The guy said, “Sweet,” and took the bag. His fingers were long and elegant and dirty. In my imagination, he’d been a piano player once. “Mahalos,” he said.
“Aloha.” Ana flashed a smile. With her smile and the sunglasses and the sun glinting off her wig, making it even more orange, she looked younger, I thought, and kind of like a movie star.
We made our way slowly down Ali’i, giving sandwiches to anyone who looked even a little bit homeless. The big Hawaiian guy with the tiny mustache sitting at the bus stop drinking beer out of a brown paper bag yelled, “Toss it ova!” So I did. It was a bad throw and I was impressed when he caught it. “Mana thanks you!” he bellowed.
The girl in shredded clothes lying on the sidewalk next to her cardboard sign—it simply said HELP—probably didn’t want to get up either, so I tossed a sandwich by her feet.
We gave sandwiches to the group of teenagers under the banyan tree who were very friendly and obviously up to no good. None of them wore shirts but they all wore backpacks. “They’re selling pot,” Ana told me. I instinctively looked for Cam and Jed around the tree and was glad when I didn’t find them.
After Ali’i, we did the parking lots behind Ali’i, where there were even more half-homeless people. “The tweakers like the shade back here,” Ana told me. We found two gaunt girls in a boxy patch of shade behind the Lava Java dumpster who introduced themselves as Marigold and Petunia in low, just-woke-up voices. Their matching eyes were huge and black and their faces were like skulls. I gave them two sandwiches each and then—I couldn’t help it; I was such a mom—I said, “You girls are too skinny!” Which they took as a compliment. “Thank you,” they said, looking at each other like they were looking into a mirror, their ghost bodies floating like jellyfish.
Hitting our hungry targets with sandwiches became surprisingly normal surprisingly fast. It felt like we’d been doing this for much longer than only thirty minutes of our lives. And it was fun. I liked being in a car with no top. I liked seeing people be grateful for our food. I liked that we were eating Red Vines from the Costco tub Ana kept in her car. I had wanted change, and here change was and it was palpable. Maybe there was a greater force. Or maybe there wasn’t. Either way, I liked how I felt in this car, doing these good deeds. In the moment a hungry person would take a sandwich from my hands, I could forget about the questionable things I had done in my life. All the reasons to hate myself seemed further away, and I felt almost free.
As we drove on, looking for more targets, the sun dipping lower in the sky and our sandwich stockpile dwindling, Ana told me more about her past. Well, because I asked her to. Her mysterious youth when she hadn’t been an upstanding (or “outstanding,” as she had said) citizen. I wanted to know what she’d meant by that. I couldn’t ask directly, of course, so I kept it vague. “Tell me more about yoooou,” I said.
Ana bit her Red Vine. “Do you want my whole life story or just the highlights?”
“Whatever you want to tell me.” I took a Red Vine for myself because hers looked good.
She took a deep breath. “Welllllllll…”
And this was what she told me:
Ana was born in the “armpit of the world,” also known as Trenton, New Jersey. Her parents never married. Her dad worked in a factory assembling guns? She wasn’t sure. Her mother may have said that once, but her mother said a lot of things. She was insane. “She was the kind of mother they arrest on Cops.” They moved around a lot. Couch-surfing. Welfare. Poor as shit. In photos of Ana as a kid, she wears Goodwill scraps and looks tenement-dirty. When her mother’s in the photos, she’s drinking a canned lite beer she probably begged off some horny guy in a trailer park. Some of those guys she married. “Long trail of abusive stepfathers,” she said. “They all knew to hit below the face so no one would see my bruises at school.”
Her mom died when she was seventeen. “Cirrhosis. It was better that she left this world. Her time here was done.” And after that, Ana got her GED. “For both of us,” she said. “My mom only made it to seventh grade.” She went to community college. Still in New Jersey at this point. But then she had a thing with her biology teacher. She was pretty; he was thirty-six. She was failing the class. She didn’t understand biology, but she did understand men. Yes, she’d used her charm to get the things she wanted in life more than once. And sometimes—but rarely—she’d used her body. Growing up the way she did, it only made sense for her to be this way. “And if you’re judging me for that, Nancy, well…that’s okay. I spent a lot of time judging myself. Years and years of self-loathing.”
Anyway, fast-forward. Biology teacher gets fired, Ana drops out, gets a job at a bank. (“I cannot believe they let me work there.”) It was a new chapter. JCPenney skirts to the knee, alarm clock set at six. New boyfriend with a job who also shopped at JCPenney. They move in together, he proposes, she says yes but means no. The second after she says yes, she looks at his dumb young face and thinks, Shit, what did I just do?
Meanwhile at the bank job, Ana had been skimming money. It wasn’t worth explaining how. “I’m a natural-born hustler,” she said. “I saw an opportunity and I took it.” By the time her boyfriend became her fiancé, she had fifteen grand in cash hidden in the AC vent, which she would open and close with the screwdriver she kept in her nightstand. (“The vent thing—I saw it on TV. But I didn’t know if real people did that. I was always worried. What if the AC broke and my cash got wet? Or blew deeper into the vent?”)
After the proposal, she started to feel itchy. The fiancé—he was just so nice. Translation: not interesting. Not interesting at all. And their little prefab house and the cheap polyester suits, and then at the bank some stuff happened. It wasn’t good. Basically, they were figuring out it was an inside job.
“So one day—one regular, boring Wednesday in Trenton—I went home early with stomach cramps. Jerry was at work. And I remember sitting on my pleather couch, thinking, Holy shit, I can’t do this anymore. I just cannot.”
Ana pulled the Jeep into a parking spot outside Longs and said, “So I opened the AC vent, took the cash, loaded the car, and drove.”