Allie and Bea : A Novel Read online

  Also by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  Say Goodbye for Now

  Leaving Blythe River

  Ask Him Why

  Worthy

  The Language of Hoofbeats

  Pay It Forward: Young Readers Edition

  Take Me with You

  Paw It Forward

  365 Days of Gratitude: Photos from a Beautiful World

  Where We Belong

  Subway Dancer and Other Stories

  Walk Me Home

  Always Chloe and Other Stories

  The Long, Steep Path: Everyday Inspiration from the Author of Pay It Forward

  How to Be a Writer in the E-Age: A Self-Help Guide

  When You Were Older

  Don’t Let Me Go

  Jumpstart the World

  Second Hand Heart

  When I Found You

  Diary of a Witness

  The Day I Killed James

  Chasing Windmills

  The Year of My Miraculous Reappearance

  Love in the Present Tense

  Becoming Chloe

  Walter’s Purple Heart

  Electric God/The Hardest Part of Love

  Pay It Forward

  Earthquake Weather and Other Stories

  Funerals for Horses

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2017 by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781477819715

  ISBN-10: 1477819711

  Cover design by Shasti O’Leary Soudant

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE BEA

  Chapter One Rude Checkbook

  Chapter Two After The End of Everything

  Chapter Three It’s All about the Weather

  Chapter Four The World May Not Owe Me a Living, but It Owes Me $741.12

  Chapter Five Van Sweet Van

  Chapter Six Why Do You Have So Much, and Why Do I Have So Little?

  Chapter Seven How Do You Wipe This Thing Clean?

  PART TWO ALLIE

  Chapter Eight Carmen Miranda’s Outlaw Sister

  Chapter Nine Controversial Suitcases

  Chapter Ten Getting to Know Fear. Getting to Know All about Fear.

  Chapter Eleven Define Okay

  Chapter Twelve Weed Oasis

  Chapter Thirteen Lights-Out, in More Ways than One

  Chapter Fourteen To the Victor Goes . . .

  Chapter Fifteen Knowing for What, Exactly, You’re Not the Type

  Chapter Sixteen The Question “What’s Worse than Juvie?” Answered

  PART THREE BEA

  Chapter Seventeen Kids Today—All Phone Scammers and Carjackers

  Chapter Eighteen More Fortified Refined Carbohydrates, Please

  Chapter Nineteen It’s Called Work. Have You Heard of It?

  Chapter Twenty Too Many Comments from the Cat

  PART FOUR ALLIE

  Chapter Twenty-One The True Value of Canned Garbanzo Beans

  Chapter Twenty-Two Nobody Takes My Ancient, Peeling Lettering

  Chapter Twenty-Three Flattery Will Get You Everywhere

  Chapter Twenty-Four Spray Paint, and the Stretching of Worlds

  PART FIVE BEA

  Chapter Twenty-Five How to Pet a Bat Ray

  Chapter Twenty-Six You’ll Be in Heaven, and There Will Be Jellyfish

  Chapter Twenty-Seven Definitely Friendly, but Definitely Not a Ghost

  Chapter Twenty-Eight Beaches Made of Glass, and Other Fragile Things

  Chapter Twenty-Nine Don’t Cross Your Boardwalks Before . . .

  PART SIX ALLIE

  Chapter Thirty Travel Advice from Ducks

  Chapter Thirty-One A Close, Personal Relationship between Woman and Cash

  Chapter Thirty-Two Actually . . . They’re Alpacas

  Chapter Thirty-Three The Epilogue-Like Part, Two Months Later, with Bathtubs

  ALLIE AND BEA BOOK CLUB QUESTIONS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PART ONE

  BEA

  Chapter One

  Rude Checkbook

  For perhaps the twentieth time that morning, Bea narrowed her eyes at the checkbook sitting on her kitchen counter.

  “Stop looking at me that way,” she told its blue vinyl cover.

  Then her face flushed, and she looked around the tiny room as if someone might have overheard that embarrassing outburst—a second act of instability all in itself. Other than her friend Opal, nobody had so much as stepped foot into her trailer since the passing of her husband, Herbert. And Opal wasn’t here now.

  She hadn’t meant it literally, what she’d said to the checkbook. It had been something of a bitter joke. But, in truth, she had been mostly joking rather than completely joking. That was the trouble right there.

  She did feel mocked and threatened by its presence. There was no denying that.

  “They put people away in weird places for making comments like that,” she said out loud. Then, as an afterthought, “Also for talking to yourself.”

  She took three sips of her coffee, which was tepid, bitter, and one cup too many in the first place.

  “I’m going to get this over with,” she said.

  Hands shaking ever so slightly, she dug through a drawer and found a pen for writing checks and a pencil for recording them in the register. She grabbed the offending checkbook off the counter and sat down to pay her bills.

  She added in her monthly Social Security check—which should have reached her bank by auto-deposit that morning—to the total of funds. Then she stared at the number. It looked okay. Heartening, almost. But then, it always did. Before. It was after she’d written checks for the rent on this little trailer—not just the space on which it sat but even the trailer itself, which she and Herbert had once owned—the gas and electric, the water and garbage service, the phone bill. That was when the numbers began to look scary.

  And this month there had been something more. A minor medical procedure to remove a skin abnormality that could have been cancer but, thank goodness, had revealed itself to be benign. Five months earlier she’d had to drop the Medicare gap insurance to save herself its monthly premium. Now, as she stared at the bill from the dermatologist, she realized the co-pay on this one visit had wiped out those savings almost twice over.

  She looked up and out her window to see that awful Lettie Pace walking that awful brown poodle-mixed-with-something-or-other—looked like a dirty string mop if you asked Bea—across Bea’s tiny patch of grass. Lettie paused to allow the dog to sniff.

  Before Bea could even struggle to her feet, the mop-dog hunkered down and rounded its back into that unmistakable and undignified position, preparing to leave a pile on Bea’s grass.

  Bea rushed to her front door and threw it wide.

  Lettie and the mop were already scurrying on as if nothing had happened.

  “Lettie Pace!” Bea shouted.

  Lettie was a younger woman—at least, younger than most of the residents of the mobile home park. Late fifties, maybe, which made her a good twenty years younger than Bea, which irked Bea in some indefinable way. Lettie shoul
d have been able to hear just fine. But she walked on as if she could not. As if Bea did not exist. And nothing—but nothing—infuriated Bea more than to be treated as if she did not exist.

  Bea reached down and grabbed up a piece of white gravel from the decorative border around her defiled patch of grass.

  For a flicker of a moment she only stood, staring at it in her hand.

  Bea wound up like a big-league pitcher on a mound in a real televised game. She let the stone fly. It hit the dog squarely on the behind. A yelp cut through the air of the park, and Mrs. Betteson, out trimming her roses, looked up to see what the trouble might be.

  Lettie Pace turned back to Bea, teeming with rage and indignity, and stomped back to where Bea bravely stood her ground. Her nose came within inches of Bea’s nose. Still Bea only stared. She did not waver or retreat.

  “I can’t believe you would hurt an innocent animal,” Lettie said.

  “Yes,” Bea said. “I agree. I’m very sorry about that.”

  Lettie’s eyes struggled to keep up with the atmospheric changes. “You are?”

  “Absolutely. I didn’t mean to hit that dog in the butt. The butt I was aiming for was yours. I never blame it on the dog. He’s a dog. What does he know? You’re on the business end of that leash. You’re the one who deserved to be stoned.”

  For a moment, nothing. Then a flare of anger filled the scant air between their noses. There would be a fight. And Bea was not afraid. In fact . . .

  The drone of an airplane broke through Bea’s reverie. It was coming in low for a landing and this place was in the flight path. It roused her from her waking dream. She looked down at her hand to see the pebble still sitting on her palm. She raised her gaze. Lettie Pace and the brown mop were mere dots in the distance, just rounding the corner into Lane C.

  Bea shook her head a few times.

  It was one thing to imagine a better ending to a confrontation, but in the past she had mostly been aware, all the way through, of what was real and what was imagination. This time she was surprised—nearly shaken—to see that stone still sitting on her palm.

  She dropped it quickly, and looked around at her little patch of grass. That pile would need to be picked up. The idea that someone besides Bea could be forced to do the ugly job—the dog’s owner being the obvious example—had just rounded the corner of Lane C.

  Mrs. Betteson offered a sympathetic smile.

  “If that were me I’d complain to Arthur,” she called out.

  “I might,” Bea said. “I’m about to go bring Arthur my rent check, and I just might.”

  But in real life, she knew, such acts of courage remained more elusive, harder to pin down.

  “There,” Bea said, and set her pen back in the drawer.

  She sat at her desk, her ancient tortoiseshell cat, Phyllis, curled on her lap. Now and then Bea would reach down and run a hand over the dry fur of the cat’s back. Phyllis would respond by lazily digging her claws into Bea’s thighs through her slacks. It smarted, and Bea said “ouch” every time. But still she felt compelled to pet the cat now and then.

  She had written checks for all the bills, sealed them into envelopes, addressed them, and affixed a postage stamp to each one. Now she would be forced by curiosity and dread to turn the calculator back on and do the math in her checkbook. Run the numbers, as Herbert would have said.

  She ran the numbers. Twice.

  Then she sat staring at the final number.

  $741.12

  When Herbert died, he’d left her no insurance or other financial means. It wasn’t so much carelessness on his part, just . . . what did he have to leave? But they had struggled to put away a small pot of savings. About $5,000, which had seemed like quite a lot of money at the time. But the Social Security check never covered the month’s expenses. No matter how hard Bea tried to economize, no matter how inexpensively she fed herself, there was always a shortfall. So, for lack of a better plan, every month that shortfall came out of her little pot of savings. Which had now dwindled from $5,000 to $741.12.

  Bea had never sat down and figured the average monthly shortfall so she could know how long those savings would last. She quite purposely hadn’t. Because she had no plan for the day when it ran dry. This was not owing to any irresponsibility on Bea’s part. There simply was no plan to be had.

  A few months? Probably. Definitely less than a year.

  The phone rang.

  For a moment, Bea only stared at it. Because it never rang. She used it to make outgoing calls from time to time, but that was all.

  Still, the phone was ringing, and it was unlike Bea to ignore such a blatant demand.

  She rose—gently moving Phyllis down to the carpet—walked to it, and picked up the receiver.

  “Yes?” she asked in place of hello. Already a bit defensive. “What is it?”

  “My name is John Porter,” a young male voice said. “I’m with the IRS.”

  His second sentence hit Bea as if she had been stabbed in the gut by a knife fresh out of the freezer. She reached one hand out to the back of a chair to steady herself. Then she sank down, and sat.

  “I have no business with the IRS,” she said. “I pay my taxes.”

  “Well, you didn’t pay enough for the calendar year 2014.”

  Her stomach sank under the weight of several more layers of ice, but it was almost hard to notice.

  “Twenty fourteen? Well, why did it take you so long to figure that out?”

  “Ma’am, we have a right to keep auditing the returns for six years.”

  Twenty fourteen. The first year she’d had to do taxes on her own, after Herbert died. She’d looked into using H&R Block, but she and her husband had no taxes withheld. Herbert had owned a small, struggling business. A bakery. No withholding meant no return. Which meant she would have had to pay a tax preparer out of pocket. So she’d struggled through the instructions herself. But it had been confusing. Overwhelmingly so. And she hadn’t really known much about the bakery’s last year of earnings—or any other year for that matter—so she’d had to rely only on what Herbert had left behind. Bank deposit records, boxes of loose receipts.

  When she stopped to think about it, what were the chances she would have gotten that exactly right?

  At least it will never happen again, she thought, and the revelation eased her mind some. All she had now was her Social Security, which was not taxable. She would never have to file a tax return again. But she had filed that one, for 2014. And she still owed.

  How much of the $741.12 was that mistake about to claim?

  “Ma’am?” the voice on the line asked. “Are you still there?”

  “Um. Yes.”

  “There’s a balance due of three hundred dollars. And it has to be paid today. If it’s not paid today, a whole series of collection procedures will be put into place. You don’t want that. You really don’t want that. And once the process has started, there’s nothing we can do to stop it again.”

  Bea straightened, and dropped her voice into a more authoritative range.

  “Well, that’s just plain unfair,” she said, pleased with the strong sound of it. “If it’s due today you should have told me weeks ago. There must be some kind of requirement for that. I could have mailed you a check. I’m going to complain to my congressperson and my senator. Why, I’ll call the newspapers and the TV news if I have to. This is no way to treat the taxpayers who pay your salary.”

  “Ma’am?” the voice asked again. “Are you there?”

  “Um. Yes. So I have to drive a check to the office?”

  “We’re in Sacramento.”

  “Sacramento?” It came out as more of a screech than a word. “That’s hours from me! More than seven or eight hours! There’s no way I could even get it to you before your office closes!”

  Bea felt the panic close in all around her, cutting off her oxygen supply. As if the room had filled up with water from the walls in.

  “Ma’am, relax. There’s an easy sol
ution.”

  “Oh. Good.” She pulled in a breath, and it was indeed oxygen. “What is it?”

  “You just give us a little banking information over the phone. A routing number and your account number, and then the PIN or code you’ve established with your bank. We can do a direct withdrawal. The whole thing will be cleared up in no time.”

  “Oh. Good. Thank goodness. Yes. I’ll just go get my checkbook.”

  As she crossed the room to fetch it, the new balance popped into her head. $441.12. She pushed it away again. At least she would have no more trouble with the IRS, and nothing could be more frightening than that.

  “Okay,” she said, grabbing up the receiver again. “I’ve got it.”

  “First,” he said, “your name.”

  “Beatrice Ann Kraczinsky.”

  Later she would run the moment through her mind dozens of times. Hundreds of times, to be more honest. Each time she would see so clearly what she had not seen at the time: that if the IRS calls you to tell you there’s a balance due, they must already know your name. Otherwise how would they know whose balance is owing? How would they even have known which taxpayer to call?

  And there would be other things that would occur to her later. That $300 was an awfully neat, round figure, for example. That the IRS was more likely to determine that you owed them $317.26 or some such raggedy number. Nothing quite so convenient as rounding off in whole hundreds.

  And that the only other time there had been communication from the IRS to Herbert it had come in the form of a registered letter.

  And that they may well have the right to audit returns for a number of years, but they tend to conduct the audits with the taxpayer present.

  All these things Bea would see very clearly. Later.

  But this was not later. This was not a moment enhanced by the wisdom of hindsight. This was the moment in which Bea gave the man her routing number, her account number, her PIN.

  No amount of hindsight would change that.

  After finishing up the dreadful call, Bea gathered up her bill envelopes. She took a brown paper sack out of the cupboard. Then she grabbed a plastic sandwich bag to cover her hand.

  She let herself out the trailer’s front door, carefully locking up behind her.