Lucky

In 1955 St. Louis, six-year-old Jodie Rattler accompanies her Uncle Drew to Cahokia Downs racetrack, where she circles numbers on a betting slip and he wins nearly $6,000. He secretly gives her $86 in two-dollar bills, telling her to hide them and never reveal their source. Jodie stashes the roll under her mattress. After a major tornado strikes St. Louis County in February 1959, she comes to believe the roll contains her luck and vows never to spend it.

Jodie lives with her mother, May, in a golden brick house on Skinker Boulevard across from Forest Park. May had pursued a stage career in New York after the war, had an affair with a married man named Rattler, and returned to St. Louis with baby Jodie when he went back to his wife. The family's emotional center is Jodie's grandparents' house in Webster Groves, where Grandfather sings in a rich baritone, Grandmother plays piano, and the extended family gathers for meals and music. Uncle Drew prospers in business and marries Aunt Louise; Jodie's closest cousin, Brucie, lives nearby with his mother, Aunt Lily.

Uncle Drew funds Jodie's enrollment at John Burroughs, a private school in Ladue, where she feels like an outsider among wealthier classmates but finds her place in the Junior Chorus. Brucie takes up guitar and forms a band called the Big Muddies, and Jodie begins singing with him. At summer music camps, including Interlochen in Michigan, her talent receives its first outside recognition.

During Jodie's early teens, Mom grows depressed and erratic, eventually driving on the wrong side of the road and undergoing months of hospitalization. Jodie moves in with Uncle Drew and Aunt Louise, processing the crisis with surprising calm. Mom returns home and attends therapy for the remainder of Jodie's high school years. Brucie, meanwhile, joins the army in 1966 rather than attend college.

Uncle Drew takes Jodie on a college tour. After she rejects several music schools, they accidentally drive toward Penn State, and Jodie is captivated by the landscape. She enrolls in the fall of 1967 and meets Leon Diamond, a 15-year-old piano prodigy from Pittsburgh who becomes her accompanist and collaborator. She dates Charlie, a kind boy who works in the dining hall, and then Allen, a hiking enthusiast with whom she has her first sexual experience.

Jodie begins writing songs. Leon's family introduces her to Max Gross, a music promoter, who arranges her first recording for Elektra Records. That summer, Jodie fills in as a backup singer for a touring band and discovers the pleasure of performing live. Her Christmas song, "Nothing to Say About Christmas," reaches number 43 on the Billboard Hot 100. Royalty checks totaling over $214,000 arrive, and Uncle Drew advises her on investments.

Through Brucie, Jodie connects with the Scats, a Chicago-based band. They record an album, High Flyers, and perform at the Glastonbury festival in England. When the Scats' former singer wants to return, Jodie steps aside and flies to London alone, carrying her backpack and roll of two-dollar bills.

Jodie travels through England. In Winchester, she meets Martin Leighmor, a charming pub server and the son of a baron who has stepped away from his privileged background. They begin a relationship marked by easy affection and humor. Martin takes Jodie to Beech House, his family's grand but isolated estate, where she wins over his reserved father. She writes songs during this period but grows uneasy when she senses Martin is about to propose, envisioning a future trapped in the estate's lonely grandeur. Shortly before her 23rd birthday, she tells him she must leave. He offers to come with her, but she refuses. She meets Uncle Drew in York; he tells her the decision was decisive, whether or not it was correct. Jodie journeys through Scotland, buys a guitar, and teaches herself to play. She releases a second album, Fair Isle, but the record company does not renew her contract.

Jodie settles on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where she befriends Jackie Grandon, an anthropologist who becomes her closest companion. She has 23 affairs over the following years and works as a substitute backup singer for various bands. On her 30th birthday, she travels alone to St. Thomas, where she passes through an existential crisis before discovering that curiosity about people and places gives her a reason to live.

In 1984, while in Los Angeles, Jodie encounters Martin at an Irish pub. He is married to a woman named Charlotte, with infant twin daughters, and is consulting a financial manager about investing the family estate. Jodie assumes his father has died, making Martin the new Lord Leighmor. They spend a week together, rekindling their old tenderness. Jodie observes his dutiful calls to Charlotte and recognizes that he feels trapped in exactly the life she had predicted. On their last night, she sings "No Regrets" by Tom Rush, and both weep.

When Mom can no longer manage the Skinker house, Jodie helps her move to Kirkwood, near Uncle Drew. In 1987, Uncle Drew asks Jodie to watch over Mom while he and Aunt Louise travel Europe. Jodie discovers Mom is drinking heavily and barely eating. Rather than confronting her, Jodie keeps Mom occupied with outings, singing, and visits to their aging grandparents. When Uncle Drew returns, Jodie decides to stay in St. Louis permanently.

Grandmother dies peacefully in May 1990, just after her 90th birthday. Grandfather grows increasingly depressed, sharing memories of their courtship. Several months later, Jodie finds him dead in bed. He is 94.

While Jodie is away at her cabin in the Catskills, Mom falls off a curb while drunk. A neighbor takes her to an Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meeting, and she begins attending daily. Through AA, Mom forms friendships that, along with existing family ties, coalesce into a biweekly dinner group that sustains Jodie for years.

Mom is diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer and refuses treatment. In her final months, she shares memories she had kept private her entire life: stories about Jodie's father, her Broadway days, and a secret trip to London. On Mother's Day, Mom tells Jodie she is not going to make it. Jodie climbs into bed and holds her as she dies.

In the summer of 1995, a young producer named Ernie contacts Jodie after hearing her at a festival. She records Rattle Rising and tours smaller venues. The album earns modest royalties, disappointing to Ernie but satisfying to Jodie. She buys a house in Clayton, Missouri, and continues writing songs, including a cycle of 12 interrelated pieces about consciousness during the Iraq War.

At her 50th high school reunion in 2017, Jodie encounters "the gawky girl," a former classmate who has become a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist. Over dinner at the Cheshire Inn, they have a long conversation about luck, music, writing, and marriage. The gawky girl reveals she has been married four times and considers her current husband the best thing that ever happened to her. Walking home afterward, Jodie feels a loneliness she has spent years rejecting and wonders whether she has made a mistake she only now understands.

An epilogue reframes the entire narrative. A woman named Jamie Ring reveals that she is the real person behind Jodie Rattler, and that the gawky girl wrote Lucky based on Jamie's life. Jamie catalogues the differences between her real life and the novel: her actual name, her instruments, the absence of a lucky uncle. She initially sends an angry email but, on rereading the novel, recognizes it as fiction and sends an apology. She receives no reply and later learns the gawky girl has died. Jamie describes a dystopian near-future in which climate catastrophe, political authoritarianism, and nuclear conflict have devastated the world. She and her elderly cousin Brad flee St. Louis to New Zealand, one of the last habitable places. Her final reflection is that outliving everyone she ever knew is not a piece of luck.