The Thing About Luck

by Cynthia Kadohata

  With my hair braided, Mel and I checked on Jaz in the living room. He was sitting on the couch wearing his favorite T-shirt, which was neon green. When noon came and went, I put the plates into the refrigerator. I went to check on Jaz again. His hands were folded in his lap, and he was staring straight ahead. There was no clock in the living room, so he may not have known that it was ten after twelve.

  Back at the kitchen table, we waited some more. At twenty past noon Obaachan said, “Why say come when no come? Why say yes when mean no?”

  I looked down at the flecks of silver in the kitchen table. Jaz had once counted every fleck on the table; there were 3,412. That was just the kind of boy he was, and that was why he had no friends.

  I went to peek at my brother again. His hands were still folded in his lap, but now his jaw was hanging open. My brother was small and stocky, like a four-foot tall weight lifter. He was built exactly like my grandfather, a rectangle with a head on top. It was disconcerting to talk to Jaz because his eyes had a strange, unwavering quality. He was a very serious kiddo, but I had seen him smile. I had heard him laugh. So I knew he could be happy sometimes.

  I started to feel furious at the boys in Jaz’s class. Were they completely heartless? Finally, at 12:45, my grandmother’s back slumped with defeat. I had never seen her like this before. Jiichan flossed his teeth, as if nothing special were going on.

  “What Jaz doing?” Obaachan asked.

  “Just sitting in the living room with his mouth hanging open,” I answered. “He’s hardly moved.”

  At one o’clock, my grandfather laid down his floss and declared, “Nobody coming. Let’s eat sandwich. Let’s celebrate, ah, we can celebrate, ah . . . ”

  Nobody could think of anything to celebrate, so Jiichan just got to his feet and took the sandwiches out of the fridge. “Go get your brother.”

  I walked reluctantly into the living room, where Jaz sat stoically. “Jiichan says we should eat.” Then I said it again.

  He looked at his feet. “Why doesn’t anybody like me?” he asked.

  I thought of saying, You have a bad temper, and you’re weird. He had such a bad temper that when he was angry, he sometimes banged his head on a wall or on whatever was handy. And he was weird because he would do strange things. Like, one time when he started singing a song in the middle of a test. My mother loved to tell that story because she thought it was cute, but I doubted the kids in his class thought it was cute. But I knew now wasn’t the time for honesty. “You had a friend, but he moved away. That wasn’t your fault. You’ll make another one.”

  “Connor Foster smells, and he even brags that he takes only one bath a week, and even he has a couple of friends,” Jaz went on, now looking at me directly.

  I hated all the boys in Jaz’s class. In my class the boys were nicer. They did not shun anyone. But then I remembered Jenson, who didn’t have a single friend that I knew of. I had rarely given him a thought, but now my heart went out to him. He was long and lanky, and he always held his chin slightly up, so you could see in his nostrils. And, it was hard to explain, but there was something about him that kind of repelled everyone. It was something about the way he moved, not in smooth, normal strokes like most people, but rather kind of jerky, as if he were part robot. Right then and there, I vowed to say something to him one day. Even if it was only “hello,” it would acknowledge that he was there.

  Jaz stood up. “Okay, let’s eat.”

  Everybody took half a sandwich, along with some potato chips. We ate silently. Jaz was a focused eater, just as he was focused with about everything he did. He stared down his food as if eating were a fight to the finish, and he chewed so vigorously that my parents worried he might crack his teeth.

  “Boys need red meat to grow, not chicken,” Obaachan finally said, not sharply, but weakly, as if she had been defeated today. I think she loved Jaz more than she loved me, but at that moment I didn’t mind. Jaz needed all the love he could get.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Nothing more happened as far as making friends for Jaz. But a few weeks later, as I walked into class on my last day before we left for harvest, for some reason, my eyes rested on Jenson. I remembered vowing to say hello to him, so I cheerfully called out, “Hi, Jenson.” Several people looked at me like, What are you doing saying hello to Jenson of all people? Jenson?

  Jenson glared at me suspiciously, then said, “Shut up.”

  Wow. I didn’t expect that. People were still looking at me, and I felt my face grow hot. I thought about what Jenson had just said. He must have been incredibly lonely to respond that way.

  I heard one boy saying to another, “Hey, Summer likes Jenson.”

  Even though I knew Jenson was lonely, now I was annoyed at him. “I was just trying to be friendly,” I called out.

  “And I was just trying to say shut up,” Jenson shot back.

  And now everybody was laughing at me. I knew nobody would remember any of this in September when I got back; still, when I took my seat, my face was burning.

  I got called on four times that day. I had to solve an equation with two unknowns on the board, read a page out loud, explain what an element was, and define “ethical” versus “moral.” Boy, I was glad to be free when the bell rang.

  After school I walked with some friends to where the school bus stopped. The ones who didn’t take the bus hugged me good-bye. When the bus came, I sat next to Melody as usual. Then I don’t know what possessed me, but I wanted to try to be nice to Jenson one more time. He was sitting alone, as if people were scared that if they sat next to him, some of his unpopularity might rub off on them, which it probably would. But I figured I had loyal friends, so I could afford to lose a couple of popularity points. I got up, walked straight back, and sat right there next to him. I felt his leg against mine, so I moved over a bit in the opposite direction.

  “We’re going away for harvest tomorrow,” I said pleasantly.

  He looked at me with annoyance and said, “You again?”

  “Yeah, I just wanted to sit here and, like . . . talk or something.” I saw several kids, including Jaz, watching me curiously. I couldn’t think of what to say next. I finally came up with, “I like your shirt,” which was a ridiculous thing to say because his shirt was heavy plaid flannel, even though it was warm out.

  He thought a second. “I don’t know what’s going on, but I’ve known you since first grade, and I don’t think you’ve ever spoken a word to me. So thanks for whatever you’re trying to do, but bug off.”

  Well. That hadn’t turned out very agreeably.

  Then we came to my stop, and my friends were hugging me and we were saying good-bye.

  “See you!” I called out before I stepped off of the bus.

  When I turned to head home, Thunder was sitting near the bush where he always waited for me. I walked with him a ways, then stopped in the middle of a bunch of weeds and sat down and rolled my head around to stretch my neck. I felt all tense. I didn’t know why.

  “What are you doing?” Jaz said behind me. At least people didn’t mind sitting next to him. In that way, he was better off than Jenson.

  “I’m de-stressing,” I said. De-stressing was what my dad did all the time. For instance, if you bothered him while he was watching sports on TV, he’d say, “Not now, honey, I’m de-stressing.”

  Jaz shrugged and walked toward our house.

  After de-stressing, I went inside. Jiichan had stretched a big map across the kitchen table to show us our route. This season we would be traveling from Texas to Oklahoma, back to Kansas, to Colorado, and to the Dakotas. If there was one thing I hated, it was road trips. It wasn’t that I found road trips boring. It was just that I would be trapped with my grandmother and Jaz for hours at a time. I mean, I loved them, but thinking of spending all that time with them made me crazy. My grandfather was different. I could ride with him all day, no problem.

  For me, taking off time from school would be sort of wonderful and awful at the same t
ime—wonderful because I hated schoolwork, and awful because my mother had told me that a lot would change for my entire class over the summer between sixth and seventh grades. And whatever these changes were, I wouldn’t be there for them. When we studied the civil rights movement that took place about a hundred thousand years earlier in the 1960s, we heard Sam Cooke singing “A Change Is Gonna Come,” which was my favorite song in the world, or at least my second favorite. I didn’t have a favorite, but I liked to reserve that space just in case a song came along that was the actual best song in the world. Anyhow, I wondered if I would ever understand these mysterious changes that were coming for my class or whether I would get left behind. I didn’t want to become a reject just because of a bunch of wheat.

  And I already missed my parents. Obaachan was so much more strict than my mother or my father. She told us what to eat and drink and how to live. In Japan, her family had a plum tree in their backyard. She was convinced of the healing power of umeboshi, Japanese salty plums. They’re difficult to eat because they’re so sour and salty, but she ate them like candy, spitting the seeds expertly into a bowl. Spitting seeds like that would have gotten me quite a scolding, but as I said, she didn’t have to use her manners anymore because she was so old. I didn’t like umeboshi, so this was a mark against me Japaneseness-wise. Still, I was required to eat two pickled plums a day.

  And I had to wear rubber gloves whenever I did the dishes. Even at Obaachan’s age, she had beautiful hands. She often held them in front of herself to admire them. The gloves made my hands sweaty, but if she caught me with no gloves on, she would say, “Even if I ugly fish for face, someone would marry me for my hands.”

  “But you had an arranged marriage,” I once pointed out.

  “No talk back or I ground you.”

  I gathered the schoolwork my present and future teachers had given me into a binder. Binders are a great organizational tool. My finished mosquito drawings and the matching original photographs took up one binder. Then I had a binder for all my schoolwork, and another binder to hold new photographs of mosquitoes. Supposedly, I was going to have to spend three hours a day on my schoolwork. Ha-ha. I had already done some of it so that I would have free days. And teachers weren’t that strict about work they gave you when you went away on harvest. Once, I had returned from harvest and not done any of my homework, and the teachers barely blinked an eye.

  One good thing about harvest is that there are always other kids around who belong to drivers, custom harvesters, or farmers. I had made friends that I’d stayed pen pals with, and even Jaz had made a friend one year, a boy as focused and intense as he was. I was surprised that there could be two such boys in the world. There were probably others as well. I wished they could all meet one another and form a club called the Intense Boys Association.

  The night before we left, Jaz was really excited as we lay in bed—he had the bunk above mine. He was hoping he would make a friend during harvest.

  “Wouldn’t it be great if I make two friends?” he said.

  “That would be cool.”

  “What if I make three? I’ve never had three friends at the same time before.”

  Actually, he had never had two friends at the same time either.

  He became quiet then, but I knew he wasn’t asleep. He was thinking about these three imaginary friends. I hoped he did make three, I really did, but thinking about it made me get a small pain in my stomach, because what was most likely to happen is that he would end up by himself a lot, talking to himself, playing with plastic soldiers, building with LEGOs, and watching movies. If you bothered him while he was playing with his soldiers, he might fly into a rage. You had to wait until he was taking a break.

  The hall light went on, and Jiichan came into the bedroom. He pulled up the chair from my desk.

  “Tonight I tell you the story of a weed,” he said. “One day when I boy, I pulling weeds in orange grove. Day hot, many weed, back hurt. Bad day. Weed came from all over the night before. Suddenly, more weed than I ever see. Weed my special enemy. I hate it more than anything. I have many nightmare about weed. But that day I find special weed I never see before. My mother scold me, but I take weed roots carefully out, and I leave field and put my special weed in jar of water. Then after work I plant it in wet soil. Every day I take care of that weed. It grow as tall as me, and that year we have best-tasting orange crop ever. We raise price because everyone want our oranges. So I want you to remember, always keep eye open for special weed. You both special weed. Oyasumi.”

  “Oyasuminasai, Jiichan,” we said.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  From our home in Littlefield, Kansas, we had to drive across the state to Susanville, Kansas, to meet up with the Parker Harvesting crew. My parents had worked for the Parkers twice, once two years ago and once three years ago. The second time we were short on money, and they paid us for the first month before we’d done any work. That’s the kind of people they are.

  It was still dark when we set out in our rattly, old Ford pickup. That thing was older than I was. We’d eaten a quick breakfast of oatmeal and two umeboshi each. I just pulled on a pair of jeans. I was also slathered in controlled-release DEET. That was why Thunder didn’t lay his head on my lap like he usually did. The company that made the DEET said they used an extra refining process that almost eliminated the smell. I’d grown used to it, but it was apparently too much for Thunder.

  Jiichan sort of turned off whenever he drove. He didn’t talk much and kept the radio on low. Once in a while he came to life, as if somebody had flipped an “on” switch. As for Jaz, he was blowing giant bubble-gum bubbles, over and over. “Look,” he said. “I can blow a bubble the exact same size every time.”

  On his lap sat a LEGO apartment building he’d been gluing together as he built it. He could have just put it in the truck bed, but he said that it was his most precious possession. End of argument.

  Thunder was curled up on the backseat beside me. I opened my window. The air was perfectly lukewarm, but I knew when we got to Texas, that would change. When I checked the Weather Channel before we left, it said it might hit 100 degrees there! Thunder lifted his head and took a big breath, closing his eyes and, I swear, smiling. I stared out the window. The wheat fields were black in the early-morning darkness. I wondered who’d be cutting those. Maybe it would be us as we swung back north.

  We drove past mile after mile of wheat, soybean, cattle, and sunflower farms. One of my favorite things was driving through Kansas when both the wild and cultivated sunflowers were in bloom. I liked the wild ones better, the clouds hovering over the tangle of yellow. They would still be in bloom in the fall.

  Then I heard Obaachan growling. It was her sign that the pain in her back had become unbearable. Without a word, Jiichan pulled over to the side of the road. He had barely stopped the truck when Obaachan got out and lay flat on her back on the shoulder of the highway. She lay down like that several times a day, sometimes for hours. Jiichan grabbed the flashlight from the glove compartment, and we all stepped outside. Thunder sniffed at Obaachan and then looked at me, as if he knew something about her that he couldn’t communicate to us.

  We stood around for twenty minutes or so doing nothing but watching. That kind of standing around occurred sometimes in the country, where you were far from medical care. You had to kind of gather around and evaluate. Obaachan looked bad, but I’d seen her worse. She even wore a slight smile, as if she was thinking of something pleasant like me getting all A’s or Jaz finding a friend. She had just recently stopped dyeing her hair jet-black, so I could see the white roots like a halo around her face.

  Then her smile faded and she said, “We suppose to be there before six.”

  She reached out her arms without saying anything more, and Jaz and I each took a hand and pulled her up.

  Back in the car she said, “I think I die this year, maybe this month.”

  “I die first,” Jiichan replied. “Japanese women live to nineties.”
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br />   “I die first! You eat many mandarin orange as child. They make you live longer. Vitamin C.”

  “You drink more green tea. You live longer.”

  They continued like this for several minutes, at the end of which I wasn’t sure who the matter was settled in favor of. Personally, I planned to live until I was 103, like my great-grandmother on my father’s side had. All she did toward the end was watch TV, like it was more important than the real people around her. But there was a lot of good stuff on TV, so it wasn’t such a terrible last few years.

  We drove quietly, except for Jaz, who popped his perfect bubbles over and over. For some reason, that started to make me crazy. “Can you stop popping your gum so much, please?” I asked him politely.

  “Make me.”

  “You are so immature!”

  He gave me a hard, angry look, and then I was already unbuckling my seat belt as he started pounding the side of his head on his window, his LEGO building tottering on his lap. I wrapped my arms around him and squeezed, so he wouldn’t hurt himself. I had learned that when you’re trying to hold someone still, you had to concentrate on squeezing, just as you had to concentrate when you did math or English. If you tried to do it with just your strength and not your mind, you would fail. In fact, Jiichan taught me to meditate partly because he thought that would help my concentration whenever I had to hold Jaz back.

  After a couple of minutes he calmed down. Jiichan had pulled over, and he and Obaachan were watching. Jiichan said sadly, “You lucky to have each other. Why fight?”

  “All I did was say he was immature,” I said. “Alyssa says that all the time to her brother.”

  “You’re not even human!” Jaz cried out. “You’re nothing but a smelly DEET bomb! Smellface!”

  I set him loose and moved back to look out my window. I wasn’t going to talk to him for the rest of the ride. Let’s see him get malaria and not come out the other end feeling a little paranoid.