Luck

The wind picked up as Jill sat in her stepdad Jim’s old pickup truck and fumbled around in her purse, feeling for her gloves. Not there. She reached for the glove box instinctively, but remembered it was locked. Jim’s truck still belonged to him after all this time. Nobody knew where the key was that opened the glove box or the tool box in the truck bed. Jill accepted that she was just going to have to have cold hands.

Ten years ago Jill had graduated from high school and left for college, leaving behind her mom Maureen and stepdad Jim. Although she loved them dearly, she couldn’t help but feel like a third wheel. They had only been married a year when she moved away, and they were still very much in the “honeymoon” phase.

That was when the bad luck started. First, Jim got sick. Really sick. Being the stubborn man he was, he refused to go to the doctor. Right before Thanksgiving last year, however, he turned yellow, and that was the final straw. Maureen insisted that he go to the hospital first thing the next morning. He didn’t argue. That next day, a Friday, Maureen called her daughter and told her that Jim had pancreatic cancer and it had spread throughout his body. And just like that, by Sunday he was gone. The memory still made her cringe in pain.

Back home, Jill sat on her bed and looked around. Although the furniture hadn’t changed since she was a child, everything else had. Her mom and Jim had opened an antique store years ago, so the dressers and shelves were covered in treasures they had acquired. Old fragile things that Jill had no interest in whatsoever. One shelf had little motorcycle statues that her mom had collected for Jim, since he owned the motorcycle shop down the street from her antique store. Their life together really had been idyllic.

Jim was known in Omaha as someone who would always help a person in need. He had a collection of quirky friends, all of whom looked at him as a saint of sorts. Each had a story of something Jim had done that saved them in one way or another. He bought a family groceries, or fixed a neighbor’s car. So many stories. When a friend asked him if he had a job he could give to a woman who needed to be paid under the table because she was escaping a violent marriage, of course he agreed to help. She was living in a domestic violence shelter and needed to remain anonymous, and Jim’s heart went out to her. That was how Koko came into their lives.

Jill’s bedroom became Koko’s room after Jim died. Koko’s clothes hung in the closet next to Jill’s old prom dresses. She thought about the first time she met Koko. She had stopped by the shop to bring her mom lunch and found the two of them laughing so hard they were crying. They couldn’t even tell her what was so funny. Jill immediately liked Koko, who helped Maureen out at the antique store a couple days a week, and ran errands for Jim at the motorcycle shop when he needed her. She fit into their world like she’d been there all along.

Koko had made her way across the country, seeking out the local Alcoholics Anonymous chapter of any given town, where she’d always find a kind soul who’d direct her to a shelter. In this way she had kept her identity hidden from her husband, a man she swore would kill her if he found her. Koko was Chinese, but she said she met her American husband, who was a high-ranking military officer, when he was stationed in the Philippines. Koko endured his abuse until their son was safely away at college, and that’s when she made her getaway.

When Jim died, they thought it was so lucky that Koko was there to help out. It was Jill who had suggested that Koko should just move in while she was settling Jim’s estate. So Koko ran the motorcycle shop while Maureen ran the antique store, and over the course of a few months, they liquidated most of the inventory and had an auction to get rid of the rest.

By the time the buildings sold, a full year had passed. They ordered take-out Chinese food for Thanksgiving dinner and Jill learned that her mother was a nervous wreck. Even after selling off all of Jim’s assets, there were taxes owed that she didn’t know how she’d be able to pay. She was worried she would lose the house. Jill tried to cheer her mom up by saying, “WWJD? What would Jim do?” It was a joke between them since Jim had even more of a saintly reputation since his passing. Maureen laughed and said he’d tell us this was all good luck, we just didn’t know it yet.

“Think lucky, be lucky,” she said. “That was his motto, wasn’t it?” They were interrupted by the phone ringing. From the dining room, Jill and Koko heard Maureen.

“Hello? Linda? I’m sorry, there’s nobody here by that name. You must have the wrong number,” she said, hanging up the phone.

“It was nobody,” said Maureen, as she returned to the dining room. “Remember how Jim used to mess with the telemarketers?” she said, laughing.

Every time Jim was mentioned lately, Koko looked uncomfortable. She stood up and said she couldn’t spend another holiday moping around this house and she was going to go book a plane ticket to Beijing to visit an old friend over Christmas. Maureen said she thought the break would do Koko some good. She said it had to be hard to be stuck with a grieving widow all the time.

That night, though, more bad luck struck. In the middle of the night, someone hit Jill’s car while it was parked on the street and took off. It was completely totaled. Jill had to work and had planned to drive back to Lincoln as soon as she woke up, but now her only option was to drive her step-dad’s old truck that Koko had been driving. There was practically steam coming out of Koko’s ears when Jill woke her up at 5 a.m. to get the truck keys. She argued at first, saying she needed it, but relented when Jill told her that her car had been hit last night and it was the only way she could get home. Jim’s old Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash cassettes were still in the console and Jill played them every time she missed him, which was pretty much always.

A couple weeks later, right before Christmas, Jill and Maureen drove Koko to the airport to see her off. Koko seemed distracted and annoyed when they promised to open gifts with her when she returned. It was mid-February when Maureen received a phone call from a shelter in Oklahoma. The man on the phone said they were trying to find a woman named Linda. A wave of dread washed over her as she suddenly understood. Instead of telling him he had the wrong number, Maureen asked the man what Linda looked like. He described Koko, down to the birthmark on her cheek. Apparently she had embezzled money from a charity and they were trying to track her down.

Maureen thought about all those weeks Koko had run the motorcycle shop. How she had just taken Koko’s word for it when she handed over the cash she had made each day. Maureen felt like she was being pulled into a rip tide. She felt like she was drowning.

Jill came home as soon as she found out, wanting desperately to help in some way, but having no idea how. She searched through all of Koko’s things and there wasn’t a shred of proof that she had ever even been there. Everything Koko wore she had bought at a thrift store. She didn’t have a car, she had been using Jim’s truck until Jill’s car was wrecked, and after that she just started borrowing Maureen’s car if she ever needed to drive, which wasn’t often since they had sold off everything in the motorcycle shop and settled the estate.

Koko’s fluffy, yellow bathrobe hung on a hook on the back of the bedroom door. On a whim, Jill slipped it on and flopped onto her bed. That was when the little black notebook fell out of the robe pocket.

Jill opened the notebook and found pages of lists in what she assumed was Chinese script. On the last page of the notebook there was a page that had the word “gym” written in English, and the number 048. Taped to the back cover was a small key.

The next morning when Jill walked into the gym, the teenage girl at the desk didn’t even bother to look up from her phone. Jill went straight to the locker room, her hands shaking as she turned the key of locker 048. Her heart sank. Inside there was just a makeup bag and a shower caddy. She had hoped to find a clue to where Koko was, or who she was. Jill unzipped the makeup bag and looked at the contents. Eyeliner, a couple makeup brushes, concealer, mascara, and under the makeup peeked something metal. Jill pulled it out and immediately recognized the keychain. It had Jim’s motorcycle shop logo on one side, and the words THINK LUCKY, BE LUCKY engraved on the other. It was identical to the one that held her truck keys. She had found the missing glove box keys!

When she opened the glovebox, though, she was once again disappointed. There was nothing of use inside; just the truck manual, an envelope full of oil change receipts, and a tire pressure gauge. She felt utterly defeated at this point. She wondered why had she even gotten her hopes up. Hot tears streamed down her cold, numb face. She closed the glove box and realized there was still the tool box key. As huge snowflakes started falling fast around the truck, she found herself in the bed of the pickup, turning the thick key in the lock. It was frozen. She grabbed a tire iron and started beating on the edges of the lid, trying to break the ice that had formed on everything. Chunks broke off and the lid popped up.

There was only one thing inside the toolbox: a black briefcase. Jill felt like she was in a movie. She grabbed it and jumped back inside the cab. Upon examination, she realized the briefcase also had a lock. And no key. She tried the glove box key on it, but it didn’t fit.

The snow was really coming down now and Jill thought she would have to figure this out back at home. She pulled out her truck keys from her coat pocket and put them in the ignition. Then she saw it. That little key that had always been hanging there next to her truck key. She had never known what it belonged to. She turned off the truck again and tried the tiny key in the briefcase lock. It turned. Inside the briefcase was a black plastic bag. She looked inside and her eyes welled up with tears. It was filled with stacks of money, wrapped in rubber bands, each with a post-it note in Koko’s handwriting. Jill picked up the stacks and quickly counted them, barely able to see through her weeping. There was $20,000 inside that bag. All the money Koko had stolen from her mom, that Jill had inadvertently stolen back when she took back the truck. Once more she put the keys back in the ignition of that magical truck, the words THINK LUCKY, BE LUCKY swinging in time with the music all the way home.