“I’m not going to steal,” I said to her, real nice and loud. There was nobody else in the store to crane their necks around and wonder what we were fighting about—at least, not that I could see. “It really sucks that you’ve already decided I’m going to steal and you don’t even know me. That sucks, you know? I would never do that to you—or, actually, I’d never do it to anybody.”
She didn’t bother to answer, just stared at me with her hands on her hips, which also sucked.
They do this to you when they can tell you’re on the street. The younger and dirtier you are, the more you get this everywhere you go. And I’m always thinking, Damn it, I’m the same person I was when I lived at home with my parents like a regular kid, like everybody else, but I can’t show them that, and they’ll never see it, and the whole thing just sucks.
And, by the way, I didn’t ever steal. Bodhi stole when he needed to, but I never ate anything he stole, because it wouldn’t have been right.
I took my money out of my pocket, the dollar bill, and the forty-two cents in change, and I held it out for her to see, even though she was a pretty long way away.
“I have enough for a banana,” I said, “and I’m going to buy it, I’m not going to steal it, and I just need to know if it’s okay to take one off the bunch and just buy the one.”
I probably should have gone ahead and done it and not even stopped to ask, because I couldn’t afford a whole bunch, and if she said no I would’ve walked all that way for nothing.
“There are some loose ones there in the corner,” she said, and pointed over to the left-hand side of the bin where the bananas were sitting.
I found a real nice one, and weighed it, and looked at the price per pound, and did the math in my head, and figured out I could afford an apple, too, and picked one out. And the whole time she never stopped staring at me. I got a Fuji, because that’s my favorite kind. I hadn’t had a Fuji apple since I left Utah with Bodhi.
I took them both to the checkout counter, and the woman took my money and asked me if I wanted a bag, but I said no because I figured they wouldn’t last that long and it was just another thing to throw away. Just more trash on the street in LA, and I felt like I was living in a world overflowing with trash.
Just as she handed me back my eighteen cents change, kind of dropping it into my hand so her clean hand didn’t touch my dirty one, she said, “Sorry, hon.”
Which I guess was nice.
I said, “That’s okay,” but it wasn’t completely true. I mean, it was and it wasn’t, but I figured it was better than if she hadn’t said that.
I ate the banana on the long walk back. I could never bring myself to call that place Bodhi and I had been living “home” because that would’ve been ridiculous. It was never anybody’s home and never could be. It was just a place to hide at night. It was good—the banana, I mean—but it didn’t last long enough, and when it was gone I wasn’t sure it had been worth everything I’d gone through to get it.
I dropped the peel into a trash bin on a corner because I don’t like to litter. Not that one more piece of trash would make much difference around where we’d been living, but it was just a thing that mattered to me.
I decided to save the apple, so I put it in the pocket of my pants, which was sort of a weird and bad thing, because there shouldn’t have been room for an apple in my pants pocket. When I left Utah I would’ve had to mash an apple up into applesauce to get it to fit in the pocket of those pants.
Then I looked up, and on the sidewalk on the next block I saw something, but I didn’t know what kind of a thing it was. It was under the streetlight, and it didn’t look like trash.
I walked closer, and kept looking at it, and when I got closer it started to look like a kid’s car seat, like the kind my mom used to use with my little sisters to strap them proper into the car. I guess she used one with me, too, but I was little so I don’t really remember.
Anyway, here’s the thing: It wasn’t trash—or, at least, it didn’t look like trash. It looked like a nice, new one that nobody in their right mind would throw away, but I figured when I got closer I would see a strap that got broken, or some other thing that would explain why somebody pitched it. But this other little voice in my head said, No, maybe it’s fine, maybe it’s a real find and maybe I could sell it. Take it to a pawnshop or something, and Bodhi and I could have the best meal we’ve ever had since we’ve known each other.
I didn’t know Bodhi when I had a family and a house.
Sometimes Bodhi came back with money at night but we never spent much of it on food. He was saving it up so we could get a real place to live. I knew
