PART ONE
BEA
Chapter One
Rude Checkbook
For perhaps the twentieth time that morning, Bea narrowed her eyes at the checkbook sitting on her kitchen counter.
“Stop looking at me that way,” she told its blue vinyl cover.
Then her face flushed, and she looked around the tiny room as if someone might have overheard that embarrassing outburst—a second act of instability all in itself. Other than her friend Opal, nobody had so much as stepped foot into her trailer since the passing of her husband, Herbert. And Opal wasn’t here now.
She hadn’t meant it literally, what she’d said to the checkbook. It had been something of a bitter joke. But, in truth, she had been mostly joking rather than completely joking. That was the trouble right there.
She did feel mocked and threatened by its presence. There was no denying that.
“They put people away in weird places for making comments like that,” she said out loud. Then, as an afterthought, “Also for talking to yourself.”
She took three sips of her coffee, which was tepid, bitter, and one cup too many in the first place.
“I’m going to get this over with,” she said.
Hands shaking ever so slightly, she dug through a drawer and found a pen for writing checks and a pencil for recording them in the register. She grabbed the offending checkbook off the counter and sat down to pay her bills.
She added in her monthly Social Security check—which should have reached her bank by auto-deposit that morning—to the total of funds. Then she stared at the number. It looked okay. Heartening, almost. But then, it always did. Before. It was after she’d written checks for the rent on this little trailer—not just the space on which it sat but even the trailer itself, which she and Herbert had once owned—the gas and electric, the water and garbage service, the phone bill. That was when the numbers began to look scary.
And this month there had been something more. A minor medical procedure to remove a skin abnormality that could have been cancer but, thank goodness, had revealed itself to be benign. Five months earlier she’d had to drop the Medicare gap insurance to save herself its monthly premium. Now, as she stared at the bill from the dermatologist, she realized the co-pay on this one visit had wiped out those savings almost twice over.
She looked up and out her window to see that awful Lettie Pace walking that awful brown poodle-mixed-with-something-or-other—looked like a dirty string mop if you asked Bea—across Bea’s tiny patch of grass. Lettie paused to allow the dog to sniff.
Before Bea could even struggle to her feet, the mop-dog hunkered down and rounded its back into that unmistakable and undignified position, preparing to leave a pile on Bea’s grass.
Bea rushed to her front door and threw it wide.
Lettie and the mop were already scurrying on as if nothing had happened.
“Lettie Pace!” Bea shouted.
Lettie was a younger woman—at least, younger than most of the residents of the mobile home park. Late fifties, maybe, which made her a good twenty years younger than Bea, which irked Bea in some indefinable way. Lettie should have been able to hear just fine. But she walked on as if she could not. As if Bea did not exist. And nothing—but nothing—infuriated Bea more than to be treated as if she did not exist.
Bea reached down and grabbed up a piece of white gravel from the decorative border around her defiled patch of grass.
For a flicker of a moment she only stood, staring at it in her hand.
Bea wound up like a big-league pitcher on a mound in a real televised game. She let the stone fly. It hit the dog squarely on the behind. A yelp cut through the air of the park, and Mrs. Betteson, out trimming her roses, looked up to see what the trouble might be.
Lettie Pace turned back to Bea, teeming with rage and indignity, and stomped back to where Bea bravely stood her ground. Her nose came within inches of Bea’s nose. Still Bea only stared. She did not waver or retreat.
“I can’t believe you would hurt an innocent animal,” Lettie said.
“Yes,” Bea said. “I agree. I’m very sorry about that.”
Lettie’s eyes struggled to keep up with the atmospheric changes. “You are?”
“Absolutely. I didn’t mean to hit that dog in the butt. The butt I was aiming for was yours. I never blame it on the dog. He’s a dog. What does he know? You’re on the business end of that leash. You’re the one who deserved to be stoned.”
For a moment, nothing. Then a flare of anger filled the scant air between their noses. There would be a fight. And Bea was not afraid. In fact . . .
The drone of an airplane broke through Bea’s reverie. It was coming in low for a landing and this place was in the flight path. It roused her from her waking dream. She looked down at her hand to see the pebble still sitting on her palm. She raised her gaze. Lettie Pace and the brown mop were mere dots in the distance, just rounding the corner into Lane C.
Bea shook her head a few times.
It was one thing to imagine a better ending to a confrontation, but in the past she had mostly been aware, all the way through, of what was real and what was imagination. This time she was surprised—nearly shaken—to see that stone still sitting on her palm.
She dropped it quickly, and looked around at her little patch of grass. That pile would need to be picked up. The idea that someone besides Bea could be forced to do the ugly job—the dog’s owner being the obvious example—had just rounded the corner of Lane C.
Mrs. Betteson offered a sympathetic smile.
“If that were me I’d complain to Arthur,” she called out.
“I might,” Bea said. “I’m about to go bring Arthur my rent check, and I just might.”
But in real life, she knew, such acts of courage remained more elusive, harder to pin down.
“There,” Bea said, and set her pen back in the drawer.
She sat at her desk, her ancient tortoiseshell cat, Phyllis, curled on her lap. Now and then Bea would reach down and run a hand over the dry fur of the cat’s back. Phyllis would respond by lazily digging her claws into Bea’s thighs through her slacks. It smarted, and Bea said “ouch” every time. But still she felt compelled to pet the cat now and then.
She had written checks for all the bills, sealed them into envelopes, addressed them, and affixed a postage stamp to each one. Now she would be forced by curiosity and dread to turn the calculator back on and do the math in her checkbook. Run the numbers, as Herbert would have said.
She ran the numbers. Twice.
Then she sat staring at the final number.
$741.12
When Herbert died, he’d left her no insurance or other financial means. It wasn’t so much carelessness on his part, just . . . what did he have to leave? But they had struggled to put away a small pot of savings. About $5,000, which had seemed like quite a lot of money at the time. But the Social Security check never covered the month’s expenses. No matter how hard Bea tried to economize, no matter how inexpensively she fed herself, there was always a shortfall. So, for lack of a better plan, every month that shortfall came out of her little pot of savings. Which had now dwindled from $5,000 to $741.12.
Bea had never sat down and figured the average monthly shortfall so she could know how long those savings would last. She quite purposely hadn’t. Because she had no plan for the day when it ran dry. This was not owing to any irresponsibility on Bea’s part. There simply was no plan to be had.