Allie realized her jaw was hanging open too wide. She took a moment to adjust that. She could feel her face redden with shame.
“Yes. Of course. I’m really sorry. None of that ever occurred to me. I just figured because you don’t have a bakery . . . I’m sorry. I guess I was being thoughtless. So . . . what do we do?”
“What do we do? I’m not sure there’s any we about it. You just decide what you’re going to do now. As I see it, you have two choices. Take a chance riding with me, or take a chance out there without me.”
“Oh,” Allie said again.
She felt more than a little bit stung. Truthfully, she’d thought ransacking her house and bringing valuables had secured her a place in Bea’s van. She thought it made them a solid “we.” The idea that she might have to go off on her own at this point had been put away, seemingly for good. It hurt to think of dredging it up again. It was another scrape with fear that Allie’s gut felt she could not afford.
Allie looked around. Not that there was anything to see beyond what she’d seen already. An ocean. A little beach town lining the coast. A pier. The route north. No police or Highway Patrol cars that she could see.
“If something goes wrong, though . . . ,” Allie began. Hesitantly. “I hate to get you involved. You know. Get you in trouble.”
“Why would I get in trouble? I’ve done nothing wrong.”
“Aiding and abetting a runaway? That sort of thing?”
“Nonsense. I know nothing about any of it. I picked you up hitchhiking. I kept you around because you had gas money. You swore you were eighteen and I believed you. Why would I know any more about your background than that?”
Allie nodded. A bit limply.
Shoulders slumped, she walked back to the passenger door and climbed in.
Bea lifted herself up into the driver’s seat a moment later.
“Probably not a bad decision,” the old woman said. “And if it goes wrong, well, maybe you’ll get to see my point about the three squares and the roof over your head in prison. Who knows? Maybe I’ll claim I did know you were a runaway and get my three squares a day, too.”
She started the engine and shifted into “Drive,” aiming the van toward the highway north.
“Don’t you worry about the privacy thing, though?” Allie asked.
“What privacy thing?”
“You don’t think they’d give you a private cell, do you?”
“Hmm,” Bea said. “I hadn’t really thought of that. That would be hard, I think. As far as whether it would be harder than not knowing where to live or how to eat . . . I’m not sure. I think both are very important to me.”
“Well, I have cash now.” Allie pulled the piggy bank out of her South American bag and removed the plastic plug in the bottom that allowed access to the money. “So I think out in the world is our best bet for now.”
Truthfully, she had forgotten about the bank. She would have counted the money a long time ago, the moment she’d first climbed back into the van, but the alarming brush with Mrs. Deary had knocked some obvious thoughts out of her head.
“Except this is no longer a private cell, either,” Bea said.
“Oh. Right.”
She counted in silence for a time while Bea drove.
“Three hundred and sixty dollars.”
“That should pay me back for sharing my cell.”
“And when that’s gone we can start selling off my electronics. But after that . . . I mean, if we keep driving the way we’ve been doing . . . I don’t know what we do when the money is gone.”
“It only needs to last until the third of next month. Then I get my Social Security check.”
Allie looked around as if the van might contain a post office or bank she had missed seeing.
“At what address?”
“It goes straight into my bank on direct deposit. Then I can use my new debit card for food and gas until the third of the following month, and so on.”
“Oh,” Allie said, drawing the word out long. “We might be in pretty good shape, then.”
“There you go with the ‘we’ thing again. But we’ll manage, yes.”
“We should just keep going. You know. Before it all comes crashing down.”
“Why should we do that?”
“I don’t know. Why not? Probably better than what’s behind us. Besides. It could be . . . you know. Interesting. It could be almost like an adventure.”
She heard the old woman snort derisively.
“Adventure?”
“Sure. What’s wrong with that?”
“After the experience you just had? I should think you’d want nothing but quiet safety from here on out.”
Allie couldn’t help noting that this was the first time Bea had referred to Allie’s traumatic experience without hinting that it might have been made up and false. She wondered if that was a type of progress between them. Some hint of an ability to get along.
“Yeah, I see your point, but . . . there’s nothing wrong with wanting to have good experiences. You know. After all that.”
“No. Hardly. No adventure. I say a big hearty no to that.”
“How can you not want to have an adventure?”
“Because life is plenty adventurous enough for me. Just the way it is. Every day. Thank you very much.”
“Can you stop in Cambria?” Allie asked when she saw the sign for the town.
“I could, I suppose. But why?”
“I want to see if that nice lady at the market will let me use one of her electric outlets. I want to plug in my computer and do that thing where you restore it to factory specs. My father taught me you always do big computer jobs like that while you’re plugged into power. I guess it drains the battery really fast.”
“Eagle loggle google, pigs flying upside down,” Bea said.
It occurred to Allie that the old woman might be having a stroke.
“What?”
“Exactly. What you said made every bit as much sense to me as my sentence did to you. It’s all nonsense when you talk about computer stuff. Or it is to me, anyway. Might as well be.”
“It just means that you set it back to how it was before you put all your personal information on it. It erases all your data. You know. So you can sell it without anybody else having your personal stuff.”
“Oh,” Bea said. “I actually do know a little bit about that.”
“Besides, the market has that fried chicken you like. I could bring you some.”
“I guess a rest would do me good,” Bea said, but Allie suspected it was the chicken that had won her over.
“Hey,” Allie said.
The woman whose name she did not know, the store owner, looked up. A smile spread across her face, and Allie felt it like warmth through her gut. Maybe the search for that smile was why she had come. That longing for recognition. That hope that someone might actually recognize her and seem glad she was back. The store owner had a smile that looked strong and calm and seemed to arrive easily. She looked entirely at home in her own skin. Allie realized she had not met a lot of people who could make such a claim.