Canned Greens

Cecelia opened her can of raviolis with a satisfying pop and peel. A quick slosh into the bowl left sauce on the counter as well as her sleeve but she paid no attention to that and returned to the box of books that she couldn’t wait to get open as soon as the door to the microwave was shut. She opened the musty box from the local thrift shop and started stacking each book off to the side. She’d signed up for their new Box of Books a month program and so far was the only monthly subscription she had ever even wanted to keep up. It was gold; there was nothing as satisfying as finding a decent story after so many terrible ones.

She stuck her hand into a bag of baby carrots and bit the end off of one, and tossed it to her dog, Sophie. One bite for her and another for Sophie while she sorted the box into two piles.

That book looked the most promising - it went to the bottom of the stack for last. That book looked just horrid - she would read that first. That book looked even worse - she would actually read that one first. Then, what was that? A tiny black book with no name on the cover fell out when she lifted up the last book.

The cover of it was soft, buttery even, and the pages cut exactly to the edge; clean and consistent, as beat up as it was. She turned it over to find slits that looked like the book had once had an elastic closure. “This is a journal,” she said to either Sophie or herself, neither of them could tell. She felt strange opening it, like she was trespassing on someone’s life. But when she did she found nothing but numbers, commas, and decimals.

She turned her phone on and pressed the number four to speed dial Tad.

“Hey, what’s up?”

“Are you busy?”

“I’m at work but I can chat for a few minutes.”

“Oh, right.” She slapped her hand to her head. Other people had important, full-time jobs. “You know what, it’s not a big deal, we can talk later.”

“No, no, I’m going out for a walk now. What’s going on?”

She conceded and told him about the journal. He asked what pattern of numbers there were and she told him each row had a new number on it that was under 50 with a bunch of digits following the decimal point. Then there was a comma and another set of numbers just the same except with a minus in front of it.

“There’s no inscription on the front cover?”

“No.”

“No words at all, in the whole book?”

“Just a few here and there,” she told him. “Like ‘roses,’ ‘flat,’ and ‘view.’ Do you think it has to do with money?”

“Well, everything has to do with money, but these sound like GPS coordinates. Maybe they lead to money?”

Sophie came over and stuck her head in Cecelia’s hand. Cecelia rubbed her big, brown head. “Want to go for a walk?” she asked Sophie.

“I love your sense of adventure!” Tad said on the other end of the phone and Cecelia blinked, not realizing she had said that out loud. Let me wrap up a few things here and I’ll pick you up. Be there in 30!”

“O-Okay. See you soon.”

~

She was in the middle of a patch of trees, turning in circles, looking at her phone. Sophie had long since laid down, airing her dramatic, German Shepherd tongue, patiently waiting for her human companions to figure out which direction they were going to stumble to next.

“I got it!” Tad shouted and dropped the shovel he was carrying so he could grab a box with both hands.

Cecelia rushed over to find him holding a very dirty, plastic container. “I kind of figured it would have a lock or something. That can’t be it.”

“Well, let’s see,” he said and grinned up at her.

Inside was a big box of junk. There was a yo-yo, three different packs of gum, an energy drink, two action figures, a stress ball, and an unopened journal.

“Henry’s Geocache,” she read off the lid. “Take one, leave one. That’s kind of fun.” She picked up the stress ball still in a new wrapper, and looked in her bag for something of similar value. She plopped in two rolls of unopened mints and unwrapped her new stress ball.

“Hmm.” Was all Tad said.

~

They kept going back out; Cecelia would look for items to trade, Sophie would disintegrate sticks, and Tad would stomp on the ground, looking for hollow spots. He stopped grinning, became even snappier, and eventually purchased a metal detector, the first time finding an unsurpassed treasure indeed.

Cecelia couldn’t stop laughing. “Want some peas?” she asked, holding out the 42 oz can of peas they had just unearthed from the ground, which was so heavy she had to set it down to wipe the tears from her face.

“Why would someone bury this?” he growled out. “What about the entries with the words next to them?” he asked, wrenching the book out of her bag.

He picked out the one that said, “view,” and they drove there next. There wasn’t even a box, but Cecelia didn’t try too hard to find it; the view was too good.

“Huh, imagine that,” she said.

She even started going off on her own, when Tad was busy, but not for the same reasons. She enjoyed it in the forest, just her and Sophie. Then, one day on the side of a hill overlooking a valley, she found an Altoid tin with one thousand dollars in cash. It was just laying on the ground right next to the cache like it had fallen out of a pocket. Cecelia was stunned; what was she going to tell Tad?

Nothing, she decided. It was probably a one-off, not at all related to the box nearby or the journal. Was it?

~

Then, the next week in a ditch near a small bridge to Cecelia’s utter shock he found another tin just like it.

Before she could stop herself she said, “Another one?!”

Tad was beside himself. “A thousand dollars! Another one? A thousand dollars! What do you mean another one? I knew it; you found money and kept it from me.” He turned his back on her and her heart felt a great dagger had pierced it. “Which one did you find it at?” he finally asked.

She took out the book and handed it to him, pointing.

“Look!” he shrieked.

“What?” Cecelia shrieked back. He showed her the book and an extra dot that appeared below the decimals of the longitude and latitude on the one she found earlier and on this one.

“No, it can’t be,” she grabbed the book. “Those are just accidental dots.”

“There’s only one way to find out,” he snatched the book back and took off down the street. He was running so fast that she ignored the pit in her stomach that made her think he might actually leave her behind and raced after him anyway, calling after Sophie.

But they didn’t find anything at the next spot, probably because it was dark and cold and Sophie refused to get up after a while so Cecelia insisted that they either come back later or abandon the search altogether. But then they found a stash of cash in a hot chocolate tin the next week, and none the week after that, but then two in one day the week after that, and then Cecelia lost count but they still had barely touched most of the locations in the book.

“I think,” Tad concluded, “that the mystery is officially solved, but we’re not looking hard enough at each location.”

Cecelia was blending a smoothie in her new blender. She pretended not to hear him to give herself a little more time to respond. She was torn: she could use more cash, she was just a part-time worker trying to pay off student loans after all. But on the other hand the person who lost this book might be looking in these spots for the money, too. Plus there were people that needed money more than her. She said so.

“So what?” was his reply. “We can easily be looking for geocaches in case anyone catches us. I bet the person who wrote those down isn’t even around anymore.” He made a throat slashing movement.

Cecelia drew back. “Why would you say that?”

“And anyway, about your humble lack of need for money — everyone struggles all the time in this life and you’ve got to just take what you can! Relax; get out in nature and find some more money, honey!”

Cecelia was confused by this speech. “How is me hoarding money going to fix everyone else’s struggles.”

“It’s not,” he replied. “Because you’re no better than anyone else.” His face was red and the door slam made Cecelia’s teeth shudder.

~

Three weeks later Tad still wasn’t returning her texts and the knot in her chest still wasn’t fading. She had worked the stress ball extra hard recently and kept from going out again, not feeling it was right to do so without him.

Finally the loneliness got to her and she suddenly wanted, no needed, to get outside again. She tore her apartment apart looking for the journal, a mad desire in her to find out what the “precipice” was and what the last entry looked like. But she couldn’t find the book anywhere.

The book was gone and so was her friend.

She looked at her new blender and thought of the smoothie she had made with him while having their last fight. Then she looked at the other treasures she had found since finding the journal. She had some new clothes, a weekly subscription to a meal kit, a new video game, and a spare set of sheets. But more importantly she had the largest can of peas ever made, a well loved chew toy for Sophie, the best scone recipe, 4/5ths of a Matryoshka, and her well-used stress ball.

Cecelia took some cans to the food pantry in town, including the giant can of peas. The next week she joined a geocaching community online and planned out her first trip without the book, but with a new attitude and a new harness for Sophie.

A story aired that week on the local news about a family who had unexpectedly come into possession of $20,000; hidden, apparently in a giant can of peas. When they went to open it for a big family meal, instead of thousands of grayish green vegetables in salted water they found thousands of green slips of paper wadded into a circle.

“We had been saving up for my daughter’s college when my husband lost his job. With my mother-in-law sick at home and our oldest son just injured in football, we didn’t know how we were going to pay our rent this month. We just want to say thank you to the donor.”

“How much was in the can?” the newsreporter asked.

“It was a lot of bills! We were counting all night. Something like $20,000.”

“$20,000?! Whoa. Are you at least going to buy a new TV?”

“Maybe. A new TV, a new pair of shoes for everyone. We are so blessed, we don’t know what else.”

“Well, folks, maybe that will teach you to eat, or at least open, your veggies. Back to you, Marissa.”

And Marissa was ready to comment but Cecelia didn’t even know what had happened because she was busy climbing a mountain with Sophie.