Free The Natural Laws of Good Luck by Ellen Graf

remained—and one wrong move could split the thing asunder—but the method had been discovered and proved humanly possible.
    My husband thought me as clever as a person paddling a canoe with the wrong end of the paddle. He said I had accepted a job too difficult for too little money and was going at it in the most inefficient and unprofitable way. He communicated as much by asking, “Lady pay how much?” and “You work how much days?” He wasted no more words. We took turns refining the inside with a handheld gouge to avoid cracking the precious vessel. His slender-fingered hands, which had been smooth and elegant when he first came from China, were now as rough-knuckled as mine. He stuck with me until the urn enclosed a pleasing concavity.
    Zhong-hua was surprised when I finished the crow on the lid, its round eyes wide open and sleek head tilted forward and down, as if already talking to the future inhabitant of the urn. This grueling task had let us both know that we were equally matched in endurance and skill and could work under pressure in harmonious collaboration. When I think of how many hours went into that job, I am glad that the ashes resting in it are those of a great patron of the arts who had bolstered the careers and morale of many poor artists.
    I thanked Zhong-hua for coming to my rescue. He sat me down solemnly. “I am your husband, so I should do these things for you. If you say thank you, it is I not your husband.” I didn’t get it right away, but from then on I bit my tongue before the phrase escaped again. I gradually learned that appreciation, remorse, and even joy were things one just had to feel in the air over time.
    After the urn money paid some back bills, I pondered other ways we could make money together. One of my specialties is hand-built teapots with hand-carved handles. When Zhong-huasaw them, he said at once, “No good.” He said they were too heavy and just “No good” in general. To elaborate, he pointed out that the Chinese had perfected the bowl and the teapot four thousand years ago, and these designs had since been working very well. Did I think I could improve upon them? I agreed that my pots were kind of clunky but argued for innovation and a combined vision. After many dummy teapots, we came up with some hybrid designs that I cast in porcelain and he painted. They incorporated my love of nature, making use of twisted roots for handles and spouts, and Zhong-hua’s preference for delicacy and tradition, expressed through brush painting and calligraphy. I didn’t know much about marketing but managed to sell some to the airport gift galleries in Detroit and Albany. The curators, both lovely ladies, were reverent toward artists and fair.
    The grocery store was cutting back Zhong-hua’s hours each week because his English was not progressing as the boss had hoped it would from attending summer school. My husband used a Chinese study technique that entailed silently copying words and phrases over and over. He memorized spelling but neither sound nor meaning. This discipline was repeated night after night into the wee hours. One morning I inspected the notebook. In his beautiful penmanship, he had written five pages of “I have an advantage with the doctor. I have an appointment over the slower runners.” He copied whole sections from a Toyota repair manual: “The symbol illuminates and chimes sound simultaneously when a fault has occurred in an important vehicle system.” Each chosen sentence was written four hundred times. It was hard to see how we were going to move forward at this rate.
    I also worried that my husband was very isolated. Our social milieu was a bit thin for someone used to falling asleep to the music of his neighbors bickering and weeping on the other side of thin apartment walls and waking up to their cheery resurrection. He was comfortable in crowds, and I guessed the stillness of our