The Bean Trees

Lou Ann found a scrap of paper and wrote down the name of the stop and the number of the bus they would have to take downtown. Ivy handed back the baby and took the paper. She looked at it carefully before she folded it twice, tucked it in her purse, and began helping Granny Logan on with her coat.

"Granny, you're not going to need that coat," Lou Ann said. "I swear it's eighty degrees out there."

"You'll swear yourself to tarnation if you don't watch out. Don't tell me I'm not going to need no coat, child. It's January." Her old hand pawed the air for a few seconds before Ivy silently caught it and corralled it in the heavy black sleeve.

"Lou Ann, honey, don't let him play with that ink pen," Ivy said over her shoulder. "He'll put his eyes out before he even gets a good start in life."

The baby was waving his fist vaguely in the direction of the blue pen in Lou Ann's breast pocket, although he couldn't have grabbed it or picked it up if his little life depended on it.

"All right, Mama," Lou Ann said quietly. She wrapped the baby in a thin blanket in spite of the heat because she knew one or the other of the two women would fuss if she didn't. "Let me help you with the stairs, Granny," she said, but Granny Logan brushed her hand away.

Heat waves rising from the pavement made the brown grass and the palm tree trunks appear to wiggle above the sidewalk, making Lou Ann think of cartoons she had seen of strange lands where palm trees did the hula. They reached the little bus stop with its concrete bench.

"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.