in front of Bill but now stood with the agility that comes with a daily yoga discipline. “So, it’s not so much about you as it is the shaved ice and sugar.”
“Completely understandable.” Dini offered a distant high five to Bill, who stood to greet her. He wore baggy cargo shorts, frayed at the hem, and a Jazz Ramblers T-shirt that was probably once a vibrant yellow but had now faded into something soft and undefinable. He brought out his wallet, extracted a few bills, and handed them over to Arya.
“What flavor do you want?” Arya asked, taking the money.
“Are you kidding?” Bill crouched, made his hands into grasping claws, and growled, “Tiger blood.”
Bea screamed and ran the circumference of the blanket while he chased her, roaring.
“Every time,” Arya said, grabbing Bea’s hand on the next lap. “He doesn’t even like it. Just gets it to make her scream.”
“It’s a safe scream,” Dini said, falling into step beside her friend.
“So.” Arya nudged her arm. “Tell me about breakfast.”
“It was…good.”
“He showed up?”
Dini had forgotten her one, panicked text to her friend. “He did.”
“And?” Arya let Bea run ahead a few steps with the warning to stay where she could be seen.
“He gave me a picture.”
“His picture? Strange for a first date, but let me see—”
“Not his picture, obviously. Hedda’s. The same from the front of her book. Only now I know that picture has been cropped, because the original is dated—October 1914. Three years before coming to San Antonio. And the inscription written in the front of the book? It’s handwritten on the back of the photograph. But it’s not written in Hedda’s hand.”
“Do you ever stop to think how sad it is that you can recognize the handwriting of a woman who’s been dead for a hundred years?”
“She hasn’t been dead for a hundred years,” Dini said, long past being defensive about Hedda. “This is something new. I always thought the quote was about her jewels and her love for her late husband and the truth about what—what happened. But now? They might not even be her own words.”
They had arrived at the raspa truck. A hand-lettered sign written on poster board listed all the flavors of shaved ice available, with index cards of additional choices tacked along the edge.
“Read them to me!” Bea whined, tugging on Arya’s long linen skirt.
“I’m not going to read them all to you,” Arya said with a sigh, intimating she’d tangled with this request before. “Tell me what you want, and I’ll bet they have it.”
Dini scanned the list. “Why write ‘blueberry’ and ‘raspberry’ and ‘blueberry-raspberry’? We all know we can combine flavors. Without the combinations, they’d knock this list down to”—she calculated—“twelve flavors. Tops.”
“You do this every time,” Arya said with the same edge of maternal impatience.
“And I’m right every time.” She pointed at a decorative card. “Bea? Do you want to try a unicorn raspa? It’s every flavor of the rainbow. And unicorns fly. So tigers can’t eat them.”
Arya shot her a familiar look that said, Don’t fill my girl’s head with nonsense, but acquiesced to Bea’s enthusiasm. She folded her arms and took on a mock-serious tone. “And do you have money, young lady?”
Dini took her cue, fetching the silver dollar she had ever-ready in her pocket. Palming it, she reached down and behind Bea’s ear, dropped it into her fingers, and touched the metal to the girl’s little lobe. “Here. You can use this.”
Bea’s eyes grew wide, then suspicious. “Is this real money?”
“It’s unicorn money,” Dini said, making a mental note to get more from the bank this week.
“Can I keep it, then? Daddy already gave Mom money to pay for the snow cones.”
“Put it in your pocket and say, ‘Thank you,’” Arya said. “Go wait with your dad. You can come back when we’re at the front of the line.”
Bea complied with the smallest protest, and both Arya and Dini kept their eyes trained on her until she was safely at Bill’s side. As they watched, Dini told Arya everything—how Quin showed up in running gear, how he carefully transported her book, how he’d read what she told him to read, and that she could keep the picture. As they inched forward in the raspa line, she told her friend too about the text she saw, seeing it clearly even as she dug her toe into the grass.
“Relax,” Arya said, soothingly, “maybe she’s his sister.”
“Dying? With a heart-eyes emoji?”
“Okay. Maybe not a sister. But come on, Dini, I know