The Thing About Luck

CHAPTER FIVE

The air was still cool as we all headed for Hargrove, Texas. I figured it would be about a six-hour drive. I glanced into the side mirror at the line of vehicles behind us.

Obaachan turned onto the highway, then said to me, “Too young to stare at boys.”

“I wasn’t staring.”

“You staring like he alien from outer space. Boys not alien, they real, and they cause trouble.”

“How do they cause trouble?”

“You too young to know that.” She looked at me as if making a decision. Then she said, “Maybe I tell you if I have time before I die.”

“I’m a boy,” Jaz said. “I know how they cause trouble.”

“You do not,” I scoffed at him.

“Stop fight now or I throw you both out of truck and you have to walk to Texas. Jaz, this not involve you,” Obaachan said. “Summer, you walk to Texas, you be sorry. I walk twenty mile once when I a girl, and by end I could hardly move. And don’t think I forget what we talking about. No stare at Robbie. Everybody notice.”

I sighed and gave Thunder’s ears a tug. He had natural ears and a docked tail, like a lot of Dobermans today. In some countries it was against the law to crop Dobermans’ ears. Personally, I approved of this law. In fact, if someone tried to crop my own ears, I would bite them.

“You listen me?” Obaachan said.

“Yes, Obaachan, I heard you.”

“Not hear, listen,” she shot back.

I looked out the window at a cattle farm. In Kansas agriculture, cattle was number one in terms of how much money it brought the state. Wheat was a distant second. But my whole life had revolved around wheat.

“You listen me?” Obaachan asked again.

“Well, how old were you when you started staring at boys?” I asked back.

“That has nothing to do with it.”

“But how old were you?” I persisted.

“In my day girl not married by eighteen, she a reject. Different today. Girl get married at thirty. So if I stare at boy at twelve and get married at eighteen, that mean you stare at boy at twenty-four and get married at thirty.”

“So you were twelve?” I got more alert—I might finally be about to win an argument with Obaachan.

“I don’t say that.”

“Then what are you saying?”

“I’m say you make fool of yourself. Give me apple.”

I rummaged through the bags on the floor next to me. “There’s only pears. I think we left the apples in the camper.”

“Don’t get smart. Give me pear.”

I resignedly gave my grandmother a pear. It was obviously Pick on Summer Day. Once, I asked my mother if Obaachan loved me, and Mom said, “Of course she does. She thinks about you all the time.” I knew she thought about me all the time, but that wasn’t the same as love, was it? No. It wasn’t.

My grandmother ate the pear—seeds, stem, and all—and then she began emitting that low growl: “Errrrr.”

After a few minutes of this, Jaz asked, “Are we pulling over?”

“No can,” Obaachan said.

“They’ll understand,” I said.

“They no hire us again. Errrrrrrrr. Errrrrrrrrr.”

We had brought seven bottles of painkillers with us. “Do you want some painkillers?” I asked.

“Six,” she replied.

I pulled out a bottle and read the label. “It says take one, and if that doesn’t work, you’re allowed to take another.” Plus, I had read in a magazine at the dentist’s office that taking too much over-the-counter medicine was bad for your liver.

“Give me six.”

“Obaachan, that’s dangerous.”

“I sixty-seven—you young, so you don’t understand yet. Pain more important than death.”

I thought that over. I remembered that when I had malaria, the pain in my joints had made me wish I were dead. Up until then, I’d thought that pain was something that came from the outside, but malaria had taught me to fear pain that came from within. I knew my grandmother’s pain came from within. So I handed her the six pills.

She chuckled. “Easy to get my way with you.”

I gave her a bottle of water. We had filled plastic bottles with tap water because my grandparents couldn’t understand why anyone would pay for something that you could get from your own faucet. Personally, I loved bottled water. It made me feel extravagant and grown-up. When I grew up, I would keep bottles of water in my house at all times. I would have three dogs. My husband would love bottled water and dogs and me. Or maybe I would never be able to afford bottled water, maybe I wouldn’t have any dogs, maybe I would never feel extravagant and grown-up, and maybe I would never get married.

“Errrr.”

I thought of what Obaachan had said about not stopping the convoy for her. Timing was the essence of harvesting. If we held up the progress of the harvesting team, she was right—We would not get hired again, even if the Parkers liked us as people. When the wheat was ready to harvest, it was ready to harvest now, and my grandfather would be working fourteen- or even sixteen-hour days.

Obaachan was squeezing the steering wheel so hard, I thought her beautiful hands might snap.

“Will you be all right?” I asked her.

“It no matter,” she replied simply.

And, unfortunately, I knew that was true. I started to think about the next few months. The last time we’d worked for the Parkers, Mrs. Parker had compiled a binder of every meal with every recipe we were to make. For six days a week at breakfast, the drivers ate just milk and cereal. But on Sundays we made a full-on breakfast— pancakes or French toast or omelettes. We made about 250 meals that year. I swear we followed every recipe exactly, but once in a while Mrs. Parker would wrinkle her forehead and say something like, “Maybe you skimped on the sugar?”

“Hey,” I said suddenly. “How come Jaz doesn’t have a job?”

My grandmother glanced into the rearview mirror. “Summer, you make one more trouble, my head explode and you guilty of murder.”

I started to say that heads don’t explode, but the radio came to life just then, and Mrs. Parker’s voice reported, “It’s already eighty-two degrees in Hargrove.”

That was nothing. One year in Texas the temperature was 110 when we arrived.

Actually, I was kind of relieved that it was going to be a hot day in Hargrove. The things you feared most during harvest were rain and hail and letting the wheat set too long past its prime. But heat was nothing. Once the wheat was ready to harvest, the weather was the boss. After that came the farmer, and close behind were the custom harvesters. The drivers were below them. The cooks were probably even below that, because the drivers could live without us if they had to. Basically, if either the farmer or the Parkers told one of us to do something, we would do it. And me, I was probably at the very bottom of the heap. So even though the Parkers were nice, we weren’t all equals. The Parkers liked to say we were all a family, but that simply wasn’t true.

I took out my mosquito notebook and began to leaf through my drawings, even though it was hard to concentrate in the bumpy truck. I was much better at drawing now than I was at the beginning, but I still wasn’t very good. My secret goal was to make mosquitoes out of real gold and sell them for jewelry. I had made some big mosquitoes out of clay, but the large size didn’t capture their delicacy. It was hard to get the clay thin enough. It always chunked up, and the mosquitoes always looked more like bumblebees. I would have to work on