Lucky Breaks (6 page)

All the Hard Panners who wanted to help Brigitte in her campaign to become more Californian and more American turned out to have a specialty. Short Sammy gave tips about American cooking, especially his technique of using bacon fat to improve taste. Dot advised on hair coloring, permanents, and jewelry, and the Captain explained about Harleys and Chevys. Miles and Lincoln continued coaching Brigitte on food and also useful idioms and slang, and Lucky offered many helpful suggestions on parenting.

Brigitte listened to all her advisers. She asked lots of questions. But often she smiled at the advice, and sometimes she actually burst out laughing. And even when Brigitte did follow the recommendations, deep down she still kept on being French.

After school on Tuesday, Brigitte, Lincoln, and Lucky sat around the kitchen trailer dinette, each working on a separate project. Brigitte leafed through one of her recipe books and blew
air out of her lips like a horse. She did not have an oven big enough to bake a birthday cake for forty-three people. “How will I make a cake so enormous?” she asked Lucky and Lincoln. “Even American mothers in regular house-kitchens do not have such a big oven. To bake this big cake, what will they do, these American mothers?”

As she brushed clear nail polish on her toenails, Lucky thought about all the mothers in America making birthday cakes. Brigitte let her prop her feet up against the edge of the dinette table, like a contortionist in the circus, to bring her toes close enough for a proper job. Lucky’s toes were short and stubby, but they grew in a very rare and beautiful alignment, with the big toes descending down to the little pinkies in a perfect line. No toe stuck out too far or was too short. Plus she had a delicate, high arch. For this reason, Lucky felt a little vain about her feet, and she was sorry Lincoln only saw the back of them from across the table. The bottoms of toes are entirely different, being on the nonpublic, hardworking side of the foot, and are interesting but not as gorgeous as the tops can be. “A lot of mothers would probably go to the store and buy a big sheet cake,” she said.

“Sheet cakes are cool,” Lincoln agreed, “because you can write a message on them, like ‘Happy Birthday, Miles and Lucky.’” Lincoln had finally confirmed that his entry in the International Guild of Knot Tyers’ contest was a type of net, but he wouldn’t say what type, or anything else about it. Deep in her heart, Lucky hoped it wouldn’t be a perfect net or even a great net, so that Lincoln would lose and have to stay in Hard Pan instead of going
to England. He had hung a sawed-off broomstick horizontally from two hooks on the opposite wall of the trailer, about waist level, and by turning sideways from his seat on the banquette he could use this broomstick as an anchor for his net, as he wove and knotted strands of cord with a plastic, ruler-length tool. As the net grew bigger and bigger, it still looked to Lucky like a plain old fishing net.

Brigitte lifted one shoulder and made a little tongue-click sound. “Well, you know, we are not going to the store to buy this sheet cake, because there is no store and anyway, it would not be as good as a cake made at home. So, back to one square.”

Lincoln turned to look at her for a moment. “You mean, ‘ back to square one.’”

“Yes, back to square one, of how to make this gigantic cake in a tiny oven.”

“Maybe there’s a way to make a bunch of small sheet cakes and somehow glue them all together invisibly,” Lucky suggested.

Lincoln passed his plastic tool—he called it a needle but it didn’t look
anything
like a needle—over and under some cord, forming diamond shapes, and said, “You could make forty-three cupcakes.”

“Hmmm. Cupcakes,” Brigitte said, frowning.

Lucky peered around her foot to slide her eyes sideways at Lincoln, who didn’t look back at her. “You’ve heard of cupcakes, right?”

“Well, of course I hear of them,” she said. “They are, if I remember, the little cakes you eat…out of a cup.”

“Uh-uh,” said Lucky. Brigitte knew the difference between
uh-huh
and
uh-uh
when she heard it, but she always got them confused when she was talking, so you were never sure if she meant no or yes. Lincoln had worked with her on
uh-huh
and
uh-uh
extensively, but she couldn’t get it. “Little individual cakes in their own pleated paper holder, with frosting on top. You don’t even need a plate or a fork to eat them.”

Lincoln pulled a cord carefully into place and said, “With cupcakes, you should make some extras, just in case people want another one.” Lincoln had gotten into a phase where he was always ravenous. To Lucky, he seemed to eat enough for about three people. He had a fast metabolism, which meant, as far as Lucky could figure it, that his organs passed around the ingredients in the food and zipped them through his corpuscles instantly, while regular people’s corpuscles took their time. His fast metabolism was why Lincoln didn’t get fat, no matter how much he ate.

“Every person,” Brigitte said, “each with our own little cake.”

Lucky surveyed her toes, all ten of them in excellent proportion to one another, all shining with clear nail polish. She’d only gotten a little bit of polish on the skin around them, and you couldn’t really see it unless you got up close. And most people fortunately didn’t go around putting their faces right next to people’s feet in order to examine how neat their nail polish was. She leaned forward and blew on them to make them dry quicker.

Brigitte closed her cookbook and rested her chin on the heel of her hand. “This cupcake is another wonderful American invention,” she said.

Lucky fanned her toes apart in a way that Brigitte (Lucky had earlier discovered) could not do with her own long, fingerlike toes. Toe spreading is like lengthwise tongue curling, single-eyebrow raising, and ear wiggling—either you can do it or you can’t, no matter how hard you try. It’s up to your DNA as to whether or not you have these talents. Lucky herself had all of them. “You’ll have to get cupcake tins to bake them in,” she said.

“I am sure we will find them at the thrift shop,” Brigitte said, “or we can borrow them. We will take a picture, because no one in France will believe I make forty-three cakes for this birthday. They will see how American I am becoming.”

“I’d say, probably we’ll need about fifty,” Lincoln put in.

If Paloma were there, Lucky thought, they would be exchanging eye-shrugs and secret don’t-make-me-laugh looks, finding all the weird and funny stuff no one else saw. Sometimes that happened with Lincoln, but right now he was off in some other thought, and for once he stopped working on his net. He grinned at Brigitte in a delighted kind of way, which sent a jolt through Lucky’s brain stem. Even though Lucky had recently realized she’d rather have Paloma than Lincoln as her best friend, it hadn’t occurred to her that he would ever feel differently about
her
. All their lives Lucky had known that a part of Lincoln loved her; he couldn’t help it. He would always love her,
no matter what; she took that for granted. But at that moment he was looking at Brigitte.

“A digital picture to send by e-mail,” Brigitte said. She pronounced “digital” in her French way, “dee-gee-tal,” each syllable crisp, like a freshly ironed shirt. Freshly ironed clothes were a rarity in Hard Pan; they caught your eye. Brigitte’s accent was like that: out of place, and yet pleasing; it caught your ear. “Lincoln, look at your net!” Brigitte said suddenly. “It is becoming so big and quite beautiful. What, I wonder, will you catch in it?”

Lucky shifted into a regular seated position by putting her beautiful, ignored feet under the table. No one had noticed her perfectly aligned toes or her unusual ability to spread them out as if they were fingers. Her excellent sheet cake idea had been tossed out the window. She might as well not even be sitting there, even though it was all about
her
birthday. Worse, Lincoln seemed preoccupied with useless things that had nothing to do with her. His knot tying wasn’t just a peculiar hobby any longer—he’d become so good that he had made friends with the most famous knot-man in England, and he was showered with praise by Brigitte, and probably he would win that contest. Then he would leave Hard Pan, which had suddenly become puny and unimportant to him, Lucky realized, a stupid little place that didn’t even show up on most maps.

So when Lincoln packed up his net, folding it into the plastic bag on the floor, and went outside with Brigitte to pinch off some herbs to take to his mom, Lucky stood and gazed for a
moment at the everything drawer; then she yanked it open. It contained abandoned stuff that might still be useful: bottle stoppers and spools of twine and corks and rubber bands. It also held a pair of sharp, long-bladed scissors; Lucky snatched them. Squatting down by the plastic bag, she pulled it open and plunged her scissor-hand inside. Then she made three quick cuts in different random places on the net.

Lucky slammed the scissors back in the drawer and stood in the doorway, taking deep breaths. She smelled dill and cilantro and thyme, fresh and clean, strong in the air. She tried to explain to herself why she had secretly cut Lincoln’s net. She tried to make a good reason in her mind. It was like a sudden illness, as if her meanness gland had swelled up and pumped nasty corpuscles throughout her bloodstream.

The meanness in her bloodstream made her skin feel sticky and her scalp grubby. Lucky imagined peeling off her grimy skin and throwing it into the washing machine.

There were red marks on her thumb and forefinger, where she’d gripped the scissors. She hid the marks with her other hand, and she hid her meanness deep in the laundry hamper of her heart.

As she lay on her bed copying a map of the solar system for science homework on Tuesday evening, Lucky listened to Brigitte’s end of a phone conversation with Paloma’s mom, whose name turned out to be Carmen. It was their second long talk.

Brigitte had filled Lucky in about Mrs. Wellborne’s worries from their first phone call. She worried about bugs and infections and bacteria and dust and wild animals and rabid dogs and kids who might be bad influences and Paloma’s homework and, especially, she worried about people she called Old Desert Rat Characters. Carmen wondered why the Old Desert Rat Characters would live in such a remote place for years and years; why they didn’t want to be closer to civilization, and what they did with their time, way out there in the desert. Lucky wasn’t sure, but she thought probably Short Sammy and the Captain and Dot and Mrs. Prender were all Old Desert Rat Characters. Brigitte said quietly, “I suppose we are living here because this is our home.”

It was obvious to Lucky from Brigitte’s tone of voice during this second conversation that she was worn out reassuring Mrs. Wellborne. Finally Brigitte said, “I tell you something, Carmen. The whole world is full of danger. But also it is full of beauty and courage and many wonders. We both have the daughter to protect, but if we protect a little bit too much, they do not realize that we trust them to make good choices and to be brave. Sometimes they make the little mistake, and that is one way they learn. So you have to decide to trust or do not trust.”

In her canned-ham trailer, where she was listening through the open doorway, Lucky hugged HMS Beagle. It was a splendissimo speech and Lucky was positive that Carmen, having already allowed Paloma to visit Hard Pan once, would decide to trust. And since she felt so triumphant, Lucky didn’t know why, suddenly, she was crying into the Beag’s silky coat. Silently, so Brigitte wouldn’t hear, Lucky held on and cried and stroked the Beag, stroked and stroked her warm coat until the hard metallic phantom sensation of scissors against her skin finally went away. Then Lucky released her dog and stretched up the neck of her nightgown to press it hard against her eyes. And she made herself envision the vast timelessness of space, where trust is only a tiny speck, practically invisible, lost and all but unimportant in the infinity of the universe.

Feeling weary, Lucky picked up her notebook again and penciled in the three dwarf planets and an assortment of asteroids and meteoroids, labeling them “small bodies,” which is the official scientific term. It was a big family, the solar system, with
all those other planets’ moons, way over a hundred of them, but she only showed our own moon, a tiny circle. She shaded in Jupiter, which is huge and uninhabitable for humans. Lucky often wondered if there were other planets not in our solar system but somewhere in our own galaxy, the far-off Milky Way, with nice weather and drinking water and lots of animals adapted to their habitats like on Earth. Sometimes she
longed
for there to be another planet somewhere, like ours. The idea of the Earth being the only planet with life in the whole universe became, to Lucky at that moment, unbearably lonely and sad.

Brigitte was saying, “Yes, the girls sleep in the trailer—Paloma can have Lucky’s bed and I make a little bed on the floor for Lucky. No, no, it is fine. No, the dog has not fleas….” Lucky rolled her eyes to herself. If dogs could roll their eyes, Lucky was sure that HMS Beagle would do so too.

Lucky would have jumped on a rocket, with no hesitation, to go to another planet and see the life on it, but Mrs. Wellborne was afraid of a little town in the desert, where nothing bad could possibly happen.