Lucky Breaks by Susan Patron Read Free Book Online Page B

will make a big cake because it is too many people each to make their own some-mores.”
    “Good by me, man,” Sammy said, pushing his hat back off his forehead. “But I got the stew covered. Cake sounds about right.”
    “Better practice blowing, you two,” Dot said to Miles andLucky, “to be sure you blow out all seventeen candles and get your wishes.”
    Lucky wished that wishing really worked. If it did, her wishes would be that Short Sammy’s box had never arrived, that Paloma would be there for the party, and that Lincoln would not leave Hard Pan. And way in the back row of her wishes, slouched back there because it could probably never come true, was the one about her father. He had been married to both of her mothers: first to Brigitte in France before Lucky was born, and then to Lucille. They had both divorced him, one after the other, but they must have loved him too, at least at first. And he must —kind of, in his own way—love her , Lucky thought, because he had convinced Brigitte to come all the way from France to take care of her when she was eight and Lucille had died. He sent money every month and had helped Brigitte financially a little bit with starting up the Café. But even though Lucky hadn’t divorced her father, he never saw her or talked to her or wrote to her, and she didn’t understand why. And she wished she did understand, wished so strongly that it made her heart feel like a hard little forgotten scrunched-up ball of a washcloth with all the water squeezed out of it.
    “My first wish,” Miles said, pulling Lucky back from thoughts of her father, “was to have a great big Hard Pan party, and that wish is already coming true.” He smiled the sweet way he did when you gave him a cookie, the way that made you give him a second one. Then he said something that echoed exactlywhat Lucky had been thinking. “My other ones are the kind of wishes where they never come true but you wish them anyway. Do you ever have those, Brigitte?”
    “Of course,” Brigitte said. “Adults have big, big wishes that we do not expect to come true. That is why we need so many more candles on our cakes.”
    Everyone laughed and started talking all at once about wishes, everyone except Lucky. Sometimes what wishes do, Lucky knew, especially the big, big wishes, is churn up all the confusion and longing that sloshes around forever inside of you.

11. hard pan astronomy
    Lucky ate her s’more and listened to the others. But she didn’t want some more, and she didn’t laugh with them. She felt unseen, a lamp with its cord unplugged from the socket. No one really understood her, and partly the problem was that Lucky didn’t understand herself . She knew that deep in her heart she loved her family and her extended family and the town where she lived. It was fine that Brigitte wasn’t a regular sort of mother, and Lincoln wasn’t a typical kind of friend, and Miles wasn’t an actual little brother, and Short Sammy wasn’t a real grandfather, and Dot and Mrs. Prender weren’t blood-related family. But all of that was somehow not enough .
    She leaned back and gazed up at the inky-black sky, crammed with stars. The moon looked like a happy-face smile on its side. “What I don’t get,” she said suddenly, “is the Milky Way.”
    “Our galaxy,” Lincoln said, pointing at it with his metal skewer.
    Everyone leaned their heads back to study the sky, which from this spot in their desert valley was like the inside of an immense black domed Weber lid. As if, Lucky thought, maybe God had a pesky second cousin once removed who’d played with the lid when she was a child, and she’d jabbed it a billion times from up above with her s’mores skewer. And we humans look up and see what we call stars, but really they are just bits of the immense light from beyond, shining through the jagged holes she made. If someone lifted that domed lid, the light would be so intense and so beautiful that all the people looking