face with his fingers.
He kissed the cold image of his own lips and placed his hands on top of his head in surrender to a fate not of his own design.
Th omas cam e to stay at Monique’s house at the beginning of summer. In the morning Thomas would walk Lily to the day-care center where she spent from nine to noon playing with other children and getting exercise.
It was a seven-block walk to the day-care center at Compton Elementary School. On the way, Lily was full of questions and declarations.
“I wanna be a bird when I grow up,” she said to Thomas one morning.
“What kinda bird?”
“A hummingbird or a dragonfly.”
“And where would you go, little bird?” he asked.
“I’d fly to the North Pole to see Santa Claus, and I’d fly to Disneyland right over the fence so I wouldn’t have to pay all that money that Harold don’t wanna throw away.”
“That’a be fun,” Thomas said.
He loved those walks with Lily. When he was in the facility he used to think about her and wonder if they’d ever see each other again.
“Why they call you Lucky, Lucky?” Lily asked. “Is that your real name?”
“No.”
“What is your real name?”
“Thomas, Tommy.”
1 7 8
F o r t u n a t e S o n
“Which one is it?”
“Both, really,” Thomas said. “My mother named me Thomas Beerman.”
“Oh. Where would you go if you were a bird, Lucky?”
“I’d fly deep in the woods,” he said without hesitation, “to the tallest tree I could find, and then I’d sit on the very highest branch and look out over the forest until it became the sea.”
“And what would you look for?” the girl asked.
“What I’m always looking for.”
“What’s that?”
“My mother.”
L ate r that we e k , when Lily was explaining to Thomas how she made cookies in her lightbulb-powered play oven, the topic again turned to names.
“How come if your real name is Thomas or Tommy do they call you Lucky?” Lily asked.
“Your Uncle Bruno named me that,” he said. “It was the first day we met and I got to go stay at the nurse’s office, and he thought that was lucky.”
“Was it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe if it happened to Bruno it would be.
But I’m not very lucky at all. Really my name is kinda like a joke — they call me Lucky because I’m not lucky at all.”
“How come?”
“I don’t know. I think I was born like that. I fall down and lose things. Other people have a nice life, like you with your mother and Harold who love you. And others just end up on the street like me.”
“Could you die from not bein’ lucky?” she asked, worry filling her large brown eyes.
1 7 9
Wa l t e r M o s l e y
“I don’t think so,” Thomas said. “I’ve been thinking a lot about that. The main thing about being unlucky is that bad things happen to you and you feel bad. If you died, other people would feel bad, and then they would be unlucky.”
H arol d j u st d i dn ’t like Thomas; most of the time the plumber ignored his houseguest, even when he sat down to dinner with the family. After the first few weeks Thomas started eating in his room at night. He didn’t mind Harold’s cold shoulder, but the big plumber would also fight with his wife and adopted daughter if Thomas was there.
The final straw was on a day when Thomas was supposed to have cut the lawn. Monique had baked a chicken for dinner, and she was carving it when Harold said to Thomas,
“That was a piss-poor job you did on the grass today.”
“I mowed it, Harold,” Thomas replied. “Front lawn and back.”
“But you forgot to do the edges along the path and out on the sidewalk. If you don’t do the edges it’s just a raggedy-ass mess.”
“I thought that it looked nicer to leave the edges,” Thomas said. “You know, it looked more like real grass instead of fake-like.”
