Free The Natural Laws of Good Luck by Ellen Graf Page A

country home stirred feelings of loss. When I suggested he might like to go tothe Chinese Community Center to talk with some other people in Mandarin, he said no, he’d already talked with many Chinese people in China. I fretted about making things just right for him even though I didn’t know what just right should be. Whenever my heavy thinking got out of hand, my husband said I’d best do some heavy work so that at the end of the day, I would be too tired to think.
    One chill day I woke to find my husband already out in the foggy drizzle tying up a gigantic flat rock about five feet by three feet and at least ten inches thick. What must have made a handsome door stone to the house or milk room years ago was about to be used to implement Zhong-hua’s brand of geological existentialism. “If you have no thing to do, you can help,” he offered. “OK,” I said cheerfully. I was always up for doing things that had no apparent purpose and took tremendous effort. The two of us, with ropes, pry bars, wedges, and boards, strategized all day, prying up first one edge and then another, shoving the boards underneath as skids. Sometimes the stone slid half an inch and sometimes a whole foot. Sometimes it slid an inch back uphill, defying the laws of gravity. My husband kept saying “Just try.” I never asked why.
    We moved the massive piece of granite from somewhat near the house down the bank to the pond’s edge, where it platformed into the pond like the dock to a dream. Darkness fell, and the drizzle turned to downpour. In the end we were both covered with mud, his pants were wet to the thigh, and my knuckles dripped blood. I looked back up the hill, where the stone had ripped up the grass as it lurched and slid, and remarked that, actually, the stone would be more useful at the top of the hill as the step to the kitchen door. Zhong-hua said, “Good idea. You want, you do.”
    Following Zhong-hua’s theory of how best to convert worry to aching muscle mass, I decided that it would be best for us to find outdoor work together. Our bodies were not young enough to do heavy labor every day and feel happy about it, but in our situation our bodies were the best resource available to us. We scraped and painted decks, pruned trees, pulled weeds, and shoveled gravel.Although hauling manure in a wheelbarrow and digging up daylilies was not easy, the hourly pay was good with two people working.
    Zhong-hua wore his headphones and listened to English 900 tapes, the ones with monotone voices having a conversation in English devoid of emotion and almost devoid of meaning. “Bob, were you kidding yesterday, because if you were kidding yesterday, then I am leaving next Tuesday afternoon.” “Don’t leave, Steve. Please don’t leave. I was not kidding yesterday afternoon. I will not kid you tomorrow, Steve. I will not kid you next week.” Zhong-hua’s face grew slack in the shade of his straw hat. His features thickened, and his personality vanished. It was as if he’d summoned some ancestral farmhand to take his place while he listened in on Bob and Steve. The farmhand was an opaque shadow in human form and had a lot more stamina than I did. Zhong-hua spoke once and slapped me on the back in order to prod me into completing the fifth hour. “One more hour. One day, one hundred dollars, is OK. Tonight body very tired, very pain, don’t need think anything. Just sleep is OK. Don’t need think about terrible things.”

Driving and Drinking
    I N CHINA , my husband had never driven a car. He was sure he could learn in two hours. He owned a big motorcycle in China. How different could it be? First of all, he had a general irreverence for rules. The centerline had no significance to him. The lanes held no association to restricted sideways movement. Pulling out of a side road onto the main route, oncoming car in view, a hastened version of his motto