Page 19 of Lady Luck

Once a hugger, always a hugger.

I released her and pointedly turned around to start putting away our supplies, waiting a few extra moments before glancing over my shoulder to make sure she was gone.

Coast cleared, I plopped down on the little indoor curb and looked up at Margaret, taking a moment to admire the way the late-morning sun streamed in from the glass dome above and burnished her leaves, all while imagining that the gentle sway of the blooms was by a natural wind and not the flow of industrial air conditioning.

She really was magnificent.

And I wished I could stay under her protection forever.

7

VINH

Iwas staring.

I wasn’t sure for how long, but I did know that it was long enough that the only-minutes-old iced matcha latte was sweating down my wrist where I clutched it tightly in my right hand.

I was sweating too.

My left hand had already sequenced through the fingerings for the twelve major scales on the side of my leg and had moved onto the minor scales as I internally hummed the notes.

A habit usually reserved for when I was working on an especially tricky line of code.

The genesis of my stupor?

Possibly an angel.

Possibly a hallucination.

Vibrant auburn hair glimmered as the soft morning light poured in through the high windows lining the lobby. The same light that caught the shine of the two or three pieces of jewelry in her ear, visible from where her hair was held back with a bandana. Freckles on every visible inch of skin, which wasn’t much—she was dressed casually in jeans and a T-shirt, and her dark-purple gardening gloves reached nearly to her elbows.

She was kneeling in front of the marble curb that separated the patterned carpet from the indoor foliage, her gloved hands working diligently on the arrangements in front of her. She’d surrendered her knee cushion to the pregnant woman working beside her and was talking animatedly with her as they worked, gesticulating wildly and flinging bits of dirt as she went.

None of those details were what had rooted me to this spot, transfixed.

It was her joy.

Such clear, obvious happiness emanated from her that the first time she smiled at her companion, the reverberations of it cut through and soothed the anxiety that had grown and coiled inside me.

She pushed a lock of hair out of her face and smeared a streak of dirt across her cheek in the process. She twitched her slightly upturned nose as she felt it before tucking her chin down and quietly laughing to herself.

My hand stilled.

My breathing slowed.

My grip on the drink loosened, and the plastic cup slipped in my grasp.

I stepped forward.

“Excuse me, young man.”

As if still in slow motion, the momentum of my step changed, and I turned my body toward the interruption and found myself confronted with hair.

A lot of hair. Hair going in the direction that hair wasn’t supposed to go.

And just like that, I was staring again. How does hair do that? It was curly-ish, and on my next breath, I noted that it smelled like the spray Mom used to preserve her roses.

“—you simply cannot stand idle in the corridor. People have places to be, especially the VIPs.” The person attached to the hair beehive finished her reprimands with a huff of impatience, her Southern drawl growing more pronounced as she went on, drawing out the end so it sounded like “es-pe-ci-all-y the V-I-Ps.”

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