VenCo(68)

The first time Lucky lost a tooth, the tooth fairy left her a bowling trophy. It was confusing, because when she asked Stella to read the little plaque to her, it said to fred, best gutter ball in the state.

The second time she lost a tooth, she got nothing at all. She thought maybe it was a one-shot deal and she was left with a mouthful of duds. But a week later a ziplock bag of pennies showed up under her pillow with a handwritten note on the back of an Export label that read, Sorry, I’m shitty with deadlines. She quickly sent the delinquent fairy a thank-you prayer, since she wasn’t sure how to reach her.

“Fuck ’em all, and let Jesus sort it out,” Arnya would say. So Lucky got in the habit of relaying all her important messages through heaven, since Jesus was such a good organizer.

Arnya was a magician. She could make groceries appear overnight even though the stores were closed. She found ways to evade the landlady, where others would be stuck paying rent. With just one sentence, she could make Lucky feel both panic and relief.

Lucky grew used to her mother’s mercurial nature, the comings and goings that meant she often stayed over at Stella’s apartment. Once she could read, she collected magazines, which was easy to do, since magazines were transient in nature, the hobos of the written word, hopping on trains, sleeping in alleyway piles, abandoned on chairs in office lobbies where people came to wait. By the time she was eight, she had a wall of sloping, slippery magazines like pulpy pillars stacked beneath her window in her attic room at Grandma’s.

“What do you need all these for?” Arnya was sitting on Lucky’s mattress smoking a cigarette and painting the peeled heel of her black boots with a small bottle of black nail polish. “How much can you even read in grade one?”

Lucky was organizing the travel issues by continent. She coughed. “I’m in grade three, Arnya. And you shouldn’t smoke in here.” She pointed to the circular window over her shoulder with a thumb. “It doesn’t open.”

“Well, excuse me, braniac.” Arnya ground out the cigarette on an empty plate on the nightstand after taking one last haul that burned the paper down to the butt.

Lucky felt the silence as a reprimand and hurried to fill the space. “I like the pictures. And I collect the words.”

Her mother exhaled through her nostrils. She reminded Lucky of the dragons in Grandma Stella’s stories, if a dragon wore purple eyeshadow and swore a lot.

“Collect words? Why don’t you collect something normal, like dolls or some shit? Or cards. I used to have a collection of cards from casinos all over the Midwest. Until I left Richard. They stayed behind.” She stabbed at the exposed white plastic with the nail polish brush until the fibers splayed and bent.

Lucky didn’t really remember Richard. He was one of the boyfriends who lived “somewhere else,” one of the ones her mother went to go visit for weeks at a time.

Lucky had a box under her bed filled with cut-out words. Things like:

can’t understand

cosmic reckoning

Jilted

Separate

underestimated





She also had words like:

glamour by night

adventure

untold riches

listen to your gut





The last phrase was cut from a health magazine article about IBS and originally read listen to your guts—Lucky had to be extra careful to scissor away the s. They were the words she held in her hands, let slip through her fingers when Arnya was off chasing a job, or a gig, or a man, or outrunning a debt.

“Well.” Arnya was shaking a cigarette from the pack, bouncing her thigh on the bed so that her wet boot dried quicker. “I’ll be off, then.”

Lucky felt a pinch in her stomach and that familiar feeling of guilt. “It’s okay, you can smoke in here if you want to.”

Arnya was already up and pulling on her denim jacket. She popped the unlit cigarette between her crimson lips and leaned over to place a heavy hand on her daughter’s upturned face. “Nah, it’s okay, kid. I gotta see a man about a horse.”

She turned to leave, pausing at the door. “Be good and listen to your crazy old grandma. See ya later, alligator.”

The girl listened to her mother’s steps on the stairs, the crack of the exposed heel louder than the other. Then the front door shutting behind her.

Lucky dug through the second pile from the left, the one that held all the old National Geographics. She found a promising issue on animals of the southern United States, picked up her red-handled scissors, and hunted for the word. “Alligator . . . alligator . . .”



She woke herself up talking in her sleep.

“What’s that?” Stella stood in front of her, wrapped in a beach towel, dripping bathwater onto the wood floor.

“What?”

“You were saying something.” The towel slipped enough that one soft boob fell out. Stella regarded it but did not bother covering up.

“Probably just telling you to put some damn clothes on.” Lucky was disoriented and grouchy. She pulled off her boots and tossed them towards the door.

“Okay, okay. Don’t get all constipated.” Stella went to the bedroom and put on her flannel pyjamas, the ones with the little cartoon penguins telling each other to “fuck off” that she loved so much. Ironically, she’d gotten them at a church garage sale.