The Thing About Luck

CHAPTER SIX

After I went to the bathroom and Obaachan’s aspirin kicked in, she, Jaz, Thunder, and I got back into the pickup. Obaachan made a slow, wide U-turn, and once again we were bumping along the dirt road. “Which way should we head?” I asked. “I didn’t see a store on the highway.”

“Errrr.”

If I’d been with my parents, I knew I wouldn’t have to participate in finding a store. They would take care of it. But with Obaachan, who could say what would happen? Then out of nowhere the thought popped into my head: I should have used the word “impressive,” as in “It’s really impressive that your mother has a photographic memory.” I made a mental note to say that to Robbie some other time.

“Is there map in glove compartment?” Obaachan asked. Jaz began going through the glove compartment. He turned over each slip of paper and read it for a moment, as if that were the only way to determine if it was a map.

“Just a map of the whole country,” he finally said.

Obaachan drove to the highway and kept going until we got to a gas station. Then she pulled up and turned to me. “Go ask where grocery store is, Miss Talk So Good.”

I got out and walked into the station. There were a few candy bars and drinks for sale, but there was no mini-mart like in many gas stations. The attendant was sitting on a stool behind the counter. “Hi,” I said.

“Hello, young lady.”

“Can you tell me where the closest grocery store is?”

“What are you looking for?”

I paused. “A grocery store,” I repeated.

“I mean, what do you need to buy?”

“Bread, canned chicken, lettuce, tomatoes, and mayonnaise.”

“Sounds like you want to make a sandwich.” He lazily spun his stool around until he was facing me again.

“Yes, sandwiches.”

The man asked, “Do you need any drinks to go with those sandwiches?”

“Yes, drinks.”

He gestured grandly to where the drinks were in a small refrigerator.

I hesitated before turning and walking out and up to the driver’s-seat window. “He wants to know if I need to buy any drinks. They have Coke and stuff.”

“He tell you where grocery store is?” Obaachan asked.

“No, I think he wants me to buy drinks.”

“How much drinks cost in there?”

“I didn’t ask.”

Obaachan looked worried. “What if drinks here too expensive and we no have enough money for food? Get in seat.” She restarted the engine as I got in.

We drove to a small restaurant, but it was closed, maybe forever. It wasn’t boarded up, but it just had that aura of something that was closed forever. Farther down the highway, more glass windows in what used to be stores were boarded up. I remembered learning in school that some small towns in the Great Plains were closing up as children grew older and moved to the cities.

We drove all the way to the grain elevator about ten miles away.

“I go this time,” Obaachan said. She got out and was gone for what seemed like hours. I started timing her after a while. Thirty minutes passed. The sweat dripped down my forehead, getting DEET into my eyes. They instantly started tearing up, the sting was so bad.

“I think you should go in,” Jaz finally said.

“No, here she comes.”

Obaachan got into the truck with a paper in her hand.

“What took you so long?” I asked.

“We talk about wheat and Japanese woman his second cousin marry.” She started the engine.

“What does she have to do with wheat?”

“Nothing. He want to talk about it after he see me. I talk to him because he give good direction.” She pulled onto the highway again. “Big store in next town, but smaller one nearby. Keep eye open for Carver Avenue.”

We drove about a mile before we spotted Carver. Obaachan turned right, and we drove and drove and drove until she finally pulled over. She handed me the directions. “Read this. What I do wrong?”

I looked at the lines scrawled on the paper. “We were supposed to turn left on Carver.”

“He tell me right and draw left on map. I may not have photograph memory, but I know I right about this.”

When we finally reached the store, more than an hour had passed since we’d left the Laskey place. I had a sinking feeling that this was probably what the whole summer would be like as we searched for groceries in each new town, with me, Miss Talk So Good, asking clerk after clerk where the grocery store was. But it didn’t bother me so much. I knew we were here to save the mortgage.

By the time we got back to the farm, it was close to two thirty. Obaachan’s back was killing her. Still, she laid out a plastic cloth we’d bought with our own money and made the sandwiches on that. Obaachan was a perfectionist. Her sandwiches were works of art. She cut them into perfectly symmetrical triangles and always added a slice of onion so thin, you hardly knew it was there. And the meat was always in just the right place. You’d never take a bite and get too much bread and not enough meat. Then she’d use parsley to make it fancy, except she tore off parts of the parsley so that it looked more like a little flourish. I’d actually helped her write an article about sandwich making. She sent the article to a local paper, and when they didn’t publish it, she canceled our subscription.

The crew was probably starving to death. “You tell Mrs. Parker I finish. Don’t say ‘we’ finish,” she told me.

I climbed into the pickup and pressed the button on the radio. Mrs. Parker was still out driving one of the combines. “My grandmother is finished making the sandwiches,” I told her. “She’ll be right there.”

Obaachan had climbed into the driver’s seat with the sandwiches.

“What on Earth took so long?” Mrs. Parker asked.

“We had to find the store,” I said politely.

There was no answer at first, and then she said, “All right.” She clicked off, then clicked on again. “I forgot to tell you about the timetable. Starting tomorrow, we need breakfast at seven, lunch at noon, and dinner at seven. Why did it take so long to find a store?”

“We were unfamiliar with the area,” I answered.

“Couldn’t you ask someone?”

Obaachan yanked the microphone out of my hand and said, “Man at elevator where we get direction have to talk to me before he give me direction! It not my choice. You need talk to him.”

“What did he have to talk to you about?”

“His second cousin wife.”

No one said more into the radio.

“Mrs. Parker already drive me crazy,” Obaachan said. But I figured that before long, Obaachan would be driving Mrs. Parker crazy, so it would be even Steven.

Just for something to do, Jaz, Thunder, and I drove into the field with Obaachan.

Robbie was busy with what appeared to be a handheld video game or maybe a smartphone. Jaz would probably have sold me for a quarter if it meant he could get a video game. I thought about yelling hi to Robbie, but why couldn’t he be the one to call out to me? So neither of us said anything to the other, and after we gave Mrs. Parker the sandwiches, the combine roared away, Robbie disappearing into the fields.

When we got back, Obaachan groaned. “My neck is kill me, so you make dinner later. I may get up to help. Errrrrr.” She lay down on the ground, right where she’d been standing, in the shade from the pickup. First she dropped to all fours, and then she lowered herself carefully to her back.

I sat in the shade beside her and opened my sketchbook to a half-finished picture of a mosquito hanging in the air near a leaf. I had to draw his leg over and over before I could get it right. It was a male. A male mosquito has featherlike antennae that are fun to draw. The antennae of the female are more simple, and the palps are short. Palps help mosquitoes taste. Then there’s the evil proboscis. It’s like a living spear that stretches out from around a mosquito’s mouth. The females use it to stick in you and suck your blood and sometimes kill you. I had memorized this from Wikipedia: “Death is the permanent termination of the biological functions that sustain a living organism.”

Once, I had a very old dog, Shika, who one day followed me to the washing machine. I stopped to pet her, and I could sense that she really, really, really wanted to be petted. Then I pulled a comforter out of the washer and put it in the dryer. When I turned around, my dog was lying dead. I lay on the ground beside her and just held her until my mother found us. I didn’t even know how much time had passed, but the dryer had stopped. She’d known she was about to die and that was why she’d been so open to being petted.

My mother said that when I was dying and the nurse had left the room, Obaachan had lain beside me on the bed and held me. That was so hard for me to believe I thought my mother might be lying.

After I finished with my mosquito sketchbook, I picked up one of the books I had to read for school. It was called A Separate Peace. My teacher said I had to read three books over the summer. Even though it was for older kids, I chose A Separate Peace because it was the only book in English that Jiichan had ever read, and he wanted me to explain it to him. He was very troubled by the book and had been after me to read it all year. It was about two Caucasian guys who went to a boarding school during World War II. In other words, it was about a world completely alien to mine. I was already on page 30. Some kids I knew would read only books that were about something they could relate to. But I was interested in other stuff.

Jaz, in a huge straw hat, worked on his LEGO building right out in the hot sun. He was concentrating so hard on the building that I don’t know if he even realized he was in the sun. His construction was really very impressive. There were four floors, with balconies, and the insides were furnished. Nobody could talk to him when he was focused on his LEGOs, because he might have a meltdown. He might pound his head on something. He might throw a cup at you.

I looked around at the wheat in the distance. I knew there was also wheat on the other side of the highway. There was nowhere to go except to other wheat fields and nothing to do except walk through the wheat fields.

All three of us were drenched with sweat. I wished they had brought the employee camper first, but I also understood that working the fields was more important than whether or not I was sweating. I read the last few chapters of A Separate Peace. Okay, that wasn’t a good move. Now I felt even more confused. So I went back to where I was before to keep reading from there.

Later, as I took the chicken out of the cooler to prepare sandwiches for dinner, I suddenly realized I was thinking about A Separate Peace, just like Jiichan. The book made me think about what was deep inside of me. Was I good or bad or mixed or what? And was the way I acted every day the real me, or was the real me somewhere so deep that I would never even know it? I made a mental note to talk about this with Melody when I got back home. Then I tried to remember, Wasn’t there another mental note I made to myself earlier? I couldn’t remember. Maybe I needed to start writing down my mental notes. Who knows what all I’d forgotten to do over the years? But then what if someone got ahold of my notebook and some of the mental notes were embarrassing?

Back to A Separate Peace. Why would a book in which hardly anything happened for most of the time eat at me so much? It was the weirdest thing.

The radio crackled to life. It was Mrs. Parker. “If you can hear me, can you cut the sandwiches into rectangles, not triangles? It makes them easier to eat.”

“I going to cut her into rectangles,” murmured Obaachan.

I hopped into the truck and picked up the radio. “Hi, it’s Summer. We’ll definitely cut into rectangles this time. I think my grandmother thinks triangles look better.”

“I don’t mean to micromanage,” said Mrs. Parker, “but could you and/or she also use just a touch more mayonnaise? I think even my husband would have liked a bit more if he were here.”

“Okay.” I waited, but she didn’t say anything further.

“Actually, I want less mayonnaise on mine,” Jaz said. “And as long as we’re bossing you around, can you slice my tomato really thin? I like some tomato, but not too thick.”

“I like thick tomato,” Obaachan said.

I wished I had an MP3 player so I could drown everybody out. We’d bought a cheap knife at the grocery store, and when I tried to cut Jaz’s tomato thin, I ended up squishing the tomato.

“And don’t give me the end part of the tomato with all the skin,” Jaz said. “Even if it’s thin, I don’t want that part.”

If Obaachan weren’t right there, I would have told him to shut up. Then I did say it: “Shut up!”

I waited for Obaachan to say something, but at first she didn’t. Finally, she said, “You grounded, Summer. Errrr.”

How could I be grounded on harvest?

“You too sensitive. You need to be tough cookie.”

Actually, harvest was a good time to make trouble, because I couldn’t get grounded. I made a mental note to test out that theory. Then I sighed and carefully cut a thin slice of tomato. I made the sandwiches with a little bit more mayonnaise, except for Jaz’s sandwich. I gave everyone except Jaz a thick slice of tomato. And I cut all the sandwiches in half, into rectangles. The problem with me, I decided, was that I was too good. I mean, every so often I was bad, but nobody took me seriously enough. Like, Jaz had everybody in the palm of his hand because of his temper. Everyone took his temper seriously. If I threw a cup across a room like Jaz sometimes did, my entire family would have a nervous breakdown. But maybe that wasn’t a bad thing if it made them take me more seriously.

The radio came to life again. “Are the sandwiches ready?”

I grabbed the radio. “Yes, they’re ready,” I said.

We drove out to the combines, and Mrs. Parker couldn’t stop herself from examining the sandwiches before she distributed them.

She suddenly ran her hand over my head and said, “How are you holding up, dear?”

“I’m reading and drawing, and Jaz is playing with his LEGOs.”

“Don’t worry, it won’t be this bad every time.” Then she gave a laugh. “Well, I can’t promise you that. One thing about harvest is that anything can happen.”

I smiled. “Remember that time I fell off the combine and everyone thought I had a concussion?”

She laughed again. “Honey, some of us just aren’t blessed with coordination.”

I couldn’t stand Robbie just sitting up there, so I said, “How’s Robbie doing?”

“He’s obsessed with Angry Birds. I have to hide his phone every night so he doesn’t stay up playing.”

I looked up longingly at him, then quickly looked away so Mrs. Parker wouldn’t notice.

After that I really had nothing to do, especially since it would be dark soon. We didn’t have any artificial lights, so at least there wouldn’t be so many insects around. Just the usual crickets. They were chirping up a storm because of the high temperature—they chirp faster the higher the temperature.

If all went well, the semi with the employee camper would probably be back by one a.m., maybe around the same time that the combines would finish. I found a pen and a piece of scratch paper in the glove compartment of the truck and turned on the inside light. Let’s see. On a perfect day, four combines together might cut eighty acres per hour. Eighty times sixteen hours of work equals 1,280 acres a day. So since the farm was about seven thousand acres, and since nothing ever went perfectly, it would take at least seven days to finish the job.

So you already know that the grain cart dumps into the grain trailers, and the big rigs take the full trailers to the elevators. Sometimes the wait at the elevators is as long as five or six hours; other times nobody at all will be in front of you. The nearest elevator, the one Obaachan stopped at, was going to stay open until around ten p.m., she’d found out. Some custom harvesters try to have the combine bins and grain trailers empty around elevator closing time. Then everyone would keep working for a few hours more until all the containers were full again. Only then, at one or two a.m., did the work stop. That way, early in the morning, when the elevators opened, the big rigs could go straight to the elevators to dump. The Parkers didn’t like to work their drivers past midnight unless it was necessary to beat the weather. And why was I thinking about this stuff? I was done for the day and couldn’t wait for our camper to arrive so we could all go to sleep in style. But I wondered if Jiichan was getting tired out there.

I got out again and walked around with Thunder. I heard buzzing in my ear—a mosquito! I screamed and shook myself like crazy. Jaz always said that when I shook myself, I looked like a zombie on fire. It was only a myth that just female mosquitoes buzz. Both male and female mosquitoes buzz. Thunder barked, but I wasn’t sure what he was barking at. I loved being in my bare feet. So I took off my shoes, which my mother always warned me not to do, because apparently, you could step on all sorts of terrible things outside—to her, the ground was a battlefield.

It was pitch-black, which made it kind of exciting. Thunder and I walked slowly so as not to walk into anything. It was daytime in Japan right now, and my mother was probably helping out with my great-grandparents, washing them or feeding them or just keeping them company.

I stopped and stared straight ahead into the darkness. I felt like I was part of the darkness, in a good way. Sometimes I loved farm life, the way you felt like you were such a part of the dirt and the wheat and the trees and the grass.

I heard something moving, and my heart began to thud. It was probably a coyote, and Thunder would scare it away. Still, now that I was scared, I didn’t want to walk anymore. Jiichan said that since I’d gotten sick, I’d turned into a scaredycat. Well, things moving in the dark were scary! I turned around and hoped I was going in the right direction. I couldn’t even see any lights from the combines. They must have been on the far end of the field.

I called out, “Jaz?” He didn’t answer, so I called louder, “Jaz?”

Obaachan shouted back, “You bother everybody with your noise! You walk loud like rhinoceros in jungle!”

I seriously doubted that she had ever heard a rhinoceros walk in the jungle, but I was glad to hear her voice. I walked toward it. In a few minutes Obaachan said, “Over here.”

I held out my hands and moved them back and forth until I felt the pickup. I stepped on Obaachan’s hand by accident and she cried out, “My hand! You ruin my perfect hand!”

“I’m sorry! Where’s Jaz?”

“He sleep in truck. You go too.”

I climbed into the pickup with Thunder and lay down on the backseat. Thunder tried crawling on top of me. I couldn’t push him off, though, because he was too strong and stubborn. So I lay there with ninety-five pounds of Doberman on top of me. Seriously, Dobermans have elbows like rocks. I concentrated all my energy, the way I did when I was holding Jaz, and with a grunt, I pushed off Thunder. He curled up on the floor and went to sleep.

I woke up to a commotion. A big rig had arrived with the employee camper. Jaz was sitting up, stretching on the front seat. The back doors of the pickup couldn’t open unless a front door was open, so I climbed over the front seat and got out with Thunder and Jaz. Mr. Laskey had apparently woken up with the noise as well and was standing nearby in a robe. The other combines were in from the field. I squinted at the headlights of the big rigs, then checked my watch: 2:47 a.m.

Mr. Parker was already attaching the employee camper to the water and electricity hookups. Yay—a real bed! I staggered into the camper and felt for the light along the wall. I turned it on and found myself standing in the kitchen. To the right of that was a couch and TV. Then I checked out both ends of the camper, which turned out to be identical. Each had six beds—two three-level bunks. I knew my grandparents would want the bottom bunks. I took a middle bunk so that Thunder would be able to get up into it. I told him “Hup!” and he struggled onto the narrow bed.

Even though the bed was hard, it felt really comfortable compared to the backseat of the pickup. I usually liked to take a shower before bed, but I was so tired, I thought I’d be able to fall asleep without being clean. The rest of my family trudged in together. Jiichan looked exhausted; the lines on his face seemed deeper than usual, as if he were a lifetime smoker. “You want air conditioner, Toshi?” Obaachan asked.

“Hai,” he said, lying down with a grunt.

“I’ll get it,” Jaz said. He turned it on and climbed to the top of the other bunk. I could tell how tired he was by how he kind of slapped his hands onto the rungs instead of grabbing them firmly.

Obaachan eyed her bed critically, then pushed at it a couple of times with her hand. “Summer, pull mattress off for me. I sleep with it on floor.”

I climbed down obediently, pulled off the mattress, and climbed back up.

“I change my mind,” she said. “I think I sleep with mattress on bed. Summer.”

I had a feeling she was doing this on purpose, but what could I do? I climbed down and put the mattress back on the bed. This time I waited. “Well?” I asked.

“Floor is better.”

“That’s what I figured.”

“You smart-mouth me?”

“No, it’s just what I figured, that’s all.” She looked at me suspiciously, but I just pulled the mattress to the floor without another word. Then I turned out the light and got in bed.

“Ah, kita makura!” Obaachan said. She groaned and I heard rummaging before she groaned again.

Kita makura was the Japanese superstition that sleeping with your head to the north was bad luck. The beds had already been made, with the pillows on the north. I supposed Obaachan had just moved around so that her head was now facing south. But then she said, “Summer.”

“Yes?”

“I want to sleep east. Change my mattress. It too heavy for me.”

In fact, it wasn’t heavy at all, but I climbed down carefully and felt my way to the light switch. I didn’t know how I was going to survive the whole summer without killing somebody.

“Never mind,” she said. “I like south after all.”

“You’re doing this on purpose!” I cried out.

“What you mean?” She gave me her best innocent look. That made me even more suspicious.

“You’re making me climb up and down just because you think it’s funny!”

“What funny about that?”

“Well, do you want anything else before I get back in bed?” I asked, exasperated.

“What would I want? It middle of night.”

Obaachan lay down and closed her eyes. By the time I got back in bed, I was wide awake. I stared into the blackness and thought about practice-kissing my hand and pretending it was Robbie. But somehow Obaachan would probably know, and I didn’t want to be humiliated. I turned on my side, my back to the rest of the room, and gave my hand a little peck. I wasn’t sure how stiff to keep my lips. I wasn’t sure how much to move my lips. None of my friends had ever kissed a boy, but another girl in class had kissed a boy at a party, and after she did it, the boy passed her a note in class calling her the Rock of Gibraltar because he said her lips were so hard. She had cried in class, right in the middle of math. Something like that could pretty much ruin your whole life.