In time she abandoned the book and pushed her easy chair closer to the rear doors of the van, where she sat, holding one corner of the curtain back. Watching the people go by. Thinking.
She would need money for food. She didn’t have enough food to last until next month. She would need money for gas if the BuyMart people asked her to move.
She needed so much money. And these people had so much money.
She couldn’t stop staring at them. They had shopping carts full of food and toys, but they looked bored and unhappy. How could a person go to the store, buy everything she needed—and wanted, from the look of some of those carts—and still seem dissatisfied? What more did they need to be happy, then? If all this wouldn’t do it?
And there was something else about them. They had these devices in their hands. Bea knew they were phones, but couldn’t quite imagine how a person would make a call on such a thing. The more she watched, the more she became obsessed with people’s phones.
Bea had seen cell phones. Little phones you flip open, with regular keypads for making a call. But these electronic gadgets in people’s hands—they were nothing like a simple flip phone. They were all screen, with no buttons, and people stared at these devices as they walked by, tapping out some kind of communication with both thumbs. Bea watched more than one person nearly run down by a car, so complete was their attention to the screen.
It seemed as though everyone had one of these gizmos with them wherever they went—that no one could so much as go shopping at the BuyMart without keeping their eyes glued to the things.
After an hour or more of staring, Bea needed to use the restroom. She let herself out of the van, careful that Phyllis didn’t dart out the open door, and walked stiffly into the store.
She used the ladies’ room and washed her hands, then stared at her own face in the mirror. She looked tired. Ragged and unkempt. Lost.
In her third moment of abject panic, it struck Bea that soon people might know she was homeless just by looking at her.
No.
It wasn’t going to be like that. She could take washcloth baths anytime the bathroom was private—not multistalled. She could wash her hair in the sink, and keep it nicely combed. She had that little kit she’d made up . . . but, she realized, she’d left it in the van.
No matter. She would get better at this as time went by.
She let herself out of the ladies’ room. At an angle across the crowded store Bea saw an electronics counter. In its glass case she could see dozens of those computer phones.
They drew her in their direction.
She didn’t want one. Not at all. In fact, she found the idea of walking down the street staring at those little devices repugnant. But she wanted to know what they did for their owners. Even more than that, she wanted to know what they cost.
She expected a salesperson to come along and try to talk her into buying one. But there was no one behind the counter. Bea felt invisible. She walked up and down in front of the glass case, eyeing the baffling devices. They were packaged in boxes that sported colorful photos of the phones at work. On their screens Bea saw weather reports, and sports images. She saw them playing videos, like a small TV set hooked up to nothing.
They cost as much as $700!
These people walking back and forth by her van were paying almost as much for these ridiculous little toys as the Social Security Administration expected her to live on every month of her life.
Bea walked back to her van in the bracing ocean breeze, but forgot to enjoy it. Something was changing inside her, and changing fast. Bea would not have been able to quantify the feeling, or wrap words around it. But there was a definite sense that all bets were off now. The line she had so carefully toed all her life was just a smudge in the dirt behind her. Bea did not feel inclined to look back.
Life was new. Not good. Just new.
Chapter Seven
How Do You Wipe This Thing Clean?
Bea lay on her side on the asphalt of the parking lot, half raised on one arm, waiting for someone to come by. It was dark, but only just barely, and the van was close by if she needed it. She was also close enough to the van that it blocked her view of the BuyMart security camera—and its view of her, which was key.
Her arm was getting a bit tired of holding her up, and still no one had been by. Just her luck to choose a lull in shopper traffic.
To pass the time, she sank more deeply into her role. She had taken a real fall once—well, truth be told, more than once, but she didn’t like to admit it—and she summoned back that feeling. The sense of being physically rattled and mentally disoriented. The way everything that came before the fall is suddenly gone.
“Ma’am? Are you okay?”
A man’s voice. She levered herself up a bit more and looked feebly over her shoulder.
He was a man in his late thirties with a shopping bag in each arm and a young blonde girl on either side of him holding the belt loops of his jeans for parking lot safety.
“He took my purse,” Bea said. “He knocked me over and then before I even knew what was happening I saw him running off with my purse.”
She tossed her head in the general direction of the bushes between parking lot and street.
The man jogged to her, his little girls running to keep up.
“Are you okay? Did he hurt you?”
“Yes, I’m all right. I’m not injured. It just surprised me and I hadn’t quite managed to get back on my feet yet.”
He set his bags on the tarmac and reached his arm out to her, and she took hold of it, and he helped her to her feet.
“I can call the police,” he said, fishing one of those maddening devices out of his shirt pocket. “I have a cell phone.”
Of course you have a cell phone, she thought. With the exception of me, who doesn’t these days?
“Oh, I don’t even know if that will help.” She brushed off the seat of her slacks as she spoke. “You know they’ll never find him. I didn’t get a look at him at all. There’s not one thing I can tell them to help them solve the crime. And I’m not injured. I’ll have to get a new driver’s license is all. And I’ll have to cancel that credit card. And . . . Oh. Uh-oh. I just thought. I’m almost out of gas, and I was going to use my card to fill up my tank so I can go home. I live all the way up in Santa Maria and I’m almost out of gas.”
The man pointed at a gas station sign that rose up between the BuyMart parking lot and the ocean.
“We’ll meet you right over there, okay? And we’ll use my card and we’ll fill you up.”
“That’s awfully kind of you. Are you sure you can afford it?”
“Of course I can. Don’t even worry about it. You have to get home. Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m sure. Thank you. A little shaken up is all.”
“You can drive over there?”
“Absolutely. I’ll see you there in just a few minutes.”