The True Value of Canned Garbanzo Beans
Allie rubbed the lumps on her head as they drove south again. Slowly, gingerly rubbed them. As though the touch of her hand could draw the pain away. As though anything could.
There was the lump above her left temple. That was where she had hit her head on the window when that awful man threw her into the backseat of his car. And there was the painful egg on the right, near the back, where this crazy old woman had thrown her against the side of the van by swerving. Because she’d thought Allie was carjacking her.
She could still feel the shopworn dregs of the trembling. Deep in her thighs, and in that low place in her gut that would first feel nausea if she had eaten something bad. It was a sickening location that felt so integrally part of Allie that maybe nothing that lived there could ever be fully expelled.
Such a close scrape with the worst outcomes the world had in store for a lost girl.
She wondered if her parents had been told yet that she had run away. Probably. She should call them. Let them know she was okay. But she had no idea how. She didn’t even know where they were being held.
“What’s with your head?” Bea asked her, interrupting those thoughts.
First, Allie said nothing. She just waited. She thought it went without saying. Apparently she was wrong.
“Bumped it.”
“On what?”
“The car window when that guy was kidnapping me. And the side of your van when you thought I was a carjacker.”
“Oh. Right. Sorry.”
“I guess it was an honest mistake,” Allie said.
The use of the word “honest” seemed to stop everything in its tracks.
They didn’t speak for several miles. The cat climbed up into her lap, and Allie stroked her rough, dry fur. The purring felt good to Allie. It eased the trembling some.
“I owe you another apology,” Allie said suddenly. But not to the cat.
She had been aware of her own thinking, of course. But she had not known she was about to say anything out loud.
“For what?”
“I think I’ve had some unfair thoughts about honesty.”
For a minute that statement just sat there, and no one cared to comment. There was no sound but that of the tires on the road, and the cat purring. But sooner or later Allie would need to elaborate.
“The girl who got me in all this trouble . . . Well, not all of it, I guess. I was in trouble when I met her. But anyway, she’s the one who brought me to that awful place. That house where I got sold for saying no to . . . her . . . whatever he is. I’m getting off track. There was this girl, and she said I was really super na?ve. I kind of took offense to it. I thought it wasn’t true, or anyway that I wasn’t as bad as she was saying. But now I think she was right. I didn’t know anything about the world until I got thrown out into it all of a sudden. So I had these ideas, but they were childish ideas, I guess. They’d never really been put to the test. Like a real-world test. You know what I mean?”
“I wish I could say I do,” Bea said. “No offense, sometimes you just go on and on and I can’t make any sense of it.”
“Sorry. I’ll try to be clearer. I lived all my life with these parents. My parents. They pretty much gave me everything I needed and most of what I wanted. So then here I am going around saying you shouldn’t steal. You shouldn’t take anything that doesn’t belong to you. But maybe I have no right to say that, because I never needed anything. I was thinking about what you said. About how everybody needs to live. Like, if a person has no food to eat, and no way to honestly get it. He’s going to take the food. You can’t blame him for that. He can’t be expected to voluntarily die just because the world doesn’t care enough about him to make sure he at least has enough to eat. You don’t try to shove thoughts about honesty at a person at a time like that, because the whole world is dishonest. The way it’s set up. And it’s not his fault.”
A silence. Allie was unclear on how her speech was being received. Maybe she was just a spoiled girl and even admitting so hadn’t let her off the hook. Maybe she was so sheltered that even her admission of being sheltered was that of a sheltered child, but in some way she was unable to see.
“So . . . ,” Bea began. She sounded cautious. “Let’s say you were starving. You were going to die any day of starvation. Would you go into a supermarket and steal a can of tuna?”
“I’m a vegan.”
“Nobody’s a vegan when they’re starving.”
“That’s not true at all. When you don’t eat meat for a long time your body can’t just digest it again all of a sudden. I wouldn’t steal a can of tuna just so I could throw it up all over the sidewalk. That would be a huge waste.”
A sigh from the driver’s seat.
“Okay, fine. So what do they have cans of at the supermarket? That you could eat?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe . . . garbanzo beans?”
“Fine. Would you steal a can?”
Allie sat with that for half a mile or so. She knew, but she wanted to be sure before saying it out loud. Everything was changing now. Life was revealing itself to her, and she was revealing herself to life. She had to be clear on who she was proving herself to be.
“Yes,” she said firmly. “I would steal it.”
“So everybody’s principles are negotiable. Even yours.”
“No. Not negotiable. I don’t see it that way at all. It’s more a matter of what’s really right. I thought right and wrong were completely black and white, but they’re not. It’s not that I’d be starving, so I’d do the wrong thing. It’s that right and wrong would be different than I thought, because we’re talking about a person’s life. My life is more important than a can of garbanzo beans. And not just because it’s my life, either. Any life is important. Some things are just more important than others.”
“But you’re not starving now,” Bea said. “And you’re willing to go through your house and steal electronic items that rightfully belong to the IRS.”
Allie felt herself bristle slightly inside.
“Those things are mine.”
“Not really. Your parents bought them for you with money they should have paid to the government.”
“Not every penny. They owe the government some money. Yeah. The IRS’ll sell the boat, and maybe even the house. But then that’ll probably be enough. They don’t need to sell every little item we own. It’s not that big a debt.”
“But you really have no idea how much they owe.”
“No,” Allie said. “I guess I don’t.”
Another mile or two passed in silence. Allie took to rubbing the lumps on her head again. This conversation was making her stomach hurt.