Allie and Bea : A Novel Read online

  “Whoa!” Bea said. “You almost got yourself painted white.”

  The hissing sound fell silent, leaving only a faint ocean noise and the breeze in the trees.

  “Where did you get spray paint?”

  Bea flipped her head in the direction of the house. “Courtesy of our host.”

  Allie turned around to look in the direction Bea’s head was pointing.

  Bea had almost entirely painted over the lettering on the passenger side of the van. She’d done a good job, too. No drips or sags. She must have put more than one coat on the letters themselves, because they did not show through.

  “I’m confused,” Allie said.

  “Because I said there would be no altering of the van.”

  “Right. That.”

  “Well, I was doing quite a bit of thinking while you were asleep. Which . . . I have no idea why you slept all day, by the way. You did sleep last night, right?”

  Allie looked around and noted that it was only a couple of hours before sundown. A bad time to head out again to drive this stretch of highway. At least, for very long. Besides, the paint job wasn’t done yet.

  “Pretty much. Yeah.”

  “Well, I got bored. So I talked to Jackson for a while. He just lost his wife to cancer thirty-seven days ago. Can you imagine that? How hard that must be? I remember thirty-seven days very well. Not the exact day, mind you. I just mean I remember when losing Herbert was all too fresh. But then he started talking to me about his marriage. Jackson, I mean, not Herbert. And then I did some serious thinking, and I realized it was never like that for Herbert and me. Oh, we got on okay. And he was important to me. How could he not be? He was the only husband I had. The only husband I’d ever had. And he was a lovely man in many ways. But he was a lousy, lousy businessman. Rotten. He always talked about the world like bad luck got that business down, and I talked about it the same way so as not to hurt his feelings, but he was just bad at it. I’m sorry to speak ill of the dead, but it’s true.”

  Allie waited. She was beyond surprised to hear these words coming out of Bea’s mouth. More like dumbfounded. So she waited in silence. If there were additional words, she hated to distract or discourage them.

  “I have to say, it was the oddest feeling. Not Herbert. The conversation I just had with this Jackson fellow who does the metal sculptures. I realized as he was telling me all about his marriage that no one ever did before. Ever. I’ve had friends in my life, of course I have. But not huge crowds of them. And what friends I have had, well, I guess they were more the cautious type. Like me. So we never really talked about how successful our marriages were or were not, or how we felt about them. You didn’t in my day. You just lived the marriage and left the talking part alone. But this man . . . he was just dying to talk about his wife, and I can’t blame him. What else would he have on his mind after thirty-seven days?”

  “While he was talking,” Allie interjected carefully, “did he serve you large cups of coffee or something?” Amphetamines, maybe? she thought, but did not add.

  “No, why?” Bea asked, missing the subtext entirely.

  “No reason. Never mind.”

  “So, anyway. Where was I? All my life I thought my marriage was just like everybody else’s. And now all of a sudden I’m not so sure. I threw my lot in with Herbert when I was just a girl. Never been married, never had a serious boyfriend. I just jumped on board with him, and I really had no idea where that train was going. How could I? That’s just how we did it in my day. I’m not bemoaning the fact that he didn’t make more money. Granted, a simple life insurance policy would have been nice, but I’m not judging him on the money. It’s that I made him my whole world. And so my world was always too small. Then when he died, I didn’t know what my world was anymore. I wasn’t even sure I had one.”

  Bea dropped the can of white spray paint. She walked to the back of the van. Allie followed, transfixed. Bea reached down for the “If I’m driving slowly I’m delivering a wedding cake” bumper sticker, grabbed one peeling corner, and tried to rip it off. It ripped, all right, but not off. The corner only tore away and ended up in Bea’s hand.

  “Grab a table knife from inside and start working on this,” she told Allie. “Will you?”

  “Um. Sure.” But for the moment she didn’t move.

  “So I made a decision. No more living in the past, because the past wasn’t even a good example of my best choices in action. It’s one thing to look back and see how I let my world get too small. But to hang on to that smallness now . . .”

  “Wow,” Allie said. “How long was I asleep? You made a lot of progress while I was away.”

  “About that adventure you were trying to talk me into . . . ,” Bea said, leaning over Allie as she scraped off the last bits of bumper sticker. “I have no idea what one would even look like, because I’m new to this whole adventure thing. But I just might be game.”

  “Hmm,” Allie said. And scraped. “We could drive all the way up the coast to Cape Flattery. Which is the northwest corner of the United States. It’s about as far as you can drive without crossing the Puget Sound into Canada.”

  “Good. Let’s do it.”

  Then Bea was gone, carrying masking tape and drop cloths and leftover spray paint back to the house.

  Allie smiled to herself.

  Truthfully, she wasn’t sure if merely driving to someplace qualified as an adventure. Even if it was someplace a long way away. But it was wildly adventurous by Bea’s standards, and for the moment it would definitely do.

  Somehow Allie got elected to walk down to the house and tell Jackson they were leaving. Allie wasn’t sure why. By all accounts it seemed as though Bea and Jackson had experienced a moment of connection. Then again, maybe that was the why. Maybe that was the hang-up right there. Maybe Bea wanted to step back from that connection.

  The late sun glared into her eyes as she walked downhill to his door.

  She knocked, using a fancy iron door knocker shaped like a monkey hanging by its tail.

  Jackson never answered.

  In time Allie walked around to the ivy-covered gate and found him in the sculpture garden near the statue of Bernadette. Not welding. Not working in any way. Just appraising it in that manner that suggested he knew something was missing, but he still couldn’t pin down the deficiency.

  “We’re taking off,” she said, and he barely looked up. “I wanted to just let you know. And . . . you know. Thank you. For being so nice.”

  “I hope you’re not going to try to go far tonight. You don’t have much light left.”

  “No, just to Carmel or Monterey and then we’ll stop and sleep.”

  “That should be fine. That won’t even take you an hour.”

  You’ve never seen Bea drive the coast route, she thought. But she didn’t say so. She inwardly agreed that just to Carmel or Monterey would likely be okay.

  “Something about that talk you had really changed her,” Allie said.

  For the first time, Jackson took his eyes off the statue and raised his gaze to Allie’s face. “I give up. What did I say?”

  “Just all the stuff you said about your marriage. I don’t know that it was any one thing specifically. It just got her thinking about her own life, I guess, and the choices she made, and what they all added up to. It’s just funny, because you told me I was going to have to wake her up. Figuratively speaking. And then I went and took a nap, and you woke her up while I was asleep.”

  He smiled, but it was a sad-looking thing. As was everything he seemed to be able to access. “I still don’t know how, but I’m glad. You take care of yourself. And your grandma.”

  “I will. Thanks. I wish . . .” But then for a minute she wasn’t sure if she had what it would take to finish the thought. “I wish a lot of good things for you. Like being able to be really strong. And . . . healing. That’s it. I wish you healing.”

  “I wish the same for you,” Jackson said.

  “Me? Why me? What am I heal
ing from?”

  “I have no idea,” he said. “You tell me. I only know that your pain is written all over your face.”

  The face in question suddenly felt burning hot.

  “Okay,” Allie said. “Whatever. ’Bye.”

  Then she trotted back to the van before the conversation could get any more real.

  First thing the following morning they sat in the van in front of a Monterey pawnshop, waiting for the guy to turn the “Closed” sign to “Open.”

  “You know how to wipe all the personal information off things,” Bea said. “I know because you did it with your computer.”

  “Yeah . . . ,” Allie said, the word stretching out with doubt and apprehension. “So?”

  “So maybe do it with this phone.”

  Bea had the phone in her lap, one hand over it, as though it were a dirty little secret that someone passing by the van might see.

  “No way. Absolutely not. That would be like . . .”

  “I’m going to sell it either way. Whether you wipe it clean or the guy in the pawnshop does.”

  “That’s not the point. The point is, I’m not going to be an accessory to your . . .”

  “What? Crime? Were you going to say crime?”

  “Well . . . what do you think? Is it legal to steal somebody’s phone, or is it illegal? It’s a pretty simple concept.”

  “So you think I’m a criminal.”

  “Do we really have to fight? We were just starting to get along some.”

  Bea sighed. “You can’t come in with me, then. You’ll have to sell your computer later, at a different pawnshop. Or later at this one. Because if you’re right there and he thinks you’re my granddaughter, then it’s going to be hard to explain why you wiped all your information off the computer but refused to do the same for the phone.”

  “Fine. Whatever. You go in first. I really don’t want to be any part of that phone being sold anyway.”

  They brooded in silence for a minute or two. Then the man flipped the sign to “Open.”

  “Wish me luck,” Bea said.

  Allie remained silent.

  Bea shook her head too dramatically, eased out of the driver’s seat, and walked stiffly to the pawnshop’s door. Allie watched her go. Then, after Bea had disappeared into the shop, Allie read the signs in the window for the hundredth time. Including the one that said, “We Buy Gold.” This time it struck her in a way it had not on the first ninety-nine reads.

  She stepped into the back of the van and plowed through one of her woven bags until she found the one-ounce gold bar her uncle had given her on the day she was born. It didn’t look like a bar exactly. More like a rectangular coin. She took it out of its miniature ziplock plastic bag and turned it over in her fingers. It felt vaguely heavy for its size, and was stamped with a lot of information that verified its authenticity. It was Swiss. That was stamped right in. It was “999.9 pure gold,” which didn’t quite make sense in Allie’s head. It seemed to have its decimal point in the wrong place. But that’s what it said. “Fine gold,” it also said, though Allie didn’t know if that was a verifiable thing with a definition. It even had something like a serial number stamped in. She had no idea what it was worth. A few hundred dollars, maybe?

  But the real value of the thing was clear: Bea didn’t know she had it.

  Allie had committed all of her electronics, any cash she owned, even a little bit of jewelry to the cause of traveling with Bea, and the food and gas involved in that travel. But she hadn’t remembered the coin collection or the ounce of gold before going into the house or mentioned them after coming out. This could be something that was Allie’s and Allie’s alone—something to fall back on if things didn’t go well with the old woman.

  She slipped the gold back into its plastic bag and stuck it deep into the front pocket of her jeans.

  “Next,” she heard Bea say.

  Allie jumped as if caught stealing. She looked up to see Bea sticking her head through the driver’s side door.

  “That was awfully fast,” Allie said, trying to talk over her guilt.

  “How long is it supposed to take? Anyway. It didn’t work. You have to have a password or something to get the phone open.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  “You knew that?”

  “Well . . . yeah.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t think of it. Why didn’t you know? You said you’ve done this before.”

  “I did it once. And it worked fine.”

  “Maybe because you pawned it a lot faster? Or maybe you moved some keys on it or something. That would have kept it awake.”

  “Yes, I was playing with it as I walked along. Well, shoot. That seems like a waste. Anyway, thank goodness you have something to sell him.”

  “Don’t you think I should wait a little? So he doesn’t get it that we’re together? Why don’t we go have breakfast, and then we’ll come back and I’ll sell the computer. Or . . . I don’t know. We have plenty of money right now. Maybe we don’t need to sell any of my stuff today. Maybe we should wait and see if we really need the money.”

  “The question is whether there will be pawnshops when we need the money,” Bea said, easing her bulk into the driver’s seat. “You know. Farther up the coast.”

  “Then I think what we really need,” Allie said, “is a good map.”

  They sat at their table at a diner with a view of the bay. Allie had the map she’d bought spread out on more than half the table in front of them.

  “We’ll be going through Fort Bragg and Mendocino in Northern California,” she said, tracing her finger along the coast. “Eureka and Arcata. And Crescent City. Oh, and of course San Francisco first, but that’s coming up today, most likely, and I figured it went without saying. Not sure how big those other towns are. Hard to tell just by looking at the map. But I bet one of them would have a pawnshop. Monterey is not so huge and they had a bunch. Then Coos Bay in Oregon looks bigger. Tons of little towns along the coast, but they might be pretty small. Kind of hard to tell.”

  The waitress came by, a plump, perky-looking young woman in her early twenties with hair piled up on top of her head. She handed them each a menu.

  “Travelers!” she said, as though she’d just struck gold. “I can always spot the travelers. We get a lot of ’em here, and I always like to ask people where they come from and where they’re headed.”

  Silence.

  Allie looked over at Bea’s face. Bea seemed overwhelmed by the young woman’s open cheeriness. Not in a good way.

  “Coffee,” Bea said flatly.

  The waitress’s face fell.

  “I’m from Pacific Palisades,” Allie said. “And my grandmother here is from the Coachella Valley. We’re going to drive up the coast all the way to Cape Flattery in Washington. It’s sort of an adventure.”

  “Well, it sounds like a darn good one,” the waitress said, seeming relieved.

  “I’ll have tea,” Allie added.

  “Coming right up.” She hurried away for two steps or so. Stopped. Turned back. “Of course you’re going to see our aquarium while you’re here, right? It’s world famous.”

  “No,” Bea said.

  “Maybe,” Allie added.

  The woman frowned. Then she headed back toward the kitchen.

  “That was rude,” Allie said.

  “I don’t like people like that. Never have. What business is it of hers where I’m from or where I’m going?”

  “She’s just being friendly.”

  “There’s such a thing as too friendly.”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t think there is. I think we’re having an adventure, and we might as well accept that people will be part of it. We’re going to meet people all along the way. Why not find out something about them? Why not tell them something about us? How can they use it against us? They can’t. A few minutes later we’ll be gone. It’s just communication with other humans, and I don’t kn
ow why everyone is so afraid of it.”

  The waitress swung by their table again and poured Bea a cup of coffee. She stood several steps back from the old woman and reached her arm out comically to pour, as if Bea were radioactive, or otherwise deadly. She set a small stainless steel pot of hot water in front of Allie, followed by a basket of assorted teas she had been carrying under her arm. She smiled at Allie and Allie smiled back. Then she was gone again.

  Allie looked over at Bea to find the older woman searching her face in return. With some variety of grave scrutiny.

  “What?” Allie asked, automatically defensive.

  “What got into you?”

  “Why did something have to get into me? I just think an adventure can include people. We could actually learn something about the people we meet and the other way around. You did that with Jackson, and it changed everything. It changed the whole way you look at the past.”

  “No, really,” Bea said, her expression not budging. “What brought this on?”

  Allie sighed. Geared herself up to tell the truth. After all, she had just been advocating doing so. And Bea was hardly a stranger anymore.

  “When I was saying goodbye to Jackson . . . he . . . said something. About me. He said he could see my pain. He said it was written all over my face. I was kind of shocked, because I didn’t figure people could see it. I figured I could keep it to myself if I wanted. So I left. I just walked away. And now I feel really bad about that. Why didn’t I stand there and admit how things are hard for me right now? He told us about his pain. He was so open about it. And then he reached out for me to do the same thing in return. And I ran away. Why? Why is it so scary to let somebody see you like that?”

  “Hmm,” Bea said. “I have a bad notion you’re suggesting we both try this.”

  “I thought you’d already started.”

  “Involuntarily. Tell you what. Feel free to do this wherever you go. I’ll watch and see how it works out for you.”

  “Fine,” Allie said. “You think you’re kidding, but I’ll take it.”