Jelly Beans
Jelly Beans
It was the time of year—mid-summer, long days, hot weather—for the Langdon Farmers Mercantile Association’s annual company picnic and trade show. The event always brought robust crowds of employees and their families as well as fun-seekers of all stripes. There were rides, clowns, musical acts, acrobats, food stalls, crafters selling their wares, exhibits, demonstrations, and one or two local celebrities.
Many of the employees volunteered for setup or cleanup duties. Aaron Fairfield was not one of them—he would much rather spend his time on his work and not be bothered by the trivialities of the picnic. However, his supervisor entrusted him with a task, knowing Aaron was a stickler for numbers, and he’d be as accurate as any human could. His assigned duty: Count all the jelly beans in the enormous, two-foot-high glass jar as part of the Count the Jelly Beans contest in the main exhibit hall. This year’s prize was the latest Sony PlayStation gaming console and all the jelly beans. The enormous, two-foot glass jar was not included.
Aaron commenced his task with the concentration of a spinal surgeon. He didn’t bemoan the fact that he received such a menial chore, but possessing an inquisitive mind, he became quite interested in the total figure he would acquire from his counting. (He even wrote down a prediction before he started.) His method was well-structured: Remove all the jelly beans from the jar, count twenty jelly beans and put them in a cup, put five cupfuls in a bowl, put five bowlfuls in a box, empty the box of 500 back into the jar, make a tally mark, and repeat.
When Aaron took lunch, he taped the lid onto the jar and attached a sign: DO NOT TOUCH! Please. Upon returning from his meal, he washed his hands, donned latex gloves, and resumed the count. As the jar filled to a little more than halfway, Aaron stopped and stared at the colorful contents. A feeling of rapture cascaded over him as he watched the jelly beans swimming around in the jar. His vision became cloudy as numbers and equations tumbled and aligned in front of him. He was having an epiphanic event, and he shivered with heart palpitations and cold sweat as he realized the meaning of what he was witnessing.
Aaron emptied the jar. He now knew what this revelation meant, and it related in no way to the LFMA’s annual picnic. He quickly became engrossed in finding the new total and the meaning behind it and where it would lead him. He realized that there needed to be a recount of the jelly beans, but this time, counting each color was required. There were ten colors: red, blue, yellow, green, orange, pink, purple, brown, black, and white. The recount took more time and more concentration, but in the end, he had his numbers. The figures fit nicely in his head, and the process all made sense: Multiply each color amount by the number of letters in its name (e.g., pink = 4), add the ten products to the total amount of jelly beans, divide by ten (the number of letters in jelly beans), subtract the number of white ones (Aaron didn’t like white jelly beans), divide again by the average length of a jelly bean in millimeters, carry the one, multiply by the average width of a jelly bean, subtract the weight of the glass jar in ounces, and round to the second decimal place. After throwing in a few more calculations, Aaron came up with 874.15—the exact distance in miles to Billings, Montana, heading due north from his present location in Texas.
Billings, Montana, is not the type of town people aspire to move to and start fresh; especially if you’re from Texas and you enjoy the heat. But Billings did have two things going for it, one of which Aaron knew and one he didn’t. And those two things could and would change a man forever, make him see the world differently, and quite possibly make him happy. First of all, Billings contained “it.” Aaron had become aware of this enigmatic fact upon completing his calculations, and “it” became the object of his fascination and his newly blossomed obsession. The other aspect of the small Montana town was something that completely blindsided Aaron. It didn’t show up in any of his equations and could not have been predicted, even within many of his logical extrapolations. This “it” was named Kayla.
Kayla Montgomery was born and bred in Billings, Montana. At the age of 22, she left her hometown to begin a late education at the University of Montana in Missoula. She majored in Fine Arts (she painted) with a minor in Statistics and Data Science (she liked numbers). Kayla held many jobs during her incarceration at U of M, mostly for the money, but also because she liked meeting new people. She had worked security at the airport, running the x-ray scanner and patting down the good-looking guys who “appeared suspicious.” She did some time bartending at a sports bar on Brooks Street, across the way from the Walmart Supercenter. She even volunteered at a local day care teaching children advanced composition and color theory in Fingerpainting 101.
But, after graduating, Kayla moved back to Billings to start her search for a professional career, and she toted around her canvases to sell at art shows and craft fairs. While waiting for the flood of offers from reputable corporations, she once again found employment in the customer service sector. Most recently and most importantly, she planted herself as a server in a chain seafood restaurant, earning decent tips and bringing home paper bags of hush puppies and Cheddar Bay Biscuits, which she generously shared with her cat, Rita Conchita “the Eater” Montgomery, or just Rita for short.
Back in Texas, Aaron Fairfield quit his job, packed his car, and within a few days arrived in Billings and rented an efficiency apartment. His quest consumed every thought and every second of each day. But much to his disappointment, his jelly bean calculations deposited him smack dab in the middle of a Red Lobster restaurant. He wasn’t hungry but decided to stay and think things through. A few minutes later, Kayla introduced herself as his server and asked if he wanted a drink. Aaron ordered a light beer and perused the menu, but his mind was on his faulty figures and the viability of reworking the equations without having the jelly beans at hand. Kayla came back with his Amstel Light and noticed Aaron’s notebook and was intrigued—he didn’t look like a number cruncher; he looked like a gym teacher’s assistant. Aaron blindly pointed at something on the menu when prompted for his dinner selection. Kayla twirled away and let the odd but strangely captivating man do his homework.
A half hour later, Aaron picked at his Admiral’s Feast, and soon Kayla, ever the attentive and curious type, was sitting across from him, sipping an iced tea, listening to the story of how and why he ended up in Montana. Kayla was riveted by Aaron’s account and his mathematical vision, which made him leave everything behind and landed him in her section on the slowest day of the week. He explained his unexplainable blunder and was clearly perplexed at how he came to be sitting in a vinyl booth seat in a seafood eatery marveling over the Fibonacci Sequence with a sandy-haired, besneakered, college-educated artist with a penchant for statistical analysis.
Kayla moved herself and her iced tea to Aaron’s side of the booth. “Mind if I take a look?” she asked, but she had his notebook in front of her before he could even respond. She ran the numbers over in her head, making a few notes of her own on the back of her order pad. “So there are nine colors of jelly beans?” Kayla said this to the notebook, so it took a while for Aaron to realize she was speaking to him.
“Oh. Actually ten colors, but I didn’t include the white ones,” Aaron said, looking at something he speared with his fork and wondering what kind of animal it came from. Kayla exhumed her phone from her pocket and opened the calculator app and ran Aaron’s calculations again. After more scribbling of notes and more punching of numbers, she pushed Aaron’s notebook over to his side and slid her pencil behind her ear, appearing to have reached a conclusion.
“Aaron, you’re off by 2.26 miles,” Kayla said. She showed him the math. “You were right not to include the white jelly beans in the count, but you still needed their length and width in the reactive formula. See?” Aaron looked over her figures, and he cheered up. He also looked at Kayla with admiration and respect—this was a woman who knew her way around a sci-cal. “Oh, and I think this decimal here is a coffee stain.” She pointed to a dot in the middle of a page, and Aaron scratched at it with his fingernail. Kayla and Aaron finished the seafood dinner together and spent the rest of the evening getting to know one another, conversing in normal discourse as well as tech talk. (The word algorithm came up a lot.) By the time they parted, they had made plans to meet for breakfast the following day and to visit the new destination after a quick stop at Home Depot to purchase a shovel.
Kayla’s revised calculations guided them to a small clearing within the dense forest north of Billings. Aaron began digging small holes in a semi-coordinated pattern, revealing nothing but rich soil and poor, bisected earthworms. After several hours, the couple felt exasperated. Kayla asked Aaron if he included the jar’s lid in his initial equation. “I think I may have forgotten about that, Kayla,” he sadly reported. Aaron was good with numbers but a little wonky with real-life objects. Kayla opened her calculator app.
Sixty-three and a half feet further north, they shoveled anew. This time, in hole seventeen, they struck something rigid and positively non-earthwormish. Kayla and Aaron dropped to their knees and began uncovering the clunky thing by hand. It turned out to be an aluminum instrument case, nearly two feet in length, and it seemed to be in decent condition; however, it was locked. They dusted off the debris the best they could, then headed back to Kayla’s house.
After showering and changing clothes, Kayla made fried chicken, roasted potatoes, sautéed kale with pearl onions, and corn on the cob. Aaron bathed while their clothes tumbled together in the dryer. Dinner was delicious, and he once again developed a deeper appreciation for his new friend. In the glow of the fire in the main room, Aaron walked around the newly unearthed treasure chest, trying to form a hypothesis on its contents. He was a logical man and only entertained those possibilities that could feasibly fit inside the confines of the case. Rita, the cat, made an appearance, sniffed the new box-like addition to the household, and proceeded to settle herself on top for a well-deserved nap. Kayla came in with dessert.
“What do you think is in there?” Kayla asked Aaron. They were sitting side by side on the living room sofa, eating vanilla ice cream with walnuts and honey, looking at the case situated between the hardwood floor and the soft, sleeping cat.
“What do you think is in there?” Aaron countered. Kayla smiled and licked her spoon.
“I think... it’s a bomb,” she said, not in an overtly joking way but with a semi-serious overtone. “Or maybe it’s...” Her words trailed off.
“Whatever it is, you’re getting half,” Aaron said flatly. “I wouldn’t have found it without you.”
They made love at midnight, the unopened aluminum case resting undisturbed under Kayla’s queen bed for the time being.
The events that followed in Kayla and Aaron’s life together occurred methodically and unhurriedly, the new couple accepted each approaching milestone—critically significant or not—with grace and placid temperaments:
○ The next morning, Kayla called in to Red Lobster and resigned.
○ A week later, Aaron and Kayla drove to Bozeman for her niece’s wedding.
○ A month after that, Aaron moved in with Kayla, and they purchased new dishware and a squirrel-buster bird feeder.
○ For Aaron’s birthday, Kayla gave him a Red Lobster gift card as a joke.
○ Twelve weeks in, Kayla accepted a position at an eco-conscious nonprofit as a junior financial analyst, and Aaron was hired as a fraud examiner for a charity watchdog organization.
○ Six months later, Aaron changed the oil in Kayla’s 2002 Mitsubishi pickup truck, and Kayla made double-chocolate brownies as payment.
○ For Kayla’s birthday, Aaron arranged a mini vacation to Chicago to see My Morning Jacket in concert.
○ A year to the day after they found the case in the Montana woods, Kayla announced she was pregnant.
* * *
Aaron slid the dusty aluminum instrument case out from under the queen bed. He sat on the floor looking at it, once again running through the possibilities of its contents and contemplating its purpose in his life, as he had done every few months or so. Rita ambled in, circled the man and the strange metallic thing, saw there was no food to be had, and promptly left. Aaron and Kayla’s four-year-old daughter, Mirabel, came in eating half a peanut butter and fig jam sandwich.
“What’s that, Daddy?” the young girl asked.
“I have no idea,” Aaron said. “C’mon, my little jelly bean, let’s go find Mommy. We’re gonna go to the woods and bury it.”
It’s a little hard to read every 14th word but I managed. 🤭
This was such a fun ride! I was teasing about the word count, by the way.