Lucky for Good

by Susan Patron

  It seemed that everyone, including the dogs, knew it was an important meeting. Ladling lemonade, Lucky and her best friend in Hard Pan, Lincoln Kennedy, waited anxiously for people to settle down and for things to get started.

  Finally the Captain stood up and cleared his throat. He was the postmaster of Hard Pan, which was the only official steady job with benefits, and he usually ran the town meetings—not because he was a retired airplane pilot but because he had the commanding voice of a TV airplane pilot. Everyone settled down: Dot the beautician finished lining up two wash-and-set hair appointments, Roy found the perfect-size patch of shade, and Justine broke off in the middle of explaining to her mother, Mrs. Prender, how dental floss could be used for many things besides flossing.

  “Okay,” the Captain said, “we all know the county’s going to close Brigitte’s Hard Pan Café. For the record, the regulation is Number 1849, and Brigitte is in indisputable violation. The three connected trailers are considered their residence, and you cannot serve food commercially out of a residence in California.”

  Brigitte sprang up from her chair near the Captain, like a boxer before the first round. “No one tells me about this rule!” she cried. “They give me the permit for my business license but they do not mention that part. Everything about the Café is in perfect order.” She stood there trembling in her pale green cotton thrift-store scrubs—slender and blazing. Lucky had seen and heard Brigitte cry several times, but realized she would never show that soft side of herself in public.

  “No one here disputes that the Café is in order and that you maintain the highest standards of food preparation, Brigitte,” the Captain said in his airline pilot way. Lucky was sure that every passenger on the Captain’s flights had been reassured by the authority in his voice, and the same should have happened with Brigitte. But Brigitte was not reassured.

  “We must close the Café,” she said, “because I have not another kitchen and we have not another place to live. So we must leave Hard Pan.”

  Brigitte and Lucky had already discussed this, sitting at the Formica table in the kitchen trailer. Lucky hated the idea of moving. She did not like it when your whole world had to change. She had explained to Brigitte that it would break her heart and make part of her curl up and die if they had to move. Brigitte laughed, but she had tears in her eyes at the same time. She said she hoped that by selling the trailers and the land, with its beautiful view of the Mojave Desert’s backyard, which is as big as an ocean, they would have enough money for a new start. Brigitte pressed foreheads with Lucky and said that as long as the two of them and HMS Beagle were together, they would be fine. Lucky had agreed with that, but she hoped with all her might that they could go on being fine together in Hard Pan.

  Dot, owner of Dot’s Baubles ’n’ Beauty Salon, spoke up next. She had a firm, resounding voice and a firm, cauliflower-looking hairdo that resembled the hairdos of most of the other old ladies in Hard Pan. That was because they all got their wash, rinse, set, and air-dry on Dot’s back-porch beauty salon, and Dot only did the one cauliflower-type style. She permed Lucky’s hair too, but since it was longer, it looked more like a garden hedge. “Gonna be tough,” Dot said, “to find an apartment where they’ll take a good-sized dog like the Beag.”

  Brigitte nodded and shrugged; they would look until they found one. But this new possibility, this threat of not being able to keep HMS Beagle, weighed more than all Lucky’s other worries put together. It was almost more than she could bear.

  “Can’t call it Brigitte’s Hard Pan Café, then,” Mrs. Prender proclaimed. “Won’t be in Hard Pan.”

  “She could, too,” came another voice. “She can name her Café anything she wants, irregardless where it is; there ain’t no law about that. But it’d be better if the Hard Pan Café was in Hard Pan. Makes more sense.”

  “Darn shame for the town,” someone added from the back. Everyone loved Brigitte’s cooking and the feeling you got that you were in a little part of France when you had a meal at her Café.

  Brigitte sat back down between Lucky and Pete the geologist, who now got to his feet. “It’s a shame for all of us,” he said. “Hard Panners, folks from Dale and Sierra City down the highway, visitors like me and the other geologists, tourists going to Death Valley, and of course the Trimbles. I think we should find a way around this.”

  “Let’s pray,” Justine suggested. She sat up very straight, reminding Lucky of the expression, “She’s small for her age,” as if Justine was a girl instead of a woman. Ever since she’d shown up at the Café, Lucky had secretly studied Justine. She could barely remember her from before she moved to L.A. and got herself into all kinds of trouble. So Lucky wasn’t sure if the way Justine looked—so determined and fierce—had always been there, or if it was because of her time in prison. Had she already been that kind of constantly brave person—like she was used to people messing with her and figured someone was bound to do it again? Lucky didn’t know, but she wished she were like Justine in that way: She wished she were brave.

  “You pray, man, if you want to. But what we need is a plan.” Short Sammy believed, and had made it clear to everyone, that your religion and his religion are nobody’s business.

  The Captain cleared his throat as Justine said to Sammy, “He counts the number of the stars; He calls them all by their names.” She held up her Bible. “Psalms 147, verse 4.”

  Lucky found this to be a beautiful quotation, and she wanted to think about it. The words made God sound wonderfully scientific and organized, counting and naming. But she wasn’t sure what it had to do with the problem of Regulation Number 1849.

  Justine lifted her chin. “God pays attention to the details,” she explained, as if answering Lucky’s thoughts.

  “Let’s get back to the Café,” the Captain intervened as several people began discussing Justine’s comments.

  Short Sammy spoke up. “Why couldn’t we build Brigitte a separate kitchen right there next to the trailers? Everyone has some scrap lumber, man, and we could all pitch in with the labor.”

  The Captain shook his head. “I see more code violation problems with that,” he said. “You know the county’s going to be all over this if we come up with a new building. Sewer, plumbing, electrical, you name it. Take us months, a year, and no one here’s getting any younger. Plus, the permit would cost a bundle.”

  “I’d help every weekend unless I have to work,” Pete said.

  “You got a contractor’s license?”

  Pete shook his head. He sat, looking defeated.

  Lucky felt defeated too, and not in the least bit brave. It would be hard to move to a new town: a strange school, an apartment, starting all over with another café. No Lincoln, no Miles, no Short Sammy. It was like if one of your internal organs that you never think about suddenly stopped working. Then you would get sick and maybe even die. Hard Pan was like that—like an organ of her body that she needed in order to stay alive.

  Perched on a rickety folding metal chair on Lucky’s other side, Lincoln worked on a noose knot. Nooses were his latest interest, and he had explained to Lucky that the optimum number of wrappings for a hangman’s noose is supposed to be eight, but that between one-half and one and a half wrappings tend to be lost during the tightening process, so you really need to make nine windings to be sure your noose will hold. “The noose,” he said, “is designed to hold without slipping open when in use, while being loose enough that the hangman can slide it open to get it over the head of the person before closing it”—he raised his eyebrows meaningfully—“for the last time.”

  Lucky did not roll her eyes at him for going on and on about excruciating noose details because she had learned to take Lincoln’s knot-tying seriously after he and his knots saved her life. She had gotten trapped in an abandoned well, and he had lowered a hammock for Lucky to get into, and then hauled her up like a fish in a net. “You know what,” he said to her, “this meeting is making me wish I wasn’t leaving for England in two mo
nths. I should be here to help.”

  Lincoln had begun tying knots when he was Miles’s age, around six and a half, and recently he had won a contest given by the International Guild of Knot Tyers. His winning entry was the very hammock he’d used for rescuing Lucky from certain death at the bottom of the well. And the prize was a ticket to the annual convention of the IGKT in England during the summer, and he’d be staying with the family of the most famous knot tyer in the world, Geoffrey Budworth.

  Before, Lucky had hated the idea of Lincoln going away, and she’d tried to sabotage his entry in the contest by slashing the project that later saved her life. But now, thanks to her other best friend, Paloma, Lucky was glad for him and knew she would survive his being gone. Even though Paloma lived in the San Fernando Valley, which was a three-hour car trip from Hard Pan, she visited often on weekends.

  “No, England is your destiny,” Lucky said dramatically. “Somehow, we’ll get through this.” She sighed tremendously, so that he would see that she did want him to go, but that at the same time, there would be unspeakable agony in her heart.

  Just then a truck pulled over the ridge of the hill and chugged down into town. Everyone turned to watch, wondering who it would be, and as it came closer, Lucky knew. It was still too far away to read the words on the side, but she recognized the logo by its shape.

  “It’s the inspector from the county,” she said. “Stu Burping.”

  7. just say oui

  “Oh, man,” Short Sammy said. “Who invited him?”

  “Yeah, this meeting is none of his business,” Henrietta growled. She’d worked in the Inyo County government office before she retired, and mostly her job for forty years had been to attend meetings, which gave her a terrible opinion of them. All those meetings had made her temperamental and argumentative. For this reason she usually avoided Hard Pan town meetings. That suited the others, because when she did show up she insisted that everybody observe official meeting guidelines that are in a book called Robert’s Rules of Order—and Hard Panners in general disliked any official guidelines. But Lucky guessed that today she’d attended because she was a staunch supporter of Brigitte’s Hard Pan Café, where she enjoyed sitting alone at a small table, drinking coffee, eating spicy lamb sausages, and not being in a meeting.

  “I invited him,” said Sass Ken, Klincke Ken’s ex, who lived about fifteen miles away, in Dale. She spoke defiantly, with a hard look on her face, like someone who expects opposition and won’t back down.

  Everyone looked at her in surprise, and Henrietta seemed on the verge of quoting from her battered copy of Robert’s Rules of Order or lecturing on parliamentary procedure.

  “Hold on,” the Captain said. “Why, Sass?”

  “Because,” Sass said. “Like everyone here, I want Brigitte’s Hard Pan Café to stay open. Stu Burping works for us—we pay his salary with our taxes. He should help us. And anyway, I heard he’s a decent guy.”

  “Oh, man,” Short Sammy repeated, pulling the brim of his hat low over his eyes, shaking his head. Lucky could see it was going to be like most of the town meetings, with a whole mess of different opinions and a lot of discussion, but this time everything mattered more. Because this time the meeting was about their future, hers and Brigitte’s and HMS Beagle’s; it was about what would become of them.

  People began to murmur again; no one seemed to have any further ideas worth proposing. Then Dot stood up. She had begun using a cane recently, just to help with her balance, and now she leaned on it. “I got an old cabin,” she said, “up by the mine. Belonged to my grandfather.” She meant the Silverlode up on the hill, the mine that had made Hard Pan a booming town, bigger than Los Angeles was, back in the 1870s. Now the mine and all the buildings around it were shut down, fenced, and off-limits. “It’s solid, good oak planks, well-built. Well, I don’t need it, and can’t live in it because it’s on the mining company’s land, or sell it except to the company, and there’s no reason they would want it. So it’s yours, Brigitte, if you can use it.”

  No one responded to this, since it didn’t seem to apply to the problem, and certainly didn’t solve it.

  Finally Miles said, “It’s too far from the Café, Dot! Brigitte can’t go up there to cook and then haul the food down. It’s a restaurant. That wouldn’t work at all.”

  “I know that,” Dot snapped. “What I’m saying is, bring that cabin down. It’s small, but it would make a good-size kitchen. Set it up next to the trailers, plug into the electrical and plumbing she’s already got.”

  “What about the building code? We’re back to the idea of a new kitchen and problems of code violations,” the Captain said.

  Short Sammy jumped up. “The grandfather clause,” he said.

  Lucky felt Brigitte sigh deeply. She knew her mother was thinking that, as often happened, the meeting was in danger of veering off in some strange and unexpected direction. Why in the world was Sammy yelling about grandfathers?

  “Can we please stay on track here?” someone called out from the back.

  “This is on track,” Short Sammy explained. “That shed Klincke Ken fixed last year, the one he uses to store things in—if I remember right, the inspector said it didn’t have to come up to the same codes as for new buildings because it was already an existing structure. They call it a grandfather clause.”

  Lucky was trying to follow this. “Wait,” she said. “First, how do you move a whole cabin? Wouldn’t you have to take it all apart?”

  “Naw,” Klincke Ken said, holding his hand in front so he could grin without people seeing he didn’t have many teeth. He was the guy everyone went to after they had worked all weekend trying to fix something, but couldn’t. Klincke Ken, in exchange for a homemade pie or a six-pack of Bud Light or a tool of some kind, would always eventually find a way to make whatever it was work. “You jack it up and then lower it onto something that’ll support the structure. Something like a row of old telephone poles laid horizontally. Drive a dolly under it, then tow it down the hill and over to the Café.”

  “What dolly?” Henrietta asked. “I never seen any dolly around here big enough to move a house on.”

  “Have to think about how to do it, but basically axles and wheels at the rear. I could make the dolly. That old Caterpillar loader and the lowboy trailer out near the dump still have a lot of good parts I could use.”

  Lucky saw Short Sammy frown, then look at Pete, who was smiling and nodding. Then Sammy also nodded. “You could,” he agreed, “with a bunch of guys. Big job. But you could do it, man.”

  Lucky leaned sideways into Brigitte, who suddenly had tears in her eyes. “Oh, la-la, la-la, la-la, la-la,” she said. “It is an ingenious idea, and Dot, so generous, and Klincke Ken and Sammy and Pete also. Thank you all. But it is such a risky plan and so much work for everyone and we do not even know if it will succeed. Also I have not the money to pay for it.” She shook her head and said, in that firm way of hers that really meant it, “Non.”

  “Hey, we don’t want you to pay us,” someone called. “We want you to cook for us! We’ll all pitch in and help with the cabin.”

  Dot said, “Brigitte, listen to us. Just say oui!”

  Sass and Henrietta began chanting, “Say oui, say oui, say oui!”

  Brigitte got that look on her face Lucky had seen only a couple of times before, where she seemed anxious and not at all confident. Lucky figured it was because there were a lot of ways the plan might not work. Maybe the cabin would turn out to be just a shack or maybe Klincke Ken wouldn’t be able to build a dolly and a tow truck out of old parts or maybe the others wouldn’t help after all. If Brigitte said yes, she would have to be brave in a way of trusting everyone. Lucky tapped the side of her mother’s leg with her knuckles, like someone knocking lightly at a window so the people inside would look up and notice you smiling in at them. She said, “They want you to cook for them, Brigitte.”

  Brigitte’s cheeks flushed. “They do,” she agreed. After a moment she nodded
. “Okay! Lucky, you agree, yes? We say oui?”

  Lucky hugged Brigitte hard. “Yes! We say oui!”

  So everyone was cheering and starting to make cabin-moving plans when Stu Burping pulled up, jumped out of the truck, and waved his clipboard in the air. “I’m here to help,” he said. “Name’s Stu, and that’s my nephew Ollie in the front seat. I guess you know I’m from County Health. Believe me, we’d rather not shut down the Café at all, but I have to enforce the code.” He waved his arms over his head when everyone started talking again. “However, we don’t have to close the doors right away—there’s about a month leeway. So if you have any questions or ideas you want to run by me, that’s why I’m here.”

  Lucky could tell that no one knew what to make of this—it was so strange for the enemy to do something completely unexpected and nice.

  Pretty soon Stu Burping was shaking hands and passing out his business card, and Short Sammy was saying maybe that nephew would like to get out of the truck, have some lemonade. Lucky heard the health inspector sigh, saw him shake his head. “Oh, Ollie’s going through a rough patch, and you can’t blame him. His dad got laid off and can’t find work—looks like their home may be foreclosed. I’m trying to get the kid out of the house once in a while, let him ride along when I do fieldwork, but he’s pretty convinced the whole world’s crashing down on him. It’s a battle. Best, I guess, to leave him be . . .”

  The Captain struggled to get everyone to come to order as voices rose. Lucky moved back to where she was partially screened by a group of people, and then she checked out the boy in Stu Burping’s truck, his arms crossed, his face in a scowl. He had that junior high way of seeming like he was too cool to smile. She watched him watching the meeting, and that made her see it through his narrowed eyes: the hodge-podge of folks all talking at once about violations and God and a cabin with a grandfather clause; and Lincoln explaining to Henrietta that a noose is like a loop, which is a structure that can be used for many useful things. Dogs and a cat or two wandering around, people seated on folding chairs and stumps and old boxes outside—there being no building in Hard Pan big enough for everyone. And she felt a hot stab of shame that this boy—she searched for the word to describe him: arrogant!—that this arrogant boy was looking down his nose at her town, her home, just when it seemed to be in such a hopeless mess.