A New Kind of Luck

Nikki’s from North Fasta

Where there’s gas stations everywhere

And not much else

She works at one of ‘em

The gas stations

And not one of the nicer ones

I used to hang out there

On Saturday mornings

After I dropped my mom off at the hospital

Right before summer

Some people get spring

But around here, it’s just winter til it’s hot

When it would get like that

I’d hang around the gas station for an hour or so

Looking at candy and talking to Nikki

She’d show up at 6am

And leave around two

But I never knew where she went after that

I only knew her name

Because her mom and my mom were friends

And when we were little we’d play together sometimes

Everything else I heard

Because Nikki liked to talk

To whoever there was to talk to

I’d buy a bag of twizzlers

And she’d let me know

They were shutting her electricity off that night

‘I don’t know if I’m a month behind or two’

She’d reach into the bag I just bought and borrow some licorice

‘I’m not good at keeping track of things’

Saturday nights I’d be at El Dorado

Getting my ass grabbed my steak lovers

And scraping baked potato off sriracha red plates

Mom and I were sharing a car

A house, two dogs

And a passive resentment at my dad

He died two days before I finished high school

Heart attack

But it always felt like he just up and left

The neighborhood where we lived

Was about a mile west of North Fasta

More fast food places, less gas stations

I was thinking about getting a job at the Taco Bell

Just to keep myself busy

And maybe buy myself a new phone

Nikki was looking at my old phone one day

And told me it looked like a gag gift

Hers got broken when she threw it at a customer

It wasn’t easy to figure out

What it was about her that interested me so much

But it might have been that she always looked like she had somewhere to go

That was never me

I never looked like I had anywhere to go

Or anything taking up my time

My Mom was my main concern

Even though she was only forty-three

And way tougher than I was

A lot of single mothers with their kids

Around where we lived

Even Nikki had a kid, but she didn’t talk about him much

One Saturday she asked me to smoke with her out back

So we hung out by the dumpster

And talked about kids and how weird they are

‘Mine doesn’t look like his daddy or me’

She flicked the ash

‘Looks like my father, if anything’

Somebody was having a barbecue

And I realized that this was not how most people

Spent their Saturday afternoons when the weather gets nice

‘Some people bullshit and say they’re not going to be here forever’

Nikki would sometimes just offer stuff up with nothing around it

‘I’m not like that.  I think you’d better get used to where you are.’

My mom got promoted at the hospital about a year after that

And we got a duplex in Hadenville

Nicer than any place I ever thought I’d live

Some people have the same luck their whole lives

And some people get a new kind of luck

But none of us are dead, so everybody’s a little bit lucky

Last week I drove by the gas station

Where Nikki used to work

But I had a feeling she wasn’t there anymore

I saw online that she moved in with some guy

And that her kid was living with his dad

But nobody seemed mad at anybody about it

Nikki was a receptionist now

And there was a picture of her online

All done up at a desk in a doctor’s office

I was happy some new luck

Found Nikki too

Although I felt bad about whatever was going on with her kid

My Mom says I think too much about people

And that’s why I’m always going to be sad

Always going to get caught up in their troubles

‘Your father was the same way’

And she says it like I’m going to go the way he did

‘Always got tears for someone else’s eyes’

People have a hard time

Feeling bad for themselves

So I guess that’s why other people have to do it for them

Everybody’s got to give something

To somebody else

Whether you got it to give or not