“Are you sure?”
“Positive. The gold spot is nearly thirteen hundred.”
“How do you know that?”
“Herbert used to have a little gold. Just a couple of ounces. For the same reason. You’re supposed to hold it, because it usually increases in value. Over enough time, almost always. But he couldn’t hold it. The business was in trouble and he had to sell it to pay some back taxes. Ever since then I’ve looked at gold prices in the paper, just so I can stay mad over what those two ounces would be worth now. I shouldn’t have done it. It only irked me every time. But somehow I couldn’t stop. So, that does help our situation quite a bit. That we have it.”
“There you go with the ‘we’ thing again,” Allie said.
Bea dropped her fork and sat back in the booth with an audible thump.
“Are you trying to say you’re holding out on me?”
“Not exactly. I was going to. I hadn’t promised that piece of gold because I didn’t even remember I had it at the time. So, yeah. I was just going to keep it to myself in case things didn’t work out and I ended up off on my own again.”
“Mad money,” Bea said.
“I don’t know what that is.”
“It’s something girls carried on dates when I was young. Smart girls, anyway. The boy paid for everything. So theoretically the girl didn’t need to bring any cash on a date. But what if you get out there and it turns out you’ve accepted a date with a loser who’s all hands and no respect? We didn’t have cell phones in those days. You needed to be able to walk away. Use a pay phone. Call a cab, maybe. So you squirrelled away a little secret money. We called it mad money, for reasons that should be obvious.”
“Right. Yeah. I was going to keep it as mad money.”
“Was going to? Past tense? What are you going to do with it now?”
“I’m willing to throw it into the travel fund. I’ll hold on to it, and not sell it unless I have to. But it’ll be if we get into any trouble. If we need it. Under one condition: You don’t always get to decide how much we spend and on what. You said we’d decide together, but it hasn’t worked out that way at all. You say yes or no and expect me to accept it. I get to have some say in these decisions, too.”
“You want to go to that darned aquarium.”
“I want us both to go. Yeah.”
“Let me see that thing again. Are you sure that’s real?”
“Now why would my rich uncle give me fake gold as a present on the day I was born?”
She slid the bar out of her pocket and across the table, keeping it discreetly under her hand. Bea quietly accepted the transfer. Then the old woman pulled her reading glasses out of her pocket and studied the gold closely.
A moment later she slid it back across the table.
“On to the Monterey Bay Aquarium,” she said.
PART FIVE
BEA
Chapter Twenty-Five
How to Pet a Bat Ray
They stood in front of the giant kelp forest exhibit together, swaying slightly. Surprisingly, Bea was succeeding in ignoring the crowd around her. In fact, the other tourists seemed to have disappeared, so complete was her focus on the inside of the massive saltwater tank.
The glass walls of the thing soared more than twenty feet over Bea’s head, looking like a real window onto a real kelp forest under the sea. Some sort of pump or other device caused the kelp to sway, the way the tide would in the open ocean. It had taken Bea several minutes to realize that both she and the girl were moving slightly in response.
Now and then a leopard shark swam lazily across her view, or a school of thousands of tiny silver fish flashed by in near-perfect unison. Larger fish, the kind Herbert used to catch on their trips to the coast, moved with purpose across her view, or just hung without swimming, swaying back and forth with the kelp.
Normally Bea hated to stand for any length of time. It made her feel hot and dizzy almost immediately, and drove her to look for a place to sit. But in this case the feeling had passed quickly, replaced by intense concentration. Bea was completely absorbed by what she was seeing.
“All right, I was wrong and I admit it,” she said, nudging Allie slightly with her elbow.
“About what?”
“Coming here. This was worth . . . well, I was going to say twice what we paid for it, but I can’t very well say that, can I? Because you wouldn’t let me go along to buy the tickets, so I have no idea what we paid.”
“Just as well. You were right that it was kind of expensive.”
“But I was wrong when I said it’s just a diversion. It’s not. It’s a way of learning about the world. And it seems especially meaningful what with our driving beside the ocean all these days. I was viewing it wrong. I was just looking at the surface of it, like that’s all there was to it. Oh, I know better, of course, in my logical brain. I know it’s deep and there are fish in it. But I never pictured that. I just never stopped to think about it. Now I’ll look over at the water as we drive and understand there’s a whole other world under it. It’s like seeing part of the world you never thought about before. Never factored into your thinking. It makes the world seem bigger all of a sudden. I know I’m talking a lot. I hope I’m making sense.”
“You are,” Allie said. “But I think we should go look at something else now.”
“But I like this so much.”
“But how do you know you won’t like that so much, too? The only way you’ll know is if we go see.”
“I hate it when you get all logical,” Bea said.
“I am not touching one of those monsters,” Bea told the girl.
“Well, I am.”
Allie stood with one hand over the edge of the bat ray tank, a thigh-high open tank that allowed for petting. Though Bea could not imagine why. Petting zoos were one thing, but they were full of soft, cuddly mammals. With fur. Which is not to suggest that Bea would have enjoyed one.
“They sting,” Bea pronounced, though really she had no way to know.
“No, they don’t.”
“You can get stung by a stingray. Why do you think they call them that?”
“These are not stingrays. They’re bat rays. And they wouldn’t have them in an open petting tank if they stung. And I’m petting one. So there.”
Bea watched with mild alarm as the strange creatures lifted their front ends slightly out of the water, their winglike fins brushing upward against the sides of the tanks as though they planned to try to climb out. Then three or four glided by just under the surface of the water, looking like dark gray kites with stubby noses, and Allie dipped her hand in and allowed one of the creatures to slide against her palm.
“Whoa!”
“What does it feel like?”
“It’s hard to explain. But it’s soft. Almost . . . satiny. But wet. I couldn’t describe it to you. You have to try.”
“Oh, I think not.”
“You really should do this, Bea.”