In time Bea heard her undo her seat belt. She wandered into the open area in the back of the van.
“Mind if I take a couple of those blankets? That metal floor looks hard.”
“Whatever you think you need.”
Not a minute later the girl was fast asleep again, snoring like a buzz saw. Which kept Bea awake all day. Well, that or the fact that she had already slept all night. Or some combination of the two.
Bea lay awake listening to the snoring, Phyllis on her lap, and formed an interesting idea. Maybe she should keep this pesky kid around. Snoring and weird ideas about food aside, a young girl might prove useful. The only thing better than being an older person in need of assistance was being a minor child in need. And yet strangers would perceive her as traveling with her grandmother and so would not literally take her away and try to reunite her with family.
Yes, let’s move into an era where the girl does all the scamming, Bea thought. It’s the least she can do in return for the ride and the shelter.
It felt like a relief. It felt good to watch that awful job lift off her shoulders.
“We’ll have the little girl do the icky stuff,” she said out loud to Phyllis.
The cat raised her head, yawned, and dug her claws deeply into Bea’s thighs. Then she stretched and jumped down off Bea’s lap. She sauntered over to the sleeping girl and made herself comfortable on the rising and falling landscape of Allie’s belly.
Bea took more than a little umbrage at that. But it doesn’t pay to argue with a cat.
Chapter Nineteen
It’s Called Work. Have You Heard of It?
“What is this little town?” Allie asked as they pulled off the two-lane highway.
The girl was still rubbing her hip, which—she had several times said—hurt from sleeping on hard corrugated metal. Bea thought it was a bit overdramatic of her.
Try sleeping on the side of the road on rocks and dirt, out in the weather. Show a little gratefulness. And it’s your own fault for rolling over onto your side. The cat wasn’t very happy about it, either.
“This is Cambria,” Bea said.
She turned onto the Main Street of the little town. There was a gas station. Bea had seen it from the highway. But as she pulled closer she was shocked by the prices she saw on its sign.
“Holy moly,” she breathed out loud. “I should have filled up farther back down the coast.”
“Yeah, you should have,” the girl said, in a flat tone that sounded too authoritative and struck Bea as unwelcome. “And when you get up the coast around Big Sur, it’s only going to get worse.”
“I thought you didn’t know this area very well.”
“I know it’s remote. I know more remote means more expensive.”
Bea said nothing in reply. Just cruised a bit farther down the street, past quaint diners, a little live theater, and more antique stores and real estate offices than she could have counted. She saw another gas station on the right, much smaller. A little store with one line of pumps out front. The prices were not great, but they were a few cents better.
Bea pulled up to the pumps.
“What time is it?” the girl asked.
Bea peered closely at her watch. She had been keeping her reading glasses in her pocket at all times, but she didn’t bother to reach for them. If she ever lost them she would need a watch with a bigger face. No more giant clock over the stove as she’d had at . . .
She couldn’t bring herself to think the word home. Couldn’t even form it in her head. It stung.
“Nearly seven in the evening.”
“I thought it looked like the sun was almost getting ready to go down. Boy, that day went fast, huh?”
Bea opened her mouth to say “Yes, they always do when you sleep them away.”
Before she could, Allie jumped out and slammed the door, without the courtesy of saying why. Bea watched her walk into the store, thinking it would have been nice if Allie had offered to pump the gas.
Maybe the girl was off in search of a restroom.
Bea found herself wondering if she would get stuck providing another meal for them both. Probably. What else could she do? She couldn’t just eat in front of the child while the little girl starved. Still, just what she didn’t need was another mouth to feed.
“If I’d ever wanted children, I would have had some,” she grumbled out loud as she stepped down from the van and began to pump her own gas.
A good ten minutes passed. Still Allie had not come out.
Bea had grown tired of waiting, and the aggravation was making her feel surly.
She stepped out of the van again and stuck her head into the store.
Nothing.
No Allie. Nobody behind the counter. Just a few rows of grocery items, with a mountain of sealed cartons in between, as if a big delivery had just arrived. And there was a deli case with fried chicken and a few other treats. It actually smelled quite good, but Bea decided not to stay and have any. Because the prospect of free gas was far more enticing.
She pulled her head back out, hopped into the van—suddenly spry for her age—and started it up. She drove down a couple of doors and parked in the parking lot of an empty building with a sign that offered it for sale.
She walked back to the store and looked in again.
This time she saw Allie. She was with a woman who must have been a clerk at the little store, or owned it. They appeared to be working. Picking up the cartons one by one and moving them into a back room, maybe a storeroom of sorts, where they stayed away for a surprising length of time.
When they appeared again, Bea made a hissing sound in the girl’s direction. Both Allie and the store woman looked her way.
She was an older woman, maybe ten years younger than Bea, or maybe closer in age than that, but tanned and sturdy. It always irritated Bea when women of a similar age to her own were fit and able.
“Bunch of showoffs,” is what she and Opal had used to say.
“Go see what your grandma wants,” the woman said to Allie.
Allie set down the carton she was holding and walked down the aisle toward Bea.
Bea almost said “I’m no relation to this little beggar.” It almost slipped from her mouth before she could think the thing through.
“What are you doing?” she asked the girl in a terse whisper.
“Working.”
“Working? What on earth for?”
“It’s what people do when they need money.”
“She offered you money?”
“Well. Sort of. After she let me use her bathroom I offered to help because she said her afternoon girl called in sick. I just offered to be nice, you know? But then she said if I was really willing to do the whole thing with her she’d pay me.”
“How much?”
“She didn’t say.”
“Rookie mistake. Always find out how much up front.”
“Who cares? It’ll be more than I had to begin with. It’ll be more than I’ve had since I got dragged out of my house. And then we can go eat and you won’t have to spend your money on me.”
“Well, I like the sound of that. Bring some of that fried chicken. It smells good.”