KATE’S TWO DAUGHTERS are working behind the counter of the ice cream shop Kate and her ex-husband once owned. The girls wear robin’s-egg-blue polo shirts with SANDRA’S—Kate’s mother’s name—stitched in gold across their chests, their name tags just above. The girls are bird-breasted, Kate thinks, but not wispy, not fragile. Their hair—Elizabeth’s dark, Zadie’s coffee and milk—pulled back in ponytails, which makes the freckled slope of their foreheads and noses more pronounced, like Kate’s. The girls are talking to customers—wide-eyed, polite attentiveness for the adults; rolled-eyed smirking for the languid, horse-faced boys from their high school, shambling in line. Elizabeth, Kate’s younger daughter, at the front register, her face roiled with the first joys of being noticed and confusion over change amounts. Zadie, distant-eyed and aloof, at the drive-through window, leaning out into the shadowy late afternoon. Half swallowed up, Kate thinks, like an offering.
The ice cream shop smells of waffle cones. After their late shifts, the girls bring home this smell pleated in their clothes and hair—how they hate it, this baked-in dark sweetness. Conefication, they call it. Before bed, the girls will try scrubbing it from their skin. But to Kate—lying fitfully in the dark alongside her sleeping then-husband Ray—it’s the smell of gratefulness. All day, she’s fasted on the girls’ absence. And now the thick, sugary smell of them is everywhere. Slowly, slowly, she cautions herself. The starved can only take in so much at once.
Some of Kate’s friends think the girls are standoffish, too much in their own heads, troubled. Those Ulrich girls, they say. Kate knows this. There are whispers about her permissiveness, about drive-through window bartering of wine coolers and rum for sundaes and shakes. Grass-fire rumors about older boys and mushrooms in Zilker Park (conjured up, she suspects, by Sarah Haven, whose son was hauled off to alternative school and whose husband sleeps with men). The girls have tested Kate, it’s true. There was the time Zadie was caught shoplifting cosmetics. Pink coral lipstick. Or was it condoms? Kate decides it was both for continuity’s sake.
Now out in the ice cream shop parking lot, the last of the sun flares off car hoods. A chill is settling in. Some of the dropouts and hangers-on clown and take photos in front of Hollis Finger’s beat-up art car, its roof and hood tattooed with a mosaic of seashells, buttons, beads, metal army men, and hairless dolls. Hollis Finger, who because of a wartime head injury can’t find the mental thread on which to string the everyday beads of his life, looks out with indigestion at the scene from one of the shop’s cramped tables.
Meredith—Mare, the girls call her, because of her horse riding and sometimes, it’s true, because of her incisors, which jut at odd angles—walks in through the front door fifteen minutes late. Zadie looks over from the drive-through. Elizabeth smirks. Meredith—her mind in full gallop—has forgotten her SANDRA’S shirt. She makes wide eyes at the girls, meaning, of course, that she has a secret. Maneuvers through the line, then around the end of the counter, ties an apron around her waist. Zadie says, I hope it was worth it, and slams the drive-through register drawer closed as if Meredith’s finger is inside.