Excerpt: Bad Luck

Philomena was born in the back of a 1981 Volvo station wagon. It wasn't her parent's station wagon and you might call it lucky that they had found damn thing when they needed it. It is more likely that you would call it unlucky that her mother and father had broken into the station wagon of a very possessive old woman. It was doubly unlucky that the old woman had recently suffered the loss of her grandchild and was feeling bitter as she suffered the anger stage of grief. It was the mightiest piece of bad luck that the damn crone was an old gypsy witch who did not discriminate in her use of curses. Even on fellow gypsies.
So when the gypsy discovered the young couple holding a wet newborn baby and saw the mess they'd made in the back of her car she let one of those curses fly.
"What have you done to my car! Get out of here! Oh god! Cursed be your baby! The vile thing will bring you nothing but bad luck!"
The parents scrambled from the car, clutching their wailing daughter tight. When the old woman looked in more closely she barked with disgusted anger. “Curses!” she hissed, “Curses!”
It was that curse, the curse of bad luck, that the mother chose to name her daughter Philomena. It was an accurate sign of what was to come.
Noreen, on the other hand, was born in a university hospital that same night in a mid-sized mid-western town. Heather, the mother of this more fortunate baby girl, named her daughter after her sister who died in an automobile when she was a teenager. Noreen, only but a swaddled pink marshmallow, was brought to a split-level ranch in the suburbs of this mid-sized mid-western town. There was a yard, but nae, there would be no dog. Her father, tax adjuster Tom, was allergic.
Philomena, the shivering raisin, was taken under the front of her fathers coat around the small southern town her family had found themselves in, looking for the RV park that the rest of their transient clan had set up camp in. Around 2 in the morning they decided to stop looking, even though they could have sworn it was just over there, and they slept behind some bushes in front of an elementary school. A police officer woke the small family up around six, and shooed them off. They found the camp (it had been just over there), but the clan had taken off already leaving only beer cans and some unmentionable refuse behind. As the young couple stood in the empty grounds, with paper debris tumbling in the breeze around them, their young daughter began to cry. They cried too. Philomena did get a dog once, though, unlike Noreen, when she was seven. But it bit her and ran into the street when she yelled at it. It was hit by a passing truck. When the driver realized what he'd done, the horrified Philomena watched him back up away from the dead animal. Sadly, Philomena's mother had been behind the truck. Philomena didn't want another dog after that.