The Bean Trees

“It’s good, Lou A

“Watch out, there’s peas in there. A child’s windpipe can be blocked by anything smaller than a golf ball.”

For Lou A

I promised her that I wouldn’t give Turtle anything smaller than a golf ball. I amused myself by thinking about the cabbage: would you have to take into account the size of one leaf compressed into golf-ball shape? Or could you just consider the size of the entire cabbage and call the whole thing safe?

Lou A

Later that night when the kids were in bed I realized exactly what was bugging me: the idea of Lou A

Lou A

“Oh, jeez, take this away from me before I start looking at the boy section. There’s probably fifty thousand names better than Dwayne Ray, and I don’t even want to know about them. It’s too late now.”

“Lou A

“Okay, shoot.” The way she said it, you would think I was toting an M-16.

“Lou A

“But I want to.”

“But I don’t want you to.”

It was like that.

By the time we had worked through our third beers, a bag of deep-fried tortilla chips, a pack of individually-wrapped pimiento-cheese slices and a can of sardines in mustard, Lou A

It’s the junk food, I kept thinking. On a diet like this the Bean Curd kids would be speaking in tongues.

All of a sudden Lou A

“Oh, God,” she said. “I’m drunk.”

“Lou A

“That’s all it takes. I never drink. I’m scared to death of what might happen.”

I was interested. This house was full of surprises. But this turned out to be nothing like the cat. Lou A

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. How do I know? Just something. I feel like the only reason I have any friends at all is because I’m always careful not to say something totally dumb, and if I blow it just one time, then that’s it.”

“Lou A

“No, I mean it. For the longest time after Angel left I kept thinking back to this time last August when his friend Ma

I was trying to fit Angel into some pigeonhole or other in the part of my brain that contained what I knew about men. I liked this new version of an Angel who would go out looking for shooting stars, but hated what I saw of him the next morning, taunting Lou A

“Maybe he was pulling your leg,” I said. “Maybe there never was any meteor shower. Did you ask Ramona?”

“No. I never thought of that. I just assumed.”

“Well, why don’t you call her up and ask?”

“She and Ma

“Well, I’m sorry.”

She persisted. “But that’s not even really the point. It wasn’t just that I’d missed something important. I kept on thinking that if I could miss a whole meteor shower, well, I’d probably done something else ridiculous. For all I know I could’ve run naked through the desert singing ‘Skip to My Lou.’”

I shuddered. All those spiny pears and prickly whatsits.

She stared mournfully into the empty bag of chips. “And now it’s Valentine’s Day,” she said. “And everybody else in the whole wide world is home with their husband smooching on the couch and watching TV, but not Lou A

I couldn’t even think where to begin on this one. I thought of another one of Mama’s hog sayings: “Hogs go deaf at harvest time.” It meant that people would only hear what they wanted to hear. Mama was raised on a hog farm.

Lou A

“I always wondered if that night we got drunk had something to do with why I lost him,” she said. I was confused for a second, still thinking of her father.

“I thought you were glad when Angel left.”

“I guess I was. But still, you know, something went wrong. You’re supposed to love the same person your whole life long till death do you part and all that. And if you don’t, well, you’ve got to have screwed up somewhere.”

“Lou A