“Don’t sit on it,” she warned. “It’ll be hot as a poker in this sun.” Granny Logan and Ivy stepped back from the bench like startled children, and Lou Ann felt pleased that she was able to tell them something they didn’t already know. The three women stood beside the bench, all looking in the direction from which the bus would come.
“Pew, don’t they make a stink,” Mother Logan said when the bus arrived. Ivy put her arms around both Lou Ann and the baby, then picked up the two bags and boarded the bus, lifting her feet high for the two big steps. At the top she turned and reached down for her mother-in-law, her sturdy, creased hand closing around the old knuckles. The bus driver leaned on his elbows over the steering wheel and stared ahead.
“I just wish you wasn’t so far away,” Ivy said as the doors hissed together.
“I know,” she mouthed. “Wave bye to your great-grandmaw,” Lou Ann told the baby, but they were on the wrong side to see.
She imagined herself running after the bus and banging on the door, the bus driver letting her climb up and settle herself and the baby onto the wide seat between her mother and grandmother. “Tell your mother to hand me that jar of tea,” Granny Logan would say to her. “I’ll be dry as a old stick fence before we get back to Kentucky.”
One block down and across the street, old Bobby Bingo sold vegetables out of his dilapidated truck. Lou Ann had been tempted by his tomatoes, which looked better than the hard pink ones at the grocery; those didn’t seem like tomatoes at all, but some sickly city fruit maybe grown inside a warehouse. She had finally collected the nerve to ask how much they cost and was surprised that they were less than grocery tomatoes. On her way home she made up her mind to buy some more.
“Hi, tomato lady,” Bingo said. “I remember you.”
She flushed. “Are they still forty-five a pound?”
“No, fifty-five. End of the season.”
“That’s okay,” she said. “It’s still a good price.” She looked at every one in the box and picked out six, handing them to the old man one at a time with her free hand. With her other hand she adjusted the baby on her hip taking extra care, as she had been instructed, to support his wobbly head. “Your tomatoes are the first good ones I’ve had since back home.” She felt her heart do something strange when she said “back home.”
Bobby Bingo had skin like a baked potato. A complete vegetable man, Lou Ann thought, though she couldn’t help liking him.
He squinted at her. “You’re not from here? I didn’t think so.” He shook out a wad of odd-sized plastic bags, chose one with red letters on it, and bagged the tomatoes. “Seventy-five,” he said, weighing them up and down in his hand before he put them on the scales. “And an apple for Johnny,” he said, picking out a red apple and shaking it at the baby.
“His name’s Dwayne Ray, and he thanks you very much I’m sure but he don’t have any teeth yet.” Lou Ann laughed. She was embarrassed, but it felt so good to laugh that she was afraid next she would cry.
“That’s good,” Bingo said. “Soon as they get teeth, they start to bite. You know my boy?”
Lou Ann shook her head.
“Sure you do. He’s on TV every night, he sells cars. He’s a real big guy in cars.”
“Sorry,” she said. “I don’t have a TV. My husband took it to his new apartment.” She couldn’t believe, after deceiving her own mother and grandmother for two entire weeks, that she was admitting to a complete stranger on the street that her marriage had failed.
He shook his head. “Don’t worry about it. Makes me sick every time he comes on. Don’t even call himself by his own name-‘Bill Bing’ he says. ‘Come on down to Bill Bing Cadillac,’ he says. ‘Bill Bing has just the thing.’ I always wanted him to be a real big guy, you know. Well, look at him now. He don’t even eat vegetables. If he was here right now he would tell you he don’t know who I am. ‘Get rid of that old truck,’ he says to me. ‘What you need to sell this garbage for? I could buy you a house in Beverly Hills right now,’ he says to me. ‘What?’ I tell him. You crazy? Beverly Hills? Probably they don’t even eat vegetables in Beverly Hills, just Alaska King Crab and bread sticks!’ I tell him. “You want to make me happy, you give me a new Cadillac and I can sell my vegetables out of the trunk.’” Bingo shook his head. ‘You want grapes? Good grapes this week.”
“No, just the tomatoes.” She handed him three quarters.
“Here, take the grapes. Johnny can eat the grapes. Seedless.” He put them in the bag with the tomatoes. “Let me tell you something, tomato lady. Whatever you want the most, it’s going to be the worst thing for you.”
Back at the house she laid down the baby for his nap, then carefully washed the produce and put it in the refrigerator, all the while feeling her mother’s eyes on her hands. “The worst thing for you,” she kept repeating under her breath until she annoyed herself. She moved around the edges of the rooms as though her
