The aggrieved woman looked over her shoulder once at Bea. As if there might be some remote chance of having her losses restored. Then she turned away.
Bea waited and watched until they were gone.
She began the slow, longish walk to the pier and its public restrooms.
“Excuse me,” she said to the attendant of a parking lot as she passed by. “Is there a pawnshop in this town?”
“There are a couple,” he called back. “How well do you know the city?”
It was ironic, when Bea thought about it. Based on what she’d seen in the BuyMart display case, the phone in her pocket could probably have located a pawnshop for her. If only Bea knew how to use it, or even cared enough to learn.
“It was a present from my granddaughter,” Bea told the man behind the counter. “It’s really important that I not hurt her feelings. She can’t know I’m selling it. But I’ll never use it. So I just need you to tell me how to make sure she won’t find out. She’d be crushed.”
Bea honestly didn’t know if these gadgets stored identifying information. But she knew she’d had a log of numbers and a call history on her home phone, and that it would be best if the new owner of this device received no calls intended for the jogger.
“Oh, that’s easy. Assuming it’s not locked, or if you have the password, we can erase everything in one go,” the man said. He had big muttonchop sideburns, which Bea thought had gone out of style years ago, and wore a denim vest over a short-sleeved T-shirt. “Just go to ‘Settings’ . . .”
“I have no idea how to go to ‘Settings.’ I never got the hang of the thing at all.”
“Here. Want me to?”
“Please.”
She handed it to him, and took her own emotional temperature. She couldn’t help it. It was such a daring thing to do. She knew she should be afraid. But, oddly . . . not so much. She was just a little old lady, after all. Who would suspect her? And the phone had not been reported stolen. It would never be reported stolen.
Bea felt . . . well, it was a hard thing to admit, even inwardly, but she felt proud of herself for figuring out how to steal a phone in such a way that no one would ever report it stolen.
“You sure you want everything deleted?”
“Yes, everything.”
“Okay.”
While she waited, Bea looked around. She saw a saxophone in a glass display case. Two rifles hanging on the wall behind the counter. Several amplifiers on the floor, the kind musicians use. An electric guitar.
She thought about her lamps and kitchen utensils at home and wondered if the people who pawned these items had felt the same panicky sense of loss—the kind that almost feels like an erasure of one’s identity—and whether any of them would see their precious belongings again.
“Okay,” the man said. “Done.”
“That was fast. What will you give me for it? Maybe I should have asked that first.”
“Depends on whether you want to pawn it or sell it outright.”
“Oh, sell it outright. I’ll never want it back.”
“Did you bring the power cord to recharge it?”
“No, I didn’t think of it. Is that a problem?”
“I could offer more if you had it. But this is a nice new model. I can go seventy-five.”
“I’ll take it.”
He counted the cash into her hand.
She walked out into the street and blinked in the bright sunlight. The air was temperate and warm, the breeze cool. She had a full tank of gas. She had enough money in her pocket for another tank of gas when that one was gone. She could even stop for a hamburger if she wanted, at that fast-food grill she could see from here.
But she wouldn’t stay in Santa Barbara long. She decided that almost instantly. Because she didn’t need to. She would cruise on up the coast. Sitting in one place is for people who can’t afford gas money.
When she returned to her van, she found Phyllis sunning on the dashboard.
We’re both getting used to things, Bea thought.
Imagine thinking this new life would be boring, with endless hours to kill and nothing to do. The world was full of places she’d never seen, and people and cell phones to get her there.
“Where to next?” she asked the cat.
Then she started the engine. Phyllis half jumped, half fell into the litter box below, then scrambled under the passenger seat to hide.
It should have been an omen to Bea. A warning not to get too confident. But in that moment she was too busy feeling good for a change.
That night, with Phyllis snoring on her lap, Bea lay awake in her easy chair for a long time, wishing she had that phone back.
If she still had it, she’d figure out how to use the darn thing. Then she’d call Opal. Even though she really wouldn’t have, not at that hour, because it wasn’t Opal’s house and she wouldn’t want to make trouble by calling late. But an ache inside her wanted to hear a familiar voice.
She had to settle for Phyllis’s snoring.
PART TWO
ALLIE
Chapter Eight
Carmen Miranda’s Outlaw Sister
For Allie, it began like this: She knew and she didn’t know. She watched her parents and knew something was wrong. Anybody can do that. Any idiot knows when something is wrong. What kind of something—that’s a brass-ring prize, and Allie had not managed to reach out and grab it.
For weeks she’d walked into the professionally decorated rooms of their Pacific Palisades home and noted how quickly her parents went silent. How their whispering heads jerked farther apart.
Allie guessed maybe her father was having an affair. That her parents were about to announce a divorce.
She did not guess that she would walk downstairs one evening to see her aggressively upper-middle-class father—who had never been in trouble with the law as far as Allie knew—led out of the house in handcuffs as her mother was Mirandized.
So when that very thing happened, in the hazy shock of it all, Allie let herself off the hook for being a bad guesser. Not in a glib way, as it might sound, but in that jumble of disconnected thoughts that accompany sudden panic. When her mind should have jumped to what was happening, and why, and what it would mean to her future, it instead hung up on that minor point like a pant leg on a protruding nail. It made sense that she hadn’t managed to guess this one, because it was just too far outside the probable.
She never did see her father’s face that night. He never looked back. He must not have known she had come down the stairs. She saw his back going out the door, and that was all. A man in a suit was walking him out by one elbow. Neither of the strangers wore a uniform, which could have made the situation initially hard to decipher. But some things are simple enough on their face, and can be understood by observation.