Luck

Four leaves mean luck, my mother said, and she'd know, being Irish on one side and stubborn on both. She could find them in any field. She'd look down and there they'd be, like the ground was showing off for her. I never found one. Not once. Not in thirty years of looking, not in every park and garden and roadside verge I've walked through, looking down instead of up, missing the sky for the chance of a clover. My mother pressed them in books. Our copy of Jane Eyre had seven. The Brontës would not have approved but the clovers didn't know that and neither did my mother, who had not read Jane Eyre and used it only for pressing things. She also pressed a parking ticket once. I don't think that was on purpose. The thing about luck is — and I'm only now working this out, at forty-three, in a rented flat with a cat I didn't plan on and a job that is fine — the thing about luck is it looks different when it arrives than when you're searching for it. You look for four leaves. You get a mother who was happy in fields. You get a copy of Jane Eyre that smells like grass and has a fine from 1997 between chapters twelve and thirteen. You get a cat who likes you specifically and not just the food, though the food helps. None of this has four leaves. None of it would survive pressing. But my mother would have looked at my life and looked at her hands and said not bad, which was her highest compliment, which was enough.