Page 34 of The Party Line

“Bored?” I finished for her.

Annie smiled and nodded. “That’s the word. Every minute has been accounted for most of my life, so the idea of having whole days in a row with nothing to do scared me.”

My chest tightened, and fear washed over me when I thought of the same thing. When Mama and Annie had suggested a new path for their lives, I had jumped right in without mulling it over for a while. But I’d had a new job and an exciting new adventure ahead. Now there was a void—no calling the lawyers to help me set up a corporation, no talking about a warehouse with a kitchen in it. I would have to find my own path, and that would be new territory for me. I closed my eyes, and the first thing that came to mind was snow cones. It was kind of silly, but maybe even that was a reason to set something else in motion.

“Let’s go get snow cones. My treat, and y’all can ride with me.”

“Where did that come from?” Mama asked.

“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “But it sounds like a good idea.”

Annie stood up. “I agree.”

Mama pushed up out of her chair and started across the porch. “I’ll get my purse.”

I finished off the last of my beer and set the empty bottle on the porch. “You don’t need it. I’m paying today.”

Mama cocked her head to one side and almost grinned. “What if something happened and I needed to drive home? I don’t go anywhere with anyone without my driver’s license.”

“Suit yourself,” I said. “We’re going to San Antonio. There’s a little place up there that serves the best shaved-ice snow cones you’ll ever eat. Aunt Gracie took me there once when I was bawling and squalling about a boy calling me a beanpole.”

Mama went inside the house. “All the more reason for me to take my purse.”

“Mine is in the car,” Annie said. “We might even have time to check out a store or two if we are close to a mall.”

Three pickup trucks and one car passed us on the twenty-mile trip from Ditto to the southside of San Antonio, where the Lone Star Water Icestand was located. Mama and Annie were so busy talking about the few times they’d actually carved out half a day to go to “the city” that they didn’t even notice what served as heavy traffic in our small town.

The little building sat on the back corner of a small shopping mall, so parking wasn’t a problem. I pulled into a spot, turned off the engine, and unfastened my seat belt.

“We aren’t going to get them at the drive-up window and eat them on the way home?” Annie asked.

“Nope,” I told her. “There are two windows: one for drive-up service, another around back. There are some picnic tables back there, so we can visit while we eat.”

“That building looks like an old hippie wagon from the sixties,” Mama giggled.

“How would you know anything about those?” I led the way around the building, which had not changed one bit since Aunt Gracie had brought me here all those years ago. Bright flowers the size of the hood of a car were painted all over it. Some of them overlapped others, but the Texas flag was somewhere in each one.

“I didn’t, but Aunt Gracie talked about buying one when you were a baby. She said that she dreamed about her and Jasper traveling around in it,” Mama answered.

“Well, would you look at this?” Annie said when we rounded the side of the place and she saw the wooden picnic benches scattered about under the massive oak trees. “This is lovely, and there’s a nice little breeze blowing.”

“Y’all don’t have plans for anything else today, do you?” I asked.

“Not a single one.”

“Good, because I thought after we get done here, we might go to the mall and walk off the calories we’re about to eat.”

“This is Sunday,” Annie reminded me.

“Yep, and the mall closes early, but we’ll have a couple of hours to shop, and we’ve got that extra hour of daylight, so we’ll be home by dark.”

“And not a one of us have a curfew, so if we aren’t home by midnight, we won’t get into trouble,” Annie declared.

“Aunt Gracie would want us home by dark,” I said and swallowed the lump in my throat that formed at the memory.

“Yes, she would,” Mama agreed. “She worried about us both.”

The wooden benches showed their age and had several initials carved into the seats. Annie pointed to the one closest to the window where we would order. “I thought I could read the sign if I was this close, but no such thing. I didn’t bring my reading glasses, so one of you will have to tell me what’s on that menu up there.”

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