all ages
Disclaimer: Anything you recognize from the Trixie Belden books—in this story or any others I have posted—belongs to Western Publishing (Golden Books), now a part of random house, and is used without permission. No profit has been made (or will be made) off of any of these stories.
A Can of Beans
by Alexi
A can slides across the wooden counter. “I’d like to get this, please.”
The voice is polite, if wary, and I pull myself from my paper to survey its owner.
Freckles, a smattering of them. A tall, athletic build. And the hair. It’s wavy, in desperate need of a trim, and positively blazing red.
I stand up, and my chair scrapes against the floor. Loudly. “Sure, kid. Is that all?”
Green eyes, a little shadowed, stare back at me. His gaze is direct. “Yes, sir.”
I weigh the can in my hand and turn it over. Baked beans. An odd purchase, but not half as odd as the fact that he’s here in my small village store, alone, and I’ve never seen him before in my life. I know—I’d remember hair like that, a face like that, with its mixture of frankness and reserve. I look at him again, and this time I catch the details that I had missed: The shirt, wrinkled even for a teenage boy, with a rip that travels the length of his sleeve, and the way he tenses when, a second later, the bell hanging on the door chings.
But it’s only the cat. “Mom and Dad let you out for a camping trip?” I ask, not because I really believe it, but because I wish I do.
The pause is too long. “Yeah,” the young man says slowly, and his face becomes beet red in the instant it takes to speak the word. All of the sudden he seems to find the countertop, with its battered, time-worn surface, to be fascinating.
He’s about as good a liar as my wife is a carpenter. “That’s fun. I loved camping when I was a kid.”
The redhead frowns, and I can see he’s angry. At me, maybe, or the question. Or the world. I catch the glimmer in his eyes, and it’s my turn to frown, because he’s upset, too.
I don’t know what to say.
“The beans, sir?” The firm request draws me out of my indecision, and I hand the food over, hesitating as I do. It’s the only thing keeping him here; the only thing, perhaps, keeping him anywhere.
The lad reaches for the can in silence and pulls a tattered bill out of his jeans. I open my mouth, intending to tell him it’s free. The set of his jaw warns me not to.
I take the bill, and hate myself for it. But how can I do otherwise when his eyes are filled with misery and I have an inkling that the only thing keeping him standing up the way he does, so ramrod straight, is his pride?
So I let it go, and stuff the money into my pocket instead, where I hope it crumbles.
“Good afternoon.” It comes out as a mumble, and he blushes still darker, but doesn’t slow his retreat. No doubt he is hoping, as the door chings shut behind him, that I will go home tonight and never think of him again. Certainly he hopes that I will stay put, here in the soundlessness behind my wooden counter, until he has gone. For about three seconds, I hope so too.
The sun is low on the horizon, and I blink for no other reason than because it obscures my vision. I blink again, and it is not because this brave young man is about to board his bike and ride away and he’s all alone, in a way that I pray to God my sons will never be. It is because the wind out here is strong, and something got caught in my eye. Nothing more.
It will kill me not to help him. So I say the only thing I can think of, and probably it won’t make a difference, but it might. “Son?”
His young face twists, and I could kick myself for having hurt him. Grief, and the shadow it leaves behind, is unmistakable.
“That’s a nice bike you’ve got there.” It is. Used, but solid. The redhead pauses, his foot on the peddle, as the intensity of the sun darkens him into a silhouette. In contrast, my face must for him be in sharp relief. “If I had a bike like that, I know I…wouldn’t want to stop riding for a long time. I’d want to keep going. But you’ve got to be heading somewhere. That’s important. Not just away from something else. Alright?”
A gust of wind whistles, and then the silence is absolute. Flawless. Only the two of us exist in this moment—just a runaway youth and a man who wants to touch a soul.
The quiet stretches on. My fumbling paragraph has blown it, I am certain—it has conveyed too little, or else far too much.
Finally he speaks, and his voice is strangely husky. “Goodbye, sir.” One long, jean-clad leg swings over the bike, and he is off. In an instant, I think, he will be gone. He will not look back.
I am mistaken.
At the furthermost edge of the clearing the redhead halts. When he turns toward me, the sunlight has softened his features; the words, when they come, are softer too. “Thank you for the beans.”
Perhaps that is all he means. But it hits me harder than it ought to, for such a simple phrase. I raise my hand in farewell, and watch until the silent figure vanishes from sight.
And I can’t help but think that, after all, what I’d said had been just enough.
The End
Author’s Notes: This one-shot was inspired by the following comment, made by Jim in Mysterious Code: “Baked beans were my daily fare when I lived in the woods by myself after Ten Acres burned. Mine came cold out of a can, though.” It stuck in my mind, and here you are. :D Enjoy!