surface. Wait, I’ll give you an idea of how it’ll look.” She reached behind her to a shelf and pulled off a spiral notebook. Peering over her shoulder as Justine flipped through, Lucky could see that it was filled with pencil drawings. “Here’s a rough idea of the design,” Justine said, folding back the notebook at a particular page and handing it to Mr. Wellborne.
The Wellbornes studied the drawing for some time, and then they exchanged a look, raising their eyebrows. “My word,” Mr. Wellborne said softly. Mrs. Wellborne gazed from the drawing to him and back. “Absolutely,” she agreed, and they nodded at each other. He handed the notebook back to Justine. “This is exceptionally powerful. But won’t it be dangerous, working with pieces of broken glass?”
“I’ll be careful. But I’m not worried—I know I’ll be safe.”
“Indeed. Yes. Well, Carmen and I may be of assistance, Ms. Prender. Our foundation provides work-in-progress grants for extremely promising film students and occasionally for artists in other media. Based on your sculpture and the sketch of the wall mosaic, we’re interested in helping. I’m referring to a grant that would support you and your son while you do the new project. No strings attached. No strings whatsoever.”
Lucky bugged out her eyes at Paloma, who bugged hers out back at Lucky.
“Well,” Justine said, her eyes shining. “Thank you. I guess my agent will consider that an amazing and very generous offer.”
Lucky wanted to get to a private place so she and Paloma could thoroughly discuss this. Ever since Justine had come, Lucky worried that she would not stay long in Hard Pan; that she would want to take Miles to a real city where they had churches. But now she knew she needn’t have been concerned, for Justine had plenty in common with others in their little town: She had her own definite ideas about things, and she knew what she wanted, and she didn’t care one bit what anybody thought. Lucky realized she was going to fit into Hard Pan just fine. Justine was going to stay.
33. serenity
No one would have been able to visit the musuem to which Justine wanted to give her sculpture were it not for Short Sammy DeSoto, volunteer docent, who kept the key on a nail on an outside wall of his water tank house. It was Short Sammy who wiped fingerprints off the display cases, swept the floor, and related stories about the old mining days to tourists. But now he told the Captain, who told Klincke Ken, who told Mrs. Prender, that he wasn’t sure if he wanted to keep on being the town’s only docent if he now had to be responsible for such a valuable sculpture.
Henrietta had sort of an answer to Short Sammy’s concern over responsibility for Justine’s sculpture, because of his being the one in charge of the key to the museum. She had worked for many years for the county government and therefore knew a great deal about committees and meetings, and on the subject of the key to the museum she declared that there should be a committee and that it should hold a meeting. Reluctantly, Henrietta herself (since it had been her idea) agreed to join the committee, along with Short Sammy, Dot, and, at the Captain’s suggestion, Lucky Trimble.
Lucky loved serving on the Hard Pan Museum Key Committee because it was a little like being in the principal’s office without being in trouble. Her opinions and ideas were listened to just as much as those of the adult committee members. It was Lucky’s idea to summon Justine to the meeting as a consultant, in order to ask her why she had refused to sell the sculpture. The reason the committee needed this information was simply that everyone wanted badly to know. If she’d sold it, she’d be rich, and the town wouldn’t be facing this museum key problem.
Justine told them: She said she gave it to the museum in order to help her to comprehend the idea of serenity. Privately, Lucky noticed, as she had before with the Wellbornes, that Justine already was more serene—or at least a lot less fidgety. So Lucky didn’t get it, unless maybe to Justine serenity meant something different. Short Sammy looked up from under the brim of his hat and said, “‘The courage to change the things I can.’”
“Yes,” Justine responded.
“Just for today,” Short Sammy said. Justine nodded. Lucky figured that this was code talk about recovering from addictions. Because of having eavesdropped on twelve-step meetings when she was younger, she was able, sort of, to follow the conversation. Henrietta said, “Well, we’ll just keep working on this key problem, then,” and Justine thanked them and left.
It turned out that they needed a second meeting, as Henrietta had darkly predicted from the start. At that meeting, the committee members presented their reports, having canvassed all residents of the Hard Pan community to see if anyone else was willing to take over the job of museum docent, or at least share it. It turned out that no one was. So the committee recommended that at some point another committee should be convened to write a grant proposal requesting funding for a paid permanent part-time Found Object Wind Chime Museum and Visitor Center attendant.
But nobody had time to take on any more committee work at the moment, so the key remained hanging on the nail outside of Short Sammy’s water tank house, and the sculpture remained in Mrs. Prender’s front room, where anybody could go and see it anyway.
And Lucky noticed when she was there that Miles hung around the sculpture more than anyone, studying the staircase carefully, as if it would tell him what he needed to know.
34. lucky for good
Lucky had tried many times in the past, because of school assignments in fourth and fifth grade, to like poetry. She read it aloud as her teachers recommended, and she tried writing her own. Nothing worked, and she always went back gratefully to books about bugs and animals and her hero, Charles Darwin. But now Lucky was reading a book of poetry her father, Triple T, had translated. Even though she didn’t understand it in a complete, thorough, scientific way, many of the lines seemed to give off reflections, as if covered by tiny mirrors; they shimmered in h
er brain.
Although he hadn’t written the poems, they connected her with her father. As she read them, she knew that he had handled each word, turning it to the light or putting it to his ear to find out if it breathed. Lucky liked the idea of her father doing this, examining words the way she examined specimens.
These thoughts about being linked in an unexpected way with Triple T made her brood over her family tree.
The project had revealed to whom she was officially biologically connected, but Lucky considered it to be false and incomplete. Neatly recorded were the names of her ancestors, including all eight great-grands, which she’d found with the help of Mrs. Kennedy and Stick. Ms. Baum-Izzart was pleased and said she’d done a fine job. But to Lucky it was mostly just a tree full of strangers, stiff and lifeless. Her principal gave it back to her and told her to keep it in a safe place.
“It’s mine now? Mine for good?”
“Of course, Lucky. It’s your family.”
So Lucky added new branches. On one she wrote, HMS BEAGLE, DOG. On another, SIOBHAN TRIMBLE KELLY (STICK).
She drew a thick branch between her maternals and her paternals. On it she wrote Brigitte’s name, and Brigitte’s parents’, sisters’, and grandparents’ names. Now her tree seemed to thrum with life, like the actual Joshua tree in the dry creek bed behind her trailer that lodged families of lizards, pocket mice, cactus wrens, and beautiful small white moths.
Still, it wasn’t finished, because in Lucky’s opinion a family tree should have the family of your blood and the family of your heart and the family of your secret deep-inside self. So she went back online to the runes website. Using the chart there, she wrote in Elder Futhark near the trunk of her tree,
LINCOLN CLINTON CARTER KENNEDY
MILES PRENDER
PALOMA WELLBORNE
SHORT SAMMY DESOTO
CHARLES DARWIN
She had to make up a rune for C in order to do this, but she didn’t think the ancient Vikings would mind. Down by where the tree’s roots would be, she added ANNIE DARWIN, her future
daughter. She thought for a long time about how to include her Higher Power, and then she finally inscribed, in tiny runes along the top and sides of the page,
OH GOD OF OUR MANY UNDERSTANDINGS:
In all the rush and hard work of preparing for the Café’s opening, Lucky thought she’d misplaced her new family tree, or that it had gotten mixed up with some other paperwork or something, because it went missing for a while. But the next time Pete came to visit he handed it to her, under glass and framed in delicate carved wood. This made it look unexpectedly beautiful, like an intricate work of art. Brigitte took it from Lucky and stood gazing at it in her two outstretched hands, and then she hugged it, twirling around in her bare feet, and then she hung it in her new kitchen cabin among the paintings by Lucille.
It was nearly the end of summer, the months of brief and sudden rainstorms, the time of brash winds and flash floods. Evenings vibrated with the racket of insects shouting What if! What if! What if! at the tops of their tiny wings and legs and lungs. And each afternoon the ferocious sun, pouring red and gold, seemed to waver before it plunged behind the Coso mountains, as if reluctant to leave.
A long time ago, after her mother Lucille had died, Lucky worried a lot about changes, and she had tried to be ready for anything at all times with her survival kit backpack. She worried about losing her way.
Now Lucky suspected that she would be able to manage. It seemed that someone, often herself, always needed to be rescued in Hard Pan, but now she knew that sometimes she would be the one who would come to the rescue.
And another new thing: She liked the way life was always changing; she felt a kind of zinging excitement about it. Tomorrow was the opening, the reopening, of Brigitte’s Hard Pan Café. And in a few weeks, the start of junior high. Those new beginnings felt like the blast of bright light when you’re inside on a summer day and you open the door—it blinds you for a second, being so powerful, but you’re suddenly brimming with courage, braver than you knew you could be, even as you take your first step out, your whole life waiting for you in the vast shimmering world.
acknowledgments
Caitlyn Dlouhy combines feistiness, clarity, vision, kindness, and humor in one terrific package marked Editor. Thank you, Caitlyn. And thanks, too, to Kiley Frank for her keen eye and excellent ear.
Grateful thanks to Dr. Steven Chun for pediatric medical advice and other useful suggestions; to Nordine Patron for his candor and insights on school-yard and principal-office dynamics; to Ben Chun; to Erin Miskey for references and information regarding the Bible and Christian apologetics, and for painstakingly responding to several drafts; to Eva Cox and Rob Robbins for enthusiastic responses when most needed; to Lindsey Philpott of the International Guild of Knot Tyers for once again lending his knotting expertise; to my belle-soeur Liliane Moussy for giving me time to write by doing the cooking; to Gandalf for showing me everything I needed to know about the Beag (RIP, good dog); and to Lloyd Woolever for photos, a video, and his eyewitness account of a house being moved in a way very similar to the event described here. Thanks to Lloyd, also, for sharing his story of ironing school.
Patricia Leavengood and Georgia Chun read draft versions of this book and sent thoughtful comments. As always, I’m awed by their bigheartedness and moral support.
Pal to my Lucky, Theresa Nelson gave her (and me) more writerly help than I can ever repay. We’re hatched from the same egg, to my everlasting gratitude. Additional thanks to Virginia Walter and Lucy Frank, my fine writing friends.
The Hard Pan trilogy has enjoyed a trilogy of the finest editors in the field: Richard Jackson, Ginee Seo, and Caitlyn Dlouhy. How lucky I have been, and how extremely grateful.
As always, Ernie Nortap gave me my best lines (charging only ten dollars each), loaded the dishwasher, squeezed the orange juice, and understood the intricacies, challenges, and craziness inherent in this work.
notes to the reader
Charts to convert English words into runes may be found at NOVA online: pbs.org/wgbh/nova/vikings/runes.html.
Lucky reads about Charles Darwin and his wife in Charles and Emma: The Darwins’ Leap of Faith by Deborah Heiligman (Holt, 2009).
The story of heaven and hell appears in the folklore of many cultures. George Shannon’s retelling can be found in Stories to Solve: Folktales from Around the World (Greenwillow, 1985).
The writer Donald Westlake died on December 31, 2009, while I was writing this book. The chapter in the principal’s office is an homage to Westlake, and especially to his Dortmunder comic capers.
The little quote Lucky finds in one of the fictional books her father translated, “Life must go on; I forget just why,” is from the poem “Lament” by Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Justine’s religious beliefs and her understanding of Biblical citations are all her own and do not represent those of any person or group.