Allie realized her jaw was hanging open too wide. She took a moment to adjust that. She could feel her face redden with shame.
“Yes. Of course. I’m really sorry. None of that ever occurred to me. I just figured because you don’t have a bakery . . . I’m sorry. I guess I was being thoughtless. So . . . what do we do?”
“What do we do? I’m not sure there’s any we about it. You just decide what you’re going to do now. As I see it, you have two choices. Take a chance riding with me, or take a chance out there without me.”
“Oh,” Allie said again.
She felt more than a little bit stung. Truthfully, she’d thought ransacking her house and bringing valuables had secured her a place in Bea’s van. She thought it made them a solid “we.” The idea that she might have to go off on her own at this point had been put away, seemingly for good. It hurt to think of dredging it up again. It was another scrape with fear that Allie’s gut felt she could not afford.
Allie looked around. Not that there was anything to see beyond what she’d seen already. An ocean. A little beach town lining the coast. A pier. The route north. No police or Highway Patrol cars that she could see.
“If something goes wrong, though . . . ,” Allie began. Hesitantly. “I hate to get you involved. You know. Get you in trouble.”
“Why would I get in trouble? I’ve done nothing wrong.”
“Aiding and abetting a runaway? That sort of thing?”
“Nonsense. I know nothing about any of it. I picked you up hitchhiking. I kept you around because you had gas money. You swore you were eighteen and I believed you. Why would I know any more about your background than that?”
Allie nodded. A bit limply.
Shoulders slumped, she walked back to the passenger door and climbed in.
Bea lifted herself up into the driver’s seat a moment later.
“Probably not a bad decision,” the old woman said. “And if it goes wrong, well, maybe you’ll get to see my point about the three squares and the roof over your head in prison. Who knows? Maybe I’ll claim I did know you were a runaway and get my three squares a day, too.”
She started the engine and shifted into “Drive,” aiming the van toward the highway north.
“Don’t you worry about the privacy thing, though?” Allie asked.
“What privacy thing?”
“You don’t think they’d give you a private cell, do you?”
“Hmm,” Bea said. “I hadn’t really thought of that. That would be hard, I think. As far as whether it would be harder than not knowing where to live or how to eat . . . I’m not sure. I think both are very important to me.”
“Well, I have cash now.” Allie pulled the piggy bank out of her South American bag and removed the plastic plug in the bottom that allowed access to the money. “So I think out in the world is our best bet for now.”
Truthfully, she had forgotten about the bank. She would have counted the money a long time ago, the moment she’d first climbed back into the van, but the alarming brush with Mrs. Deary had knocked some obvious thoughts out of her head.
“Except this is no longer a private cell, either,” Bea said.
“Oh. Right.”
She counted in silence for a time while Bea drove.
“Three hundred and sixty dollars.”
“That should pay me back for sharing my cell.”
“And when that’s gone we can start selling off my electronics. But after that . . . I mean, if we keep driving the way we’ve been doing . . . I don’t know what we do when the money is gone.”
“It only needs to last until the third of next month. Then I get my Social Security check.”
Allie looked around as if the van might contain a post office or bank she had missed seeing.
“At what address?”
“It goes straight into my bank on direct deposit. Then I can use my new debit card for food and gas until the third of the following month, and so on.”
“Oh,” Allie said, drawing the word out long. “We might be in pretty good shape, then.”
“There you go with the ‘we’ thing again. But we’ll manage, yes.”
“We should just keep going. You know. Before it all comes crashing down.”
“Why should we do that?”
“I don’t know. Why not? Probably better than what’s behind us. Besides. It could be . . . you know. Interesting. It could be almost like an adventure.”
She heard the old woman snort derisively.
“Adventure?”
“Sure. What’s wrong with that?”
“After the experience you just had? I should think you’d want nothing but quiet safety from here on out.”
Allie couldn’t help noting that this was the first time Bea had referred to Allie’s traumatic experience without hinting that it might have been made up and false. She wondered if that was a type of progress between them. Some hint of an ability to get along.
“Yeah, I see your point, but . . . there’s nothing wrong with wanting to have good experiences. You know. After all that.”
“No. Hardly. No adventure. I say a big hearty no to that.”
“How can you not want to have an adventure?”
“Because life is plenty adventurous enough for me. Just the way it is. Every day. Thank you very much.”
“Can you stop in Cambria?” Allie asked when she saw the sign for the town.
“I could, I suppose. But why?”
“I want to see if that nice lady at the market will let me use one of her electric outlets. I want to plug in my computer and do that thing where you restore it to factory specs. My father taught me you always do big computer jobs like that while you’re plugged into power. I guess it drains the battery really fast.”
“Eagle loggle google, pigs flying upside down,” Bea said.
It occurred to Allie that the old woman might be having a stroke.
“What?”
“Exactly. What you said made every bit as much sense to me as my sentence did to you. It’s all nonsense when you talk about computer stuff. Or it is to me, anyway. Might as well be.”
“It just means that you set it back to how it was before you put all your personal information on it. It erases all your data. You know. So you can sell it without anybody else having your personal stuff.”
“Oh,” Bea said. “I actually do know a little bit about that.”
“Besides, the market has that fried chicken you like. I could bring you some.”
“I guess a rest would do me good,” Bea said, but Allie suspected it was the chicken that had won her over.
“Hey,” Allie said.
The woman whose name she did not know, the store owner, looked up. A smile spread across her face, and Allie felt it like warmth through her gut. Maybe the search for that smile was why she had come. That longing for recognition. That hope that someone might actually recognize her and seem glad she was back. The store owner had a smile that looked strong and calm and seemed to arrive easily. She looked entirely at home in her own skin. Allie realized she had not met a lot of people who could make such a claim.
“I didn’t know you were still in town,” the woman said.
Allie wondered if she should ask the woman’s name, but a sad flickering of reality in her gut reminded her their friendship was destined to be brief.
“Not still, exactly. Again. We made a little . . . surprise side trip.”
“Those are the best kind.”
Allie wandered into the shop with her laptop computer under her arm.
“I actually came to ask a favor. Can I plug my computer into your electricity?”
“Sure. You want to check your e-mail?”
“Not exactly. I have to restore this thing to the factory settings so I can sell it.”
That stopped the conversation cold.
Allie sat awkwardly on the floor, cross-legged, painfully aware of how long it had been since she had showered, brushed her teeth, changed her clothe
s. She felt out of place suddenly. Physically and otherwise. No one spoke for a long time.
“Everything okay with you and your grandmother?” the woman asked, startling her.
“Yeah. Why? Why do you ask?”
“Um. Let’s see. Maybe because you don’t have access to power and you’re about to sell your laptop?”
“Oh. Right. Well. We’re camping. It’s kind of an adventure. And yeah, we need all the gas money we can get. But it’s fine. She gets her Social Security check on the third of every month. We’ll manage.”
In the silence that followed, Allie felt herself crash. Physically, mentally, emotionally. Psychically. The speed of the change alarmed her. The last of the relief surrounding her escape had drained away now, leaving a crushing sense of rock-bottom depression it its wake.
The store owner seemed to notice, but said nothing.
“I guess this’ll take a minute,” Allie said, staring at the screen. It seemed like a lot of trouble, the speaking thing.
“How long are you and your grandmother out on the road?”
“Hard to say.”
“You have parents to go back to?”
“I have parents. Yeah.” A long pause. Then, “They’re in jail.”
“I’m sorry. That’s too bad. Lucky for you that you have your grandmother.”
“Yeah,” Allie said, still feeling the drag of the sudden depression. “I mean, yes and no. She’s not the easiest person. She’s not very . . . open. You know? She’s kind of closed off to everything. But I need to have somebody, so . . . yeah. I guess I’m lucky.”
“How long have you two been traveling together?”
“Just a couple of days.”
“Maybe you can help her open up a little.”
Allie lifted her head and looked into the older woman’s eyes, which were frank, unguarded, and very blue. She hadn’t considered that possibility.
“Yeah. Maybe.”
Then she stared at her screen and waited, not having the energy to say or do much more.
“Where are you two staying tonight?” the woman asked after a time.
“Not sure.”
“You want to stay the night at my house? I’d have to run it by my husband, but I can’t imagine he’d object. You could take a hot shower and sleep in a real bed. I have a guest room with twins.”
Hot shower. The words struck Allie as something grand. They wrapped around her sore gut and held on. As though the woman had said “nirvana” or “eternal happiness.”
“Let me ask my grandmother.”
Allie stuck her head into the van. It wasn’t locked, which surprised her.
“Hey,” she said to Bea, who lay sprawled on her easy chair, fully reclined, a book lying open on her chest.
“What?”
“You want to stay at this lady and her husband’s house tonight?”
Bea lifted her head to level Allie with a withering gaze. “Absolutely not. Why on earth would I want that?”
“Because she has a shower.”
“I do fine taking sponge baths in gas station restrooms. You really should cultivate the talent. It works well enough. Look, I took off in this van because I want my own space. Lately I have you in it, which seems to be a blessing and a curse in equal measure. But now you want to drag me somewhere completely unfamiliar and throw in a whole family of strangers. No thank you.”
“I could totally use the shower.”
“Fine. You go.”
“Promise not to drive off without me?”
“Not really.”
Allie sighed. The sense of depression, which had lifted ever so slightly at the thought of a bed and a shower, settled back into her belly with a painful thump. She backed out of the van and slammed the door behind her.
“Thanks anyway,” Allie said, sitting down on the floor of the little store again, beside her computer. “But, like I said, she’s not very open. It’s too bad. I could have used that shower.”
“The San Simeon State Park campground has showers. Is that where you’re staying tonight?”
“Oh. I don’t know. Where is it?”
“Just a couple miles north of here. You’ll see the sign.”
“Do you know how much it costs?”
“Not sure. It might’ve gone up lately. Might be twenty. Might be twenty-five.”
“Yeah, okay. Thanks. Maybe we’ll stay there.”
But, inside, Allie’s gut dipped lower. Because she knew Bea would never go for that. Too expensive when they could just park anywhere and sleep for free.
They sat in silence for a long time. A couple came in, paid for their gas, bought ice cream sandwiches and sodas, and left again.
Then, much to her surprise, Allie asked, “How do I help her?” The whole room seemed surprised by the question. For a moment, silence hung heavy. “I mean, how do you help somebody be more . . . you know . . . open?”
“Good question. In a very real sense, I guess you don’t.”
“Right. I thought that was too good to be true.”
“But people can change. And sometimes they can change because of what they see in you. The way you are can inspire somebody. So I would say . . . just be a really good, clear example of what you hope both of you can be.”
Allie sat with that a moment, waiting to see if her drooping and exhausted insides could take it in. Before she answered the question to her satisfaction, the restore process completed on her computer. She found herself staring at a screen just like the one she’d seen when her parents first gave her the computer two Christmases ago. It was another deep loss she could not afford. A year and a half of the recording of her online world, her communications. Allie felt as though a giant eraser was rubbing out her life. Or maybe her life was right here, right now, sitting on the hard boards of a little general store in a tiny town, and everything that had passed before had only been an illusion.
“Thanks for the electricity,” Allie said. “And the advice.”
“You want to take some fried chicken for you and your grandmother? It’s the end of the day and I can’t hold it over anyway. You’re welcome to it. I either have to eat it myself and feed it to my husband, or it gets thrown away. Some nights I have a homeless guy who comes around for it, but I haven’t seen him for a while. I hope he’s okay.”
“That’s a nice offer. Thanks. I’d like to take some for her. I’m a vegan.”
It didn’t feel as though it mattered, though, anyway, whether Allie ate. The depression had left her with no appetite.
“I have biscuits and coleslaw and three-bean salad.”
“That would be good, thanks.”
Because turning down free food seemed impossibly stupid, whether you were immediately hungry for it or not.
Just for a moment—just as Allie was walking out the door with her brown paper bags of food—it struck her that maybe she should try to stay. That the store owner would be a better bet than Bea. She lived in a real house, and felt at home in her own skin. She acted like it was good news to see Allie a second time.
Allie shook the idea away again.
She had no doubt this woman would help if Allie asked her to. But it would be the wrong kind of help. It would involve digging down to the truth. Notifying the proper authorities.
It would be that responsible kind of help that Allie could no longer afford.
“So . . . I was thinking . . . ,” Allie said to Bea, who looked three-quarters asleep. The old woman had finished all five pieces of the fried chicken. It had been an amazing thing to witness. Meanwhile Allie had only stared limply at her biscuits and coleslaw and three-bean salad. “Maybe we could go up to that campground at San Simeon State Park. It costs about twenty dollars. But I have money. And I could take a shower there.”
“I’m not moving,” Bea said, and her lips barely moved as she said it. “I’m not driving another three feet. I can’t drive as far as I did today. It’s exhausting. My whole body is fairly buzzing with exhaustion. And my neck and shoul
ders hurt terribly. From now on four or five hours and that’s it. Besides. We have money. It’s not so much your money at this point. You committed it in return for the ride. So we make any decisions about how to spend it together.”
Allie sighed.
She carefully moved the cat off her lap and began blowing up the flat bottom section of the pool raft. It made her feel painfully tired and out of breath.
By the time she had inflated it, Bea was snoring lightly.
Allie grabbed a towel and a washcloth from among Bea’s things. She hadn’t asked permission, but it seemed wrong to wake her up to ask. Besides, Allie’s money had to be affording her some kind of perks. She carefully chose a clean outfit from her other handwoven South American bag.
Then she walked two blocks to the big gas station on the corner near the highway.
There, in their women’s restroom, she attempted to cultivate the habit of the sponge bath. It was nothing like a shower, but it would have to do. Like so many aspects of her sudden new life, it seemed her only option was to adjust with as much good cheer as she could muster.
At the moment that cheer felt painfully small.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Flattery Will Get You Everywhere
They drove the high, winding, narrow ribbon of highway along the Big Sur coast. Allie gawked at the turquoise tinge of the ocean hundreds of feet below, with the jagged boulders at its edges, and the nearly vertical rock face that rose on the right, so close to the traffic lane that Allie occasionally thought it would scrape her side of the van.
Allie and Bea : A Novel Page 17