Lucky Breaks (3 page)

The geologists and Paloma seemed to be enjoying their meal. Lucky watched out the window to be ready, when they were finished, to clear the plates. Suddenly she saw Paloma lean over and look beneath the table.

Lucky remembered her jar of tomato worms from yesterday, and a bad feeling coated her stomach.

Paloma’s head stayed down for a few minutes. Then it came up again, and in her hand was the glass jar. Lucky glanced at Brigitte, who had her back turned, stacking plates. In a flash, Lucky was out the trailer and down the steps, but not in time to keep Paloma from saying, “‘Luscious tomatoes’? Which, it looks more like avocado pieces with a bunch of leaves.”

“It
is
avocado,” said Lucky. “Slices of avocado in a kind of…dressing. Special French dressing with leaves.” She reached for the jar, but the sedimentologist beat her to it.

Leaning in and trying to peer around the jar’s label, the
seismologist said, “That dressing was really wonderful. Kind of mustardy.” He squinted. “My glasses are in the car, so I can’t—”

The sedimentologist held the jar up, trying to get a view through the bottom. She said, “But why are the avocado slices kept outside in a jar under the table?”

“Let me see that,” said the mineralogist. The trouble with geologists is they all want to examine everything.

“You know, these things aren’t avocado slices. They’re some kind of
creatures
,” the mineralogist said. “They’re
moving
.”

Paloma’s uncle snatched the jar. “They’re worms,” he said. “Tomato worms. That’s what I thought right away, but then I thought,
nah
. Why would they have a jar of tomato worms under the table of a restaurant?”

Lucky glanced at the trailer and saw the back of Brigitte’s head through the window. Safe so far, but she had to get rid of that jar fast. “Okay, you’re right, they’re tomato worms. We’re fattening them up so Brigitte can…” Creative juices sprayed the inside of Lucky’s brain, like water spurting out of a sprinkler that had been clogged. She remembered the gross story of the snails.

Lucky looked all the geologists in the eye and said, “So Brigitte can cook them. They will be the specialty on the menu tomorrow.”

“No kidding!” Pete said, and his face leaped to attention. “I never heard of tomato worms being edible. You mean like
escargots
?”

Lucky noticed that Paloma had tucked her lips in again, and she stared at Lucky with wide eyes.

“Exactly right,” said Lucky. “They’re a lot like snails, but without the shells. In France they are very”—she searched for a word that would make her sound like she knew what she was talking about—“very…
prized
.” She smiled confidently in the way of someone who has pointed out a clear, obvious fact. “So I better take these guys in now so we can starve them until they’re clean inside.” She grabbed the jar and ran for her own trailer, flung the door open, tossed the jar on her bed, and ran back out.

Brigitte came out with her tray. Paloma and all the geologists turned to her with their eyebrows up.

A lot of worry churned around in Lucky’s corpuscles. She knew Brigitte would not like the tomato-worm episode one bit. Telling customers strange stories about tomorrow’s menu was
not
something recommended in the online Certified Course in Restaurant Management and Administration with Diploma from the Culinary Institute of France in Paris. “I was just telling about tomorrow’s special,” Lucky said, “because—”

“Because everyone loved their avocado salads a
lot
,” Paloma interrupted, “and we were talking about the dressing.”

The sedimentologist frowned at Paloma and said, “Well, what actually happened—”

“Was that we were all thinking,” Pete interrupted, talking to Brigitte but smiling in a piercing, squinty-eyed way at
the sedimentologist and speaking each word very deliberately, “about how
nice
and
refreshing
it is when fruits and vegetables don’t have sprays or chemicals on them. It’s perfectly
natural
to get a bug or a worm or two on them once in a while, right?”

Brigitte’s spine got straighter and her eyes blazed. “Someone has found the bug in the avocado salad?” she asked. “Where is this bug?”

“Oh, no,” Paloma put in quickly. “Which, it wasn’t in the food—just under the table.”

Lucky smiled her eyes at Paloma in thanks. At the same time, she tried to make herself as unnoticeable to Brigitte as a tomato worm on a tomato branch, or even a caterpillar disguised as a bird dropping, and she wished someone would change the subject. She sent powerful brain waves of
dessert
,
dessert
,
dessert
,
dessert, dessert
to the mineralogist, paleontologist, sedimentologist, and seismologist.

“Dixon,” Pete said to the mineralogist, who was frowning at the door of the canned-ham trailer, “on the drive up from L.A., weren’t you talking about that time you had a great dessert when you were in Paris?”

Lucky’s powerful brain waves had worked! Brigitte’s spine relaxed a little, and she said, “You will like the fresh pears poached in red wine, a
spécialité
from the south of France.”

Everybody ordered the pears, and they finally seemed to have forgotten the jar of worms. But when Lucky got busy clearing the table, she caught Paloma looking back at her as if
she could barely keep from bursting out laughing. It was a private, sparky glint of a glance. That secret eye-code launched a little YouTube video in Lucky’s brain, of herself showing Paloma one of her favorite places in Hard Pan: the broken-down cart behind Dot’s Baubles ’n’ Beauty Salon. In Lucky’s imagined video, she and Paloma scrunched down in the cart, and watched and listened as people got their hair done on Dot’s back porch and told Dot stuff that usually you only tell your doctor. At the end, a bunch of Hard Pan ladies, all with the exact same bluish, tight-curled hairdo, which was Dot’s specialty, admired themselves in little mirrors while Lucky and Paloma clamped their hands over their mouths to keep the laughter from spurting out. This is the kind of picture Lucky got in her mind to go with the words “best friend.”

It made Lucky realize that no one had ever given her that exact kind of look before. She concluded, a little sadly, that although she and Lincoln had gone through their whole childhoods together, he was just too serious and, well,
predictable
. Anyone who ever met Lincoln knew that, eventually, he would learn how to tie every knot in the world and he would understand the uses for those knots. He was not the kind of person who would get in trouble just for the fun of it, or for the sake of an adventure, or to find out how intrepid he could be. Now that Paloma had shared such a secret, private look—almost like an invitation—a certain insight came to Lucky about Lincoln. He was reliable, calm, orderly, and, on top of that, a boy. A boy
who was going to leave the whole country. It wasn’t entirely his fault. But standing as she was on the tip of the mountain of ten, about to transform her 11 into a pair of skis and fly off in a blur of speed, what Lucky wanted was a
girl
best friend, an adventurous girl. And without even knowing that she’d been looking, now Lucky longed for that girl to be Paloma.

Looking out the window over her sink full of sudsy water, Lucky could see Paloma and the geologists eating their dessert. She didn’t mind washing dishes and was good at it. Her hands liked wearing rubber gloves because they could plunge into really hot scalding soapy water and not care one bit. But then through the window she saw Paloma sad-eyebrowing her and making a funny wiggling gesture with her index finger. Suddenly Lucky got that it meant
Poor worms!
And she nodded and shrugged and blew out her cheeks to mean,
Yeah, poor worms; wish I didn’t have to be in here doing these dishes!
And right then she wondered if maybe she should invite Paloma for a visit in her bedroom trailer.

Trying to see the trailer through Paloma’s eyes, Lucky had to admit that it was not at all like a regular, normal girl’s bedroom: The varnish was chipping off the old curved wood walls, there was dog hair on the little rug, and you couldn’t fit much
more than Lucky, her dog HMS Beagle, and one other person inside. The smallness of it didn’t bother Lucky; in fact, it gave evidence of an eerie and wonderful connection to the scientist Charles Darwin. Lucky’s trailer and Darwin’s cabin in
HMS Beagle
were almost exactly the same size. Because of this and several other miraculous coincidences, it was clear to Lucky that her destiny was connected to Charles Darwin’s. In her mind was a list of the similarities:

The part about HMS Beagle wasn’t a coincidence; Lucky named her dog for the ship because
it,
the ship, had been
named for a dog, but still it was another link between her world and his.

But what if Paloma didn’t like the canned-ham trailer? Being used to Lincoln, Lucky wasn’t sure how it worked to be friends with girls. Did you have to tell
every
secret? Were you supposed to show you were cool by using swear words? No, Paloma was definitely a fun type of person, not a bad-mouth type. Lucky’s optimism gland started pumping and she felt that kind of excitement of right before you open a present. She finished rinsing plates and said, “Brigitte, can I invite Paloma to see my trailer? I could finish washing later.”

Brigitte smiled and frowned at the same time, her mouth twisting down and then up at the corners. Lucky had never seen anyone else do this, so she figured it was a handy thing French people developed, in order for their faces to show that you can have good thoughts and bad thoughts on the same subject at the same time.

“It would be so sad,” Lucky pressed on in a small, tragic voice, “for me to miss the only chance in my whole life to have a real best friend.”

Brigitte laughed. “Lucky,” she said, “you are so dramatic. What about Lincoln? Always I think he is your best friend.”

“He’s my friend, but he’s a
boy
. You can’t be best friends with a boy.”

“Ah, bon?”
Brigitte said, which Lucky figured meant,
Are you sure about that?
Then she grinned and said, “Yes, go and ask her inside while the others finish to eat their pears.”

Lucky bounded out to the tables.

“Want to see my canned ham?” she asked Paloma, which made the geologists look at her with surprised little smiles.

“Sure!” Paloma said, and jumped up. Lucky led the way.

“Where is it?” Paloma asked once they were in Lucky’s bedroom trailer.

“You’re in it.”

Paloma looked around at the curved wood ceiling and at the porthole windows and burst out laughing. “Now I get it! It’s the shape!” she said. “I thought—well, I thought you meant an actual canned
ham
! Which, this bedroom is so totally original! You have your own personal trailer, like a movie star on a
set.
”

Lucky now saw her trailer in a new way. It was actually cool.

Paloma plopped down on the bed. “So how’d you get a French mom?”

Lucky picked up the jar of tomato worms and plopped next to her. “Adopted.”

“You
adopted
her?”

This sounded way cooler than
being
adopted, and, Lucky told herself, she
had
kind of adopted Brigitte.

“Yeah. It’s kind of complicated and they’re still doing the paperwork, but Brigitte got her green card, so yeah.”

“Wow.” Paloma bounced a little bit on the bed. “So why do you really have that jar of worms?”

“Oh, I just hunted these off the tomato plants. They’re kind of a gift.”

Paloma burst out laughing again.

“What?” asked Lucky, a little concerned that Paloma was laughing at her.

“Um, a gift? Tomato worms?”

“For some chickens I know,” Lucky explained.

“I can’t decide which is weirder—tomato worms on tomorrow’s menu or giving tomato worms as a
present
to some
chickens
.” Lucky could see how it looked weird to Paloma, but cool-weird, not dumb-weird.

In a formal, professor-y voice, Paloma said, “My dear mineralogist, would you please pass that salad of highly prized worms, which, it has such a delicious French dressing.” She pretend-smoothed her shiny black hair, tilting up her chin.

Lucky wiped her lips with an imaginary napkin and held out the
LUSCIOUS TOMATOES
jar, with her little finger elegantly lifted as if she were a queen holding a teacup. “Certainly, my dear sedimentologist,” she said in a fake British-queen accent. “I was saving a few as a gift for some chickens I know, but I’d rather you have them. Chickens are so thoughtless about gifts, anyway.”

“How sad and how true,” Paloma murmured. She was pretty in a unique way, with a round mouth full of lots and lots of nicely even teeth. Her eyelashes, of course, were gorgeous, but her dark blue eyes drooped a little at the edges. If you put eyes like that on some other person, all you’d really notice would be their droopiness. But on Paloma’s face they made you suddenly wonder if eye shadow would make your own eyes look more like hers.

And, especially, you wanted to make Paloma laugh. Getting her to smile was easy because her mouth was the opposite of ordinary mouths, in that usually lips are relaxed when they’re closed and not doing anything. With Paloma, her lips were at
rest
when she was smiling; otherwise she had to sort of unsmile. It was practically the best and most interesting face Lucky had ever seen.

“What’s that an ad for?” Paloma asked, looking at a clipping from the back of a magazine that Lucky had tacked on her wall.

“Swimming lessons,” said Lucky.

“
Swimming
lessons?” Paloma got off the bed and went to study the advertisement. It was a picture of a short-haired boy, about their age, sitting on a stool in front of a table. On the table was a big clear plastic bucket-sized container full of water, and the boy was leaning over it with his head turned to the side, one ear pointed down at the water. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and his arms were windmilling around in the air like a swimmer doing the crawl stroke. At the bottom of the picture were the words,

LEARN TO SWIM AT HOME. ONLY
$39.95
FOR
6
LESSONS
.

Paloma frowned at the ad, glanced at Lucky, looked back at the ad, and burst out laughing.

Lucky positioned a pretend bucket of water on a pretend table in front of her. She stuck her face down into the pretend
water and made her arms flail all around. “Help, I’m drowning!” she said.

Paloma said in a stern voice, “You should have studied your lessons more carefully! You know you’re not supposed to go into the deep end yet!”

Lucky laughed so hard she made a loud bubble-popping snorkle noise in her throat, which caused Paloma to shriek. Tears ran down their faces.

“Thirty-nine dollars and ninety-five cents!” said Lucky, and collapsed onto the bed, clutching her stomach.

“Six lessons!” said Paloma, and pressed the edge of her T-shirt against her eyes. “But does that include”—her voice got higher as she squeezed out her words while at the same time being convulsed with laughter—“does that include the back-stroke?”

HMS Beagle wandered in from the kitchen and went politely over to smell Paloma.

Paloma held out her palm for the Beag to sniff. She gulped down deep breaths and got herself to stop laughing. “Hi, girl,” she said, and stroked one of the silky golden ears. “Wow, she’s big. What’s her name?”

“HMS Beagle.”

“HMS Beagle?” Paloma made her face very serious. She put her hand on Lucky’s shoulder. “I have to tell you
something, Lucky,” she said. “Which, brace yourself. That dog is not a beagle.” Lucky could see that Paloma was working hard to hold in her smile.

“I know,” Lucky said in the same serious voice. “She’s named for Charles Darwin’s ship.”

Paloma couldn’t hold it any longer. She collapsed into herself on the bed, snorting and choking and holding her stomach. Lucky hadn’t meant for naming HMS Beagle to be funny, but now she saw that it was, unbearably. It had been transformed into
unbearable
funniness. Her bones melted and couldn’t hold her up anymore. She rolled onto the floor.

HMS Beagle wrinkled her forehead and looked at Lucky, who was gasping and crying and trying to explain about Charles Darwin. Lucky looked back at her dog, pointed, and spewed laughter into her hands. Paloma did the same, while HMS Beagle padded out toward the kitchen, her head low. This made Lucky and Paloma burst out in a new wave of laughing.

Lucky discovered that hard laughing was like crying in the sense that sometimes you cannot stop. And it’s a catching disease, because when another person is spurting and gasping it makes you start again even after you have taken deep gulps of air and stopped looking at the other laughing person. The laughter muscles in your stomach ache because they’re not used to it. Lucky calmed herself and cleared her throat and wiped her eyes on her sleeve.

Lucky loved having to laugh so hard that she couldn’t stop, and she loved teetering on the tightrope of keeping much,
much more laughter inside, and she loved making Paloma get hysterical. But now her face and her torso were achy from laughing, and she felt wrung out. She could see that it was the same for Paloma. They both sagged onto the bed.

Suddenly they heard a tugboat outside the trailer, coming closer and closer. Lucky blotted her eyes with her shirt and blew her nose into a paper towel.

“Lucky,” Paloma said, making her voice very calm and low.

“Yes, Paloma,” Lucky said in the same controlled, TV-broadcaster voice.

“I believe there is a tugboat coming this way, although I didn’t notice any ocean in the area.”

So just when they thought they were laughed out, exhausted, and completely dried up, wanting something else like a Gatorade and a Pixy Stix, they were off again. Their humor ducts opened up and spewed laughter into their bodies.

When Miles knocked and then came into Lucky’s trailer, he stared at them for a while, boneless and writhing and hiccuping and gasping. Then he made more tugboat noises until they begged him to stop, and flung themselves outside, screaming with the craziness and strangeness of Miles and HMS Beagle and weird magazine ads and tomato worms, their arms looped around each other’s shoulders, smiled on by Brigitte and the pack of geologists, matching their steps without even meaning to.