The Bean Trees

by Barbara Kingsolver

If Arizona was a movie you wouldn’t believe it. You’d say it was too corny for words.

I wondered how many other things were lurking around waiting to take a child’s life when you weren’t paying attention.

Jerry Speller, this little twerp who believed that the responsibility of running a burger joint put you a heartbeat away from Emperor of the Universe, said I didn’t have the right attitude, and I told him he was exactly right. I said I had to confess I didn’t have the proper reverence for the Burger Derby institution, and to prove it I threw my hat into the Mighty Miser and turned it on.

I missed Mama so much my chest hurt.

For Lou Ann, life itself was a life-threatening enterprise. Nothing on earth was truly harmless.

“Sometimes I get homesick for Pittman and it’s as ugly as a mud stick fence,” I said. “A person would have to just ache for a place where they make things as beautiful as this.”

Turtle woke up in one of those sweet, eye-rubbing moods that kids must know by instinct as a means of saving the human species from extinction.

I didn’t want to believe the world could be so unjust. But of course it was right there in front of my nose. If the truth was a snake it would have bitten me a long time ago. It would have had me for dinner.

“How can I just be upset about Turtle, about a grown man hurting a baby, when the whole way of the world is to pick on people that can’t fight back?”

She told me that maybe one out of every four little girls is sexually abused by a family member. Maybe more.

Nobody can protect a child from the world. That’s why it’s the wrong thing to ask, if you’re really trying to make a decision.” “So what’s the right thing to ask?” “Do I want to try? Do I think it would be interesting, maybe even enjoyable in the long run, to share my life with this kid and give her my best effort and maybe, when all’s said and done, end up with a good friend.”

It’s funny how people don’t give that much thought to what kids want, as long as they’re being quiet.

Here were a mother and her daughter, nothing less. A mother and child—in a world that could barely be bothered with mothers and children—who were going to be taken apart. Everybody believed it. Possibly Turtle believed it. I did.

“Oh, don’t you worry about me, I don’t care if I drop over tomorrow. I’m having me a time.”