The salesman starts to repeat the things that her father has already read; Isabelle wanders away from the two of them to the other side of the store. She sits for a minute on an electric massage chair, trying to enjoy the feel of it, but its vibrations make her feel more numb than relaxed. In a back corner of the room, she sees a specially lit shelf of geodes and mineral slabs, the crystals of them glinting at her through the store’s darkness. She approaches the shelf to look more closely at these mineral slices, standing solid and calm. Agate, she reads, looking at the polished slabs of brown, orange, and red swirling into one another, the colors more deep and rich, she thinks, than colors normally are, as if they might have a taste or a smell. She blurs her eyes at the agate, and it seems to glow; it reminds her of what she imagines when she thinks of the center of the earth.

Beside the agate slabs sit opened geodes, the crystals clinging thick to their interiors. She wonders who was the first to open a geode, and whether it was done accidentally. She imagines someone long ago collecting rocks to build a wall, or to contain a fire, and dropping one that cracked open, revealing beneath the rock’s rough surface the colony of crystals inside. Who would ever think that the exterior of a rock could hide something as beautiful as geodes do? She takes a step closer to the shelf, not noticing the alabaster slab on the floor until her toe hits it. It is large and heavy, a translucent orange, and she is captivated by the way it seems to absorb the light shining through. It looks warm, and she squats to touch it, but then she wishes she hadn’t; it is cold.

She stands to return her attention to the shelf of rocks, noticing for the first time the counter beside the shelf, beneath whose glass are jewels made from these gems—jade bracelets, amethyst earrings—but what Isabelle finds most beautiful is a silver necklace, the pendant like a silver-black raindrop. She looks at this more closely; the rock of the pendant is called an Apache Tear, and she wishes she had thought of this herself; it is much more of a tear than a raindrop.

“Belle.” She hears her father behind her. “Finding anything?”

Isabelle nods.

“I’m having luck in this store, too. I think I’ll bag the toaster after all, but I found this,” he lifts a box in one hand, “and I know it’s wintertime, but they have this terrific hammock that comes with its own stand, and the way I see it, the old hammock’s seen better days, and I doubt if the apple tree will be able to hold it much longer anyway. And you know your mother and her hammock.”