Mango season is short, and my mom talks about it the way other people talk about holidays. She grew up eating them warm off a tree, and every summer she says the same thing while she stirs whatever we could get: "One good mango. That is all I want." This year I decided I would get her one. I had eleven dollars and change saved in a sock, and I figured a mango costs, what, a dollar? I was a kid. I did not know yet that the price of fruit depends on where you are standing.
The closest place to buy food from our apartment is a convenience store eight minutes on foot, sitting in the dead center of what the city maps call a food desert. You can smell it before you reach it — hot asphalt, fryer grease, the sweet chemical breath of the slushy machine. Inside, the light is the color of a headache. There is no produce aisle. There is no produce. There are chips dusted in powder the color of traffic cones — Red 40, Yellow 6, MSG, and oil that has been rethought by chemists more than once. There are honey buns in plastic that will outlive us all, ingredient lists that read like a lab inventory: high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated palm kernel oil, potassium sorbate, BHT "to preserve freshness," as if anything in that store had ever been fresh. Two-liter sodas with more sugar than a kid should see in a week. Energy drinks stacked at eye level for children.
I asked the man at the counter, mostly by chance, on my way out: "You ever have mangos?" He looked at me like I had asked for a live flamingo. Somebody behind me laughed. I did not wait to hear the answer become a joke. I put my head down and left quickly, the bell on the door ringing behind me like it was hurrying me along.
Ten dollars and four cents, with tax, for one mango. It was everything I had, and I paid it.
Two buses
The nearest supermarket is not near. I waited twenty minutes for the 9 bus and rode it past the pawn shops and the church and the lot where the grocery store used to be, before it closed when I was little. The supermarket at the end of the line is the kind with carts and coupons and a produce section that is mostly potatoes and bagged salad going soft at the edges. I walked every aisle twice. Then I asked the cashier, and she chuckled — not mean, just tired, like she had answered this before. "Baby, we don't carry mangos," she said. "Try the fancy store across town." She said "fancy" the way you say a country you will never visit.
So I took another bus, a long one, into the nicest part of town. You can tell when you cross over. The trees get older and the sidewalks get newer. The bus let me off in front of a grocery store with a name in thin gold letters, the kind of store with a cheese room and a man misting the lettuce like it was orchids. And there, in a wooden crate under a little chalkboard sign — MANGOS, IN SEASON — was exactly one mango left. I held it with both hands. At the register the screen said $9.29, and then tax, and the total came to ten dollars and four cents. For one mango. It was everything I had, and I paid it, and the cashier wrapped it in paper like it was glass.
The ride home
The bus stop back was a quarter mile down a road built for cars and nobody else. No sidewalk — just a strip of grass between the traffic and the fences, and me drudging through it with a ten-dollar mango held to my chest, cars pulling their wind past my ear, thinking: even here, in the nicest part of town, they did not build a way for a person to walk. I had spent the whole day learning the same lesson at different prices. The distance is the product. Everything else is markup.
Then a bus slowed beside me that was not at a stop, and the doors sighed open, and it was the driver from the 9 — the first bus, hours ago. She must have recognized the kid with the sock money. "But I don't have enough," I said from the grass, because I didn't; the mango had all of it. She just chuckled and waved me on, the way you wave someone into their own house.
I took the seat behind her and held the paper bundle in my lap like it was warm. Out the window the nice part of town let go of us block by block — the old trees, the misted lettuce, the chalkboard signs — and I thought about mangos the whole way. About how my mom would close her eyes at the first bite. About how sweetness like that grows on trees, and still, somehow, it took three buses, ten dollars, and a stranger's kindness to carry one home.