Lucky raked the patio in front of the Found Object Wind Chime Museum and Visitor Center. There was much less litter now that Brigitte’s Hard Pan Café had opened for business. People went before and after the anonymous twelve-step meetings to get a piece of apple pie or a ham-and-cheese sandwich, which Brigitte wrote on the blackboard menu as
tarte aux pommes
and
croquemonsieur
, and pretty soon the geologists and tourists and everyone in the town knew how to say a lot of French words.
Once in a while, Brigitte put out a platter called “Commodity Tasting,” cooked from the free Government food, and people helped themselves. Usually she added garlic and herbs and spices to make it taste better, and Lucky had the job of sprinkling the platter with parsley.
Lucky twisted shut the top of the black plastic trash bag and hauled it to the Dumpster in back. She inspected the place where the hole in the wall of the Found Object Wind Chime Museum and Visitor Center had been. She had plugged it up with Fix-All.
Not a sound emerged from inside.
She had done a good job.
Acknowledgments
The author is deeply grateful to the following people for their advice, expertise, and support:
To the Reader
The book Ms. McBeam reads to Lucky’s class is
The Tree of Life
by Peter Sis (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003).
The book Miles reads,
Are You My Mother?
was written and illustrated by P. D. Eastman (Random House, 1960).
The website for the International Guild of Knot Tyers is www.igkt.net.
This is the little prayer that Lucky hears at the twelve-step meetings:
God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change,
Courage to change the things we can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.