In time Allie walked around to the ivy-covered gate and found him in the sculpture garden near the statue of Bernadette. Not welding. Not working in any way. Just appraising it in that manner that suggested he knew something was missing, but he still couldn’t pin down the deficiency.
“We’re taking off,” she said, and he barely looked up. “I wanted to just let you know. And . . . you know. Thank you. For being so nice.”
“I hope you’re not going to try to go far tonight. You don’t have much light left.”
“No, just to Carmel or Monterey and then we’ll stop and sleep.”
“That should be fine. That won’t even take you an hour.”
You’ve never seen Bea drive the coast route, she thought. But she didn’t say so. She inwardly agreed that just to Carmel or Monterey would likely be okay.
“Something about that talk you had really changed her,” Allie said.
For the first time, Jackson took his eyes off the statue and raised his gaze to Allie’s face. “I give up. What did I say?”
“Just all the stuff you said about your marriage. I don’t know that it was any one thing specifically. It just got her thinking about her own life, I guess, and the choices she made, and what they all added up to. It’s just funny, because you told me I was going to have to wake her up. Figuratively speaking. And then I went and took a nap, and you woke her up while I was asleep.”
He smiled, but it was a sad-looking thing. As was everything he seemed to be able to access. “I still don’t know how, but I’m glad. You take care of yourself. And your grandma.”
“I will. Thanks. I wish . . .” But then for a minute she wasn’t sure if she had what it would take to finish the thought. “I wish a lot of good things for you. Like being able to be really strong. And . . . healing. That’s it. I wish you healing.”
“I wish the same for you,” Jackson said.
“Me? Why me? What am I healing from?”
“I have no idea,” he said. “You tell me. I only know that your pain is written all over your face.”
The face in question suddenly felt burning hot.
“Okay,” Allie said. “Whatever. ’Bye.”
Then she trotted back to the van before the conversation could get any more real.
First thing the following morning they sat in the van in front of a Monterey pawnshop, waiting for the guy to turn the “Closed” sign to “Open.”
“You know how to wipe all the personal information off things,” Bea said. “I know because you did it with your computer.”
“Yeah . . . ,” Allie said, the word stretching out with doubt and apprehension. “So?”
“So maybe do it with this phone.”
Bea had the phone in her lap, one hand over it, as though it were a dirty little secret that someone passing by the van might see.
“No way. Absolutely not. That would be like . . .”
“I’m going to sell it either way. Whether you wipe it clean or the guy in the pawnshop does.”
“That’s not the point. The point is, I’m not going to be an accessory to your . . .”
“What? Crime? Were you going to say crime?”
“Well . . . what do you think? Is it legal to steal somebody’s phone, or is it illegal? It’s a pretty simple concept.”
“So you think I’m a criminal.”
“Do we really have to fight? We were just starting to get along some.”
Bea sighed. “You can’t come in with me, then. You’ll have to sell your computer later, at a different pawnshop. Or later at this one. Because if you’re right there and he thinks you’re my granddaughter, then it’s going to be hard to explain why you wiped all your information off the computer but refused to do the same for the phone.”
“Fine. Whatever. You go in first. I really don’t want to be any part of that phone being sold anyway.”
They brooded in silence for a minute or two. Then the man flipped the sign to “Open.”
“Wish me luck,” Bea said.
Allie remained silent.
Bea shook her head too dramatically, eased out of the driver’s seat, and walked stiffly to the pawnshop’s door. Allie watched her go. Then, after Bea had disappeared into the shop, Allie read the signs in the window for the hundredth time. Including the one that said, “We Buy Gold.” This time it struck her in a way it had not on the first ninety-nine reads.
She stepped into the back of the van and plowed through one of her woven bags until she found the one-ounce gold bar her uncle had given her on the day she was born. It didn’t look like a bar exactly. More like a rectangular coin. She took it out of its miniature ziplock plastic bag and turned it over in her fingers. It felt vaguely heavy for its size, and was stamped with a lot of information that verified its authenticity. It was Swiss. That was stamped right in. It was “999.9 pure gold,” which didn’t quite make sense in Allie’s head. It seemed to have its decimal point in the wrong place. But that’s what it said. “Fine gold,” it also said, though Allie didn’t know if that was a verifiable thing with a definition. It even had something like a serial number stamped in. She had no idea what it was worth. A few hundred dollars, maybe?
But the real value of the thing was clear: Bea didn’t know she had it.
Allie had committed all of her electronics, any cash she owned, even a little bit of jewelry to the cause of traveling with Bea, and the food and gas involved in that travel. But she hadn’t remembered the coin collection or the ounce of gold before going into the house or mentioned them after coming out. This could be something that was Allie’s and Allie’s alone—something to fall back on if things didn’t go well with the old woman.
She slipped the gold back into its plastic bag and stuck it deep into the front pocket of her jeans.
“Next,” she heard Bea say.
Allie jumped as if caught stealing. She looked up to see Bea sticking her head through the driver’s side door.
“That was awfully fast,” Allie said, trying to talk over her guilt.
“How long is it supposed to take? Anyway. It didn’t work. You have to have a password or something to get the phone open.”
“Oh. Right.”
“You knew that?”
“Well . . . yeah.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t think of it. Why didn’t you know? You said you’ve done this before.”
“I did it once. And it worked fine.”
“Maybe because you pawned it a lot faster? Or maybe you moved some keys on it or something. That would have kept it awake.”
“Yes, I was playing with it as I walked along. Well, shoot. That seems like a waste. Anyway, thank goodness you have something to sell him.”
“Don’t you think I should wait a little? So he doesn’t get it that we’re together? Why don’t we go have breakfast, and then we’ll come back and I’ll sell the computer. Or . . . I don’t know. We have plenty of money right now. Maybe we don’t need to sell any of my stuff today. Maybe we should wait and see if we really need the money.”
“The question is whether there will be pawnshops when we need the money,” Bea said, easing her bulk into the driver’s seat. “You know. Farther up the coast.”
“Then I think what we really need,” Allie said, “is a good map.”