Allie and Bea : A Novel Read online

  “Allie?” she called. “Bring out that computer of yours so we can pay for this repair, okay? Then we’d better get back on the road.”

  While she was waiting for that transaction to play out, Bea opened the envelope. In it was a small scrap of paper torn from a notepad, printed with the words “Casper’s Automotive,” along with a drawing of a tow hitch.

  “Bea,” it said in a scratchy pen scrawl. “I’m no good at goodbyes. Never have been. You know where I am if you change your mind. Thanks for this morning. It meant the world to me.”

  No signature. But then again, it wasn’t as though Bea needed to know who it was from.

  “So, I have a question,” Allie said as they drove. “When we get to Eureka, do we sell the gold or don’t we?”

  “I think we probably should,” Bea said. “We have a lot of coast in front of us, and the gas will go fast. Do you mind it?”

  “I guess not.”

  Allie was staring at the map while Bea drove.

  The ocean had disappeared as the coast route bent east, away from the views Bea had come to love. The problem was, it just kept bending. And bending. And bending. They had been traveling through forest land for some time now, with hairpin turn after hairpin turn. Bea’s shoulders already ached, but she had vowed to make miles today. An unheard-of number of miles, at least for her.

  Because you just never know what will happen between any given “here” and any given “there.”

  Before the girl walked into the office of the man who bought gold, Bea couldn’t help noting that she stopped in the back of the van and dug around in one of her fabric bags. Bea was fairly certain Allie had been keeping the ounce of gold in her jeans pocket. And besides, when the girl pulled something out of the bag, it was far bulkier. Maybe the size of a small notebook, but with a leatherlike cover that wrapped around itself and snapped.

  Allie stuck the mystery item under her arm and disappeared.

  You’re still holding out on me, Bea thought. But she didn’t say it. She just sat and nursed a feeling in her belly that hurt. Unfortunately, it was not indignation, nor anything else clean and satisfying. Nothing in the anger category at all.

  If compelled to tell the truth, Bea would have had to admit that it hurt her feelings. Somehow she’d thought her relationship with the girl had grown more trusting than all that.

  “Okay, you’ll be happy,” Allie said as she jumped back into the van.

  Bea started the engine and began to drive again, not even waiting to hear what would bring such happiness. Because she wanted miles. She wanted to get closer to Cape Flattery, and the goal.

  “How much did he give you? I know it can’t be more than what we talked about. He has to resell it at some profit. He’s in the business. So he’ll always give you a little less than the spot price.”

  “I got more than sixteen hundred dollars!”

  Bea’s head spun a little as she absorbed that number. It was such a familiar figure—almost exactly what had been stolen from her bank account.

  “And . . . ,” the girl continued. She dug into her jeans pocket. “I got you this.”

  Allie held something out in Bea’s direction. Something small, that must have fit neatly into her hand, because all Bea could see was the hand. Bea held her own hand out, palm up, and the girl dropped something into it. A coin. Maybe the size of a quarter, or a little smaller.

  Bea glanced in her rearview mirror. No one was coming up behind. She pulled slightly right and slowed to a crawl. She looked down into her palm. In it was a small gold American Eagle coin.

  “I got us each one,” Allie said. Bea raised her eyes to see the girl’s face lit up in a genuine grin. “They’re a quarter ounce of gold each. You know. In case of emergency. We’ll each have one.”

  “Explain the math to me,” Bea said, glancing in her rearview mirror and realizing she had better drive again. “You go in with an ounce of gold. You come out with two quarter ounces of gold and over sixteen hundred dollars. How does that happen?”

  “He buys coins, too. So I sold him my grandfather’s coin collection. I had no idea what it was worth. But now we know, right? It was worth plenty!”

  Bea drove in silence for several minutes, shifting the landscape of emotion in her belly. Or maybe it was shifting her.

  “You’re a very thoughtful girl,” she said, eventually.

  After a moment or two of no reply, Bea stole a glance at the girl’s face. Allie looked about ten percent gratified and ninety percent astonished.

  They stood side by side at a Laundromat somewhere in Oregon. In some small town on the Oregon coast, after dark, after a beast of a long day on the road, folding their clean, dry laundry. It felt like a luxury, the warmth and cleanliness of the only clothes Bea owned. She wondered if it was a good thing or a bad thing to feel so much appreciation for something so small.

  She leaned closer to the girl, her body language rife with conspiracy. She had a secret, Bea. And even though there was only one other woman in the Laundromat, and that person stood nowhere near, it was a secret that required discretion.

  “I kissed Casper,” she whispered.

  At first, nothing. No response. As though the girl hadn’t heard.

  Then Allie squealed out a few words at a volume that made Bea jump. “Get outa town!”

  It even made the other woman, who was reading a magazine near the door, jump. And she was a good twenty paces away.

  “I don’t know what that means,” Bea said.

  “It means . . . well . . . it’s kind of hard to translate.”

  “And here I thought we were speaking approximately the same language.”

  “It sort of means . . . you’re kidding!”

  “I’m not kidding. And I won’t get out of town. Or however you answer that thing you just said.”

  Bea braved a look at the girl’s face. It was wide open, unguarded. Exuberant, almost.

  “You kissed him?” Allie asked, still a little too loudly.

  “Yes. If you must know, yes. I’m not saying he didn’t kiss me back. But it was my idea.”

  “What kind of kiss are we talking about here?”

  Bea held a finger to her lips in warning. “I didn’t say I was willing to share details,” she hissed.

  “Like a French kiss?” With an almost reverent emphasis on the key word.

  “Of course not. Don’t be disgusting.”

  “You don’t mean like a polite little peck on the cheek, do you?”

  “If it was a polite little peck on the cheek, I wouldn’t even be telling you about it like it was something worth telling. That’s only the sort of kiss you get from your aunt.”

  “That’s what I was going to say if you’d said yes. Only I would have said grandfather, because I never had an aunt. So . . . it was on the lips. But not just a quick little thing, right?”

  Bea felt her face flush. “Please,” she whispered. “You’re embarrassing me.”

  A long silence. Bea was almost done folding her clothes, and felt unsure of what to do with herself and her life when the folding was over.

  “All right . . . Bea!” the girl shouted.

  She punched Bea on the arm. Fairly hard.

  “Ow!” Bea said, but still under her breath. “Why did you hit me?”

  She rubbed the spot that had just been assaulted.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Was that too hard? It was just meant to be a friendly little thing. I do that with my friends all the time. It’s not supposed to hurt.”

  The girl began to rub the spot Bea had just finished rubbing.

  “I suppose it’s because they’re younger than I am,” Bea said.

  A split second later she looked up to see the only other woman in the place standing directly in front of them, smiling. She was fortyish, with auburn hair spilling perfectly across her shoulders, and an old denim shirt.

  “I just had to tell you this,” the woman said. “I hope you don’t mind. It’s so nice to see a grandmother and gr
anddaughter who get along so well. Talking and laughing together. My kids barely speak to their grandparents.”

  A long, stunned silence.

  Then the girl said, “Um. Thank you?”

  The woman turned and wandered outside.

  “That was interesting,” Bea said.

  “That was . . . bizarre,” the girl replied. “But nice.”

  “Yes. Yes, I suppose. Nice.” Then, after a long pause, “Do you miss them?”

  “Who?”

  “Your friends.”

  “Oh. That. I did. At first. Now I just feel like . . . I just think we wouldn’t have anything in common anymore. After everything I’ve gone through, how would we even fit together now? I think about them sometimes, and it’s like I knew them a couple of decades ago. Not a couple or three weeks. I guess that’s what happens when you get thrown out into life like this. It grows you up fast.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” Bea said.

  They lay quietly in the van together, Bea in her easy chair, the girl stretched out across that thing you floated around on in a pool. If you had a pool. They were camping in the Laundromat parking lot. Lying there in the dark, as if sleeping. But Bea knew that neither one of them was asleep. Bea could hear the roar of the surf, which felt comforting.

  “Psst,” the girl hissed quietly.

  “Yes,” Bea said. “I am indeed awake.”

  “Why did we drive so far today?”

  “I just want to get where we’re going.”

  “But you said you get too tired. You said four or five hours, tops. We drove for almost nine hours.”

  “I want to make it to Cape Flattery.”

  “But there’s no hurry.”

  “Isn’t there? Really? In one day yesterday we had what we thought might turn into a brush with the police, you decided you might surrender yourself to them, and we had a mechanical breakdown. I want to get there before anything else goes wrong.”

  “Oh,” the girl said, simply.

  They lay in silence for several minutes.

  Then Allie said, “We can go back there, you know.”

  “Back where?”

  “Fort Bragg. Casper.”

  “I just told you I’m anxious to get to our destination.”

  “On the way back, I mean. We can go back through there. You know. If you want to see him again.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Oh. Well, then . . . why did you kiss him? If you were going away right after and you never wanted to see him again?”

  “You just answered your own question,” Bea said.

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Oh, honey. Casper is a nice enough person. But the last thing I want to do is tie myself up with another man. My goodness. That’s how most of the last fifty years of my life disappeared, even though I didn’t know it before now. And believe me, that’s all it takes. One little kiss and then you’ve thrown your lot in with someone, and your whole life has to be built around him. And all the parts of you that don’t fit with him have to go into hiding, and all the ones that do have to come to the surface and act like they’re the whole of you. The entire reason I did what I did is because we both knew I’d be gone in a few hours. It’s the first time in my life I ever got to do a thing like that and not stay around to pay the price. You’ll understand when you get older.”

  “I doubt it,” Allie said. “But I’m happy for you all the same.”

  “Besides,” Bea said. “Must love cats.”

  “Right. Must love cats. I’m with you on that.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Don’t Cross Your Boardwalks Before . . .

  “Can we stop at this lighthouse?” the girl whined. “I really want to see one.”

  “What’s this sudden obsession with lighthouses?” Bea asked, continuing to drive. Not even slowing.

  “It’s not sudden. I’ve always liked them. But I never got to go in one.”

  “How do you know they even let people go inside that one?”

  “Because there’s a big sign telling people to pull in and park.”

  “That hardly proves your case.”

  The girl sighed deeply. She had the cat on her lap, and was scratching between Phyllis’s shoulder blades.

  “Doesn’t matter anyway now,” she said, all teenage mopey. “It’s passed.”

  A long pause, during which Bea assumed she was meant to feel guilty. She decided against it.

  “You know,” Allie said, “there’s such a thing as too much hurry.”

  “Maybe not in our situation.”

  “Oregon is almost gone. We drove it in mostly one day. We hardly saw the Oregon coast.”

  “I saw it. Where were you? All you had to do was turn your head left.”

  “But if you don’t even have time to stop and see a lighthouse . . .”

  “I’ll tell you what. After we see Cape Flattery . . . which was your idea, as you’ll recall. After we see all the coast we have ahead of us . . .”

  But she stopped, and never finished her thought.

  They had talked very little, if at all, about what they would do after Cape Flattery, and it wasn’t the slightest bit sorted out in Bea’s head. In fact, she wasn’t sure she could remember why it felt important to go there in the first place. Except that it felt important to go somewhere, and that seemed the farthest place imaginable.

  Maybe an hour later Bea spotted a place to pull over and enjoy the view. It had room for five or six cars, with a low stone wall to keep you from rolling right over the edge and falling a hundred feet to the sea. No one was parked there.

  Better yet, there was a lighthouse less than an eighth of a mile or so up the coast, and this would be a good spot from which to view it.

  Bea made a sharp left and pulled in. She shifted into “Park” and shut off the motor. The lack of constant engine noise felt stunning. It felt like silence, though Bea could clearly hear dozens of seals barking, and the crashing of surf. She could feel a ghost of the vibration of the steering wheel in her arms and shoulders. It felt like buzzing.

  “We stopped,” Allie said. “I don’t believe it.”

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” Bea said, which was true enough, though not the reason she had pulled over.

  “There’s no bathroom here,” Allie said.

  “I’ll just have to make do.”

  The girl stepped out of the van and looked around.

  “Not much privacy,” she said through the open passenger door.

  “You go out and look at the lighthouse from here, and I’ll stay inside and use the bucket. And then I’ll just . . . quietly empty it outside.”

  “Okay,” Allie said, clearly wanting no more details. “Whatever.”

  It was several minutes before Bea stepped out of the van, what with drawing all the curtains and then opening them all again.

  The girl was leaning over the waist-high stone wall, barking at the seals. Imitating their raucous clatter.

  Bea set the bucket in the dirt and walked to her.

  She looked down the dizzying cliff to see the seals crowding the rocks at the water’s edge. The wind swept her hair back and made her narrow her eyes.

  “What do they have to be so noisy about?” she asked the girl.

  “Just excited about life, I guess.”

  “You know . . .” But then Bea stalled.

  “What?”

  “We never really talk about what we’ll do after Cape Flattery.”

  “Hmm,” Allie said. “Drive home, I guess.”

  “Home being exactly where?”

  “Oh. Good point. Maybe we’ll want to stay up there.”

  “Too cold. It’s nearly Canada. Don’t forget we have no heat and no air-conditioning unless we’re driving. We have to choose our weather carefully.”

  “We could go inland and down a different route and see a whole different set of things.”

  “Again,” Bea said, “it’s all about the weather.”

  “
Right. Hot inland.”

  “And only getting more so.” Bea watched the way the sunlight sparkled on a swath of ocean all the way out to the horizon. Like a path to somewhere. Somewhere not of this world. Somewhere Bea was not yet ready to go. “We could come back down the coast. And this time we could go slow and see the lighthouses.”

  “That sounds like a pretty good plan,” the girl said.

  “I only bring it up because I sometimes think about Cape Flattery and . . . how do I say this? I feel like maybe it’s an artificial goal.”

  “No, it’s real. I found it on the map.”

  Bea sighed, a bit too dramatically. “That’s not what I meant. I meant maybe the goal is artificial. We’re acting as if all we have to do is get there, and then this adventure will be complete, and we will have accomplished something. But we’ll still be us. We’ll still be out here. Needing to figure out what to do.”

  “Well,” Allie said. “Yeah, but . . . cross that boardwalk when we come to it.”

  “I believe the expression is ‘bridge.’ ‘Cross that bridge when we come to it.’”

  “I was trying to make a little joke. Because Jackson said you walk on these boardwalks out to the cape.”

  Before Bea could comment on the little joke—before she could even register dread over whether the cape would be too far a walk, over too many boardwalks—a vehicle pulled in. One of those bus-size motor homes. It completely ruined the privacy of the moment.

  Bea quickly and discreetly emptied her bucket, and they drove on.

  Driving across a very long bridge over what appeared to be a bay, Bea began to feel uneasy. Her stomach registered the fear, like a roller coaster ride. Oh, she knew in her head that people drove over the bridge every day and the structure held. Still, she could see water beneath them in her peripheral vision, on both sides. It felt as though there was nothing underneath the van. It felt like falling. Or, in any case, being about to.