The Higher Power of Lucky Read Free

so much of home.
    Lucky sighed, put down the glass, and slid into the dinette seat. Once she finally got off the phone, Brigitte said, “First, maman send you a bisou , a big kiss, okay? Second, please put your backpack over there beside you on the seat so I do not trip on it.” Brigitte unloaded several little Tupperware containers from the fridge. The kitchen trailer was so narrow that she didn’t have to take any steps to do this—the counter, sink, stove, and fridge were all reachable from the same spot. “It is too hot to cook, so we have a cold salad for dinner—tuna, eggs, green beans, tomatoes, olives.”
    Lucky hoisted her backpack off the floor and plopped it beside her on the banquette. “Do we have those olives I like?” she asked. She hated the strong salty wrinkled black ones.
    Brigitte surveyed the many glass jars in the door of the fridge. “ Non, ” she said. “And it is too bad, because the little olives from Nice would be better, you are right. Sometimes we just have to make it do.”
    “Make do,” Lucky corrected.
    Brigitte sighed and nodded. “Make do,” she agreed.

3. Good and Bad
     
    Out of the millions of people in America who might become Lucky’s mother if Brigitte went home to France, Lucky wondered about some way to trap and catch the exact right one. She was pretty sure she’d be able to, if only she had a Higher Power.
    But when she envisioned her perfect mother, she kept thinking of traits and habits like Brigitte’s. That always made her think somehow not of the perfect mother but of the perfect child , which in most ways Lucky already was, but not in every way. Brigitte did not fully realize the ways Lucky was almost perfect, but she did notice thoroughly the ways Lucky was not.
    Lucky did not want to speak French, for instance, which is a jumpy language full of sounds that you have to gargle in the back of your throat. The back of Lucky’s throat could not learn to make these sounds, no matter how hard it tried. Of course, she had learned to say Brigitte’s name the French way—Bree-JEET—instead of the American way, BRIDGE-it.
    Lucky got Brigitte as her Guardian when she was eight years old. The reason was that Lucille, Lucky’s mother, went outside one morning after a big rainstorm, and she touched some power lines that had blown down in the storm. She touched them with her foot.
    In her mind, Lucky worked on a list of good traits and bad traits in mothers.

     
    Some aspects of life are strange or even terrible, but later something okay or even good happens that would never have happened without the bad/strange thing. An example was how long, long ago, a man who later became Lucky’s father went to France and got married to a French woman. Then they got divorced because he did not want to have children. Later, that same man came back to America (he was still not Lucky’s father yet) and met an artist named Lucille, who had silky-feeling shoulders. This was a thing he probably liked a lot—where you could put your cheek against the top of her arm and your cheek loved that comfortable feeling. Her fingers smelled like paint thinner, a very good smell and Lucky’s favorite smell, along with air-conditioned air. Lucille used to hum little tunes for different situations that made you think of certain ads on TV and laugh. So they fell in love and got married.
    But he still didn’t want children, and Lucille divorced him too. It was too late, though. Ha-ha! Lucky was already born.
    So when Lucky needed a Guardian to guard her during the time after the storm, Lucky’s father called up that first wife, the French one. She was still in France, but she said she would come to California. She came the next day. She turned out to be Brigitte.
    Only a very big and terrible thing could make her jump on a plane and fly thousands and thousands of miles—because Brigitte did not love Lucky’s father any longer, and she didn’t even know Lucille, and she’d never even heard