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Spanish accent.
    Hector cupped his ear. “A donde?”
    â€œThe mall,” Lyle’s mother said. “The Perfect Scoop. For my daughter’s job . Ella vende helado. ”
    Hector ducked down and smiled at Lyle in the passenger seat, as though she were six years old. She felt like flashing him her tits. “Que bueno.”
    â€œ Le gustan los libros. Siempre. How do you say it? A worm.”
    Lyle’s mother stuck her finger out the window and began to wiggle it around. Hector squinted at it from the guardhouse.
    â€œShe still goes to work?” he said finally, looking concerned.
    â€œClaro que si!” her mother said, smiling.
    She said good-bye and Hector relaxed back into his chair, believing no doubt that Lyle had worms. Lyle wanted to murderher mother. She would strangle her slowly and then dump her out of the car and drive to New York, where she’d never have to wear shorts and where it was okay—sophisticated even—not to be tan. She’d never actually been to New York, but she was sure that paleness was a sign of cachet. Certainly there was no volleyball. If you tried to play volleyball in New York, people would throw things at you from the street. They would stone you with cigarettes and umbrellas.
    At the mall, Lyle’s mother dropped her off at The Perfect Scoop Ice Cream Parlor and then drove off to commit more random acts of Spanish. Lyle was surprised to find Shannon Jarrell already inside the store, sitting with her legs crossed by the tower of plastic tables and reading a People magazine. Shannon’s being there on time was a miracle of Newtonian physics, but she lifted her eyes casually, as if it were an everyday occurrence. “Hey.”
    â€œHow did you get in?” Lyle asked.
    Shannon looked back at her magazine. “Jared. He gave me the keys.”
    Jared was the manager, who had a crush on Shannon and was always staring at her ass. Today she was wearing cutoff jeans to show off her tan, a direct violation of the company dress code. Her legs were long and slender and glowed like hot dogs. She’d rolled the sleeves of her Perfect Scoop T-shirt over her shoulders, which had the same Oscar Mayer tan. A flip-flop dangled insolently from one foot.
    â€œDid you cash in the register?” Lyle asked.
    â€œNo. I was waiting for you.”
    â€œWhy?”
    She shrugged. “You always do it.”
    Lyle swore under her breath and went into the back to get the cash drawer. She had to do everything. If the tubs were empty, Shannon would just tell the customers they were out of chocolate or vanilla chip or pralines-and-cream rather than get a new tub from the freezer. Not that Lyle gave two shits about the people who came in—but she couldn’t afford to slack off like Shannon, because nothing would get done. And whose well-concealed ass would Jared fire?
    She spun through the combination on the safe and retrieved the drawer of money. The back room was small and cozy, a home away from home, stocked for some reason with a shelf of cheapliqueurs. On slow afternoons, when she was working by herself, Lyle would sit back here with her feet up and sip Kahlúa from a mug, lost in whatever novel she was reading, so wrapped up in the vicissitudes of beauty and despair that she wouldn’t notice the bee-bong of the door as a customer walked in. Hello? the customer would yell into the void. Are you alive back there? Not exactly, Lyle would yell back. Sometimes, if it was a good enough book, she’d put it down in a daze and wobble out to the front, greeted by a world—faces, movement, squares of sunlight on the floor—that seemed less real than the one she’d been reading about. It was as if God had decided to phone it in.
    Locking the safe again, Lyle glanced at the corner of the room and noticed a sleeping bag rolled into a strudel, propped beside a pillow. A flash of proprietary anger went through her. She carried the cash