One Orange

I bought a woman an orange at Safeway yesterday. I was just behind her in the checkout line, watching her rummage through her small purse to find the fifty-seven cents the clerk had rung up.

I waited, then I waited impatiently, then I realized she wasn’t going to find any money.

“Put that orange on my bill,” I said to the clerk who was gazing over the woman’s head into the distance. Discretion or indifference, I couldn’t tell.

“Oh, thank you,” she said, zipping her bag and giving me a small smile. “I guess I left my money at home.”

She didn’t look so poor she wouldn’t have a dime on her. Her clothes were clean and her hair was tidy, yet I sensed a certain despair. Okay, maybe I was projecting as I looked down at my pricey artisan bread and two quarts of ice-cream. The clerk would take three cents off my tab because I had my own bag.

“Do I need to put in my discount number?” I muttered as I watched her walk away with the one orange in her hand. Oranges grow in every yard here. School kids climb our trees on the way home and toss the peels into the street. Not just oranges but lemons, grapefruit, tangerines just drop to the ground uneaten. Fifty-seven cents out the door right here in Paradise.

“Naw, she put her number in already. I’ll run you through on that.” He toted me up. “You’ve saved, let’s see, one dollar and fifteen cents.”

Last summer I walked down to the Dairy Queen to try a flame-broiled cheeseburger with pickles because the grill smoke was simply irresistible. I was finishing it up as I walked back to the house with a mouthful of strangely seasoned meat made of God knows what, the usual junk burger, when a young woman came down the sidewalk toward me.

“Excuse me,” she said, eying the last drippy bite of burger. “Could you spare some money so I could get lunch?”

My mouth full, I nodded and fished out a fiver.

Later I talked with a car salesman about selling my ten-year-old car. He had to unlock his glassed-in, open-to-view showroom office to protect customer documents from lookyloo’s who steal social security numbers right off his desk. Apparently we are beyond shredding.

“You’ll make more money if you sell your car yourself on e-Bay,” he advised. “But be sure to get green cash.”

He meant, don’t take even a cashier’s check. Uh oh. I told him the orange story.

“My mother-in-law gave a cold Gatorade to a man at a traffic light,” he said. “It was broiling hot and the guy was pouring sweat. But he threw it at her, hard, and screamed, ‘I don’t want no Gatorade, I just want money, bitch!’”

Call me a sucker but I gotta buy hamburgers and hand out fivers. Now, how many oranges should I buy?