Allie woke to a strange hissing sound. She blinked and looked around.
She was on the pool float in Bea’s van, with Phyllis sleeping heavily on her chest. Bea hadn’t bothered to draw the front curtains, probably because they were parked up against a thicket of impenetrable bushes. Which is how Allie knew they were still at Jackson’s house.
She sat up, trying to avoid upsetting the cat in the process but failing. She rubbed her eyes.
She stepped out of the back door of the van to investigate that sound—and found herself face to face with Bea and an actively spraying can of spray paint.
“Whoa!” Bea said. “You almost got yourself painted white.”
The hissing sound fell silent, leaving only a faint ocean noise and the breeze in the trees.
“Where did you get spray paint?”
Bea flipped her head in the direction of the house. “Courtesy of our host.”
Allie turned around to look in the direction Bea’s head was pointing.
Bea had almost entirely painted over the lettering on the passenger side of the van. She’d done a good job, too. No drips or sags. She must have put more than one coat on the letters themselves, because they did not show through.
“I’m confused,” Allie said.
“Because I said there would be no altering of the van.”
“Right. That.”
“Well, I was doing quite a bit of thinking while you were asleep. Which . . . I have no idea why you slept all day, by the way. You did sleep last night, right?”
Allie looked around and noted that it was only a couple of hours before sundown. A bad time to head out again to drive this stretch of highway. At least, for very long. Besides, the paint job wasn’t done yet.
“Pretty much. Yeah.”
“Well, I got bored. So I talked to Jackson for a while. He just lost his wife to cancer thirty-seven days ago. Can you imagine that? How hard that must be? I remember thirty-seven days very well. Not the exact day, mind you. I just mean I remember when losing Herbert was all too fresh. But then he started talking to me about his marriage. Jackson, I mean, not Herbert. And then I did some serious thinking, and I realized it was never like that for Herbert and me. Oh, we got on okay. And he was important to me. How could he not be? He was the only husband I had. The only husband I’d ever had. And he was a lovely man in many ways. But he was a lousy, lousy businessman. Rotten. He always talked about the world like bad luck got that business down, and I talked about it the same way so as not to hurt his feelings, but he was just bad at it. I’m sorry to speak ill of the dead, but it’s true.”
Allie waited. She was beyond surprised to hear these words coming out of Bea’s mouth. More like dumbfounded. So she waited in silence. If there were additional words, she hated to distract or discourage them.
“I have to say, it was the oddest feeling. Not Herbert. The conversation I just had with this Jackson fellow who does the metal sculptures. I realized as he was telling me all about his marriage that no one ever did before. Ever. I’ve had friends in my life, of course I have. But not huge crowds of them. And what friends I have had, well, I guess they were more the cautious type. Like me. So we never really talked about how successful our marriages were or were not, or how we felt about them. You didn’t in my day. You just lived the marriage and left the talking part alone. But this man . . . he was just dying to talk about his wife, and I can’t blame him. What else would he have on his mind after thirty-seven days?”
“While he was talking,” Allie interjected carefully, “did he serve you large cups of coffee or something?” Amphetamines, maybe? she thought, but did not add.
“No, why?” Bea asked, missing the subtext entirely.
“No reason. Never mind.”
“So, anyway. Where was I? All my life I thought my marriage was just like everybody else’s. And now all of a sudden I’m not so sure. I threw my lot in with Herbert when I was just a girl. Never been married, never had a serious boyfriend. I just jumped on board with him, and I really had no idea where that train was going. How could I? That’s just how we did it in my day. I’m not bemoaning the fact that he didn’t make more money. Granted, a simple life insurance policy would have been nice, but I’m not judging him on the money. It’s that I made him my whole world. And so my world was always too small. Then when he died, I didn’t know what my world was anymore. I wasn’t even sure I had one.”
Bea dropped the can of white spray paint. She walked to the back of the van. Allie followed, transfixed. Bea reached down for the “If I’m driving slowly I’m delivering a wedding cake” bumper sticker, grabbed one peeling corner, and tried to rip it off. It ripped, all right, but not off. The corner only tore away and ended up in Bea’s hand.
“Grab a table knife from inside and start working on this,” she told Allie. “Will you?”
“Um. Sure.” But for the moment she didn’t move.
“So I made a decision. No more living in the past, because the past wasn’t even a good example of my best choices in action. It’s one thing to look back and see how I let my world get too small. But to hang on to that smallness now . . .”
“Wow,” Allie said. “How long was I asleep? You made a lot of progress while I was away.”
“About that adventure you were trying to talk me into . . . ,” Bea said, leaning over Allie as she scraped off the last bits of bumper sticker. “I have no idea what one would even look like, because I’m new to this whole adventure thing. But I just might be game.”
“Hmm,” Allie said. And scraped. “We could drive all the way up the coast to Cape Flattery. Which is the northwest corner of the United States. It’s about as far as you can drive without crossing the Puget Sound into Canada.”
“Good. Let’s do it.”
Then Bea was gone, carrying masking tape and drop cloths and leftover spray paint back to the house.
Allie smiled to herself.
Truthfully, she wasn’t sure if merely driving to someplace qualified as an adventure. Even if it was someplace a long way away. But it was wildly adventurous by Bea’s standards, and for the moment it would definitely do.
Somehow Allie got elected to walk down to the house and tell Jackson they were leaving. Allie wasn’t sure why. By all accounts it seemed as though Bea and Jackson had experienced a moment of connection. Then again, maybe that was the why. Maybe that was the hang-up right there. Maybe Bea wanted to step back from that connection.
The late sun glared into her eyes as she walked downhill to his door.
She knocked, using a fancy iron door knocker shaped like a monkey hanging by its tail.
Jackson never answered.