“Over here,” she said, leading him toward the display in the window.

“Um, I don’t know, let me check,” he said, taking the tools in his hands to show them to the other man behind the counter.

Aria’s heart fluttered, seeing the man’s head nodding up and down. “Yep, they’re carving tools. They didn’t come in with a sharpener, though,” he said, walking back toward the window to put them back in the display.

“No … I’d like to buy them!” Aria said.

“OK, then come over this way,” the man said, reversing course toward the checkout counter. “That’ll be ninety-five dollars,” the man said.

Aria’s stomach sank. “I only have like eighty-eight dollars,” she said.

“I could sell ’em for ninety?”

Aria’s stomach sank even further but her sense of urgency trumped her shyness. “Dude, seriously, you don’t understand, I really only have eighty-eight dollars and I have to get these.”

The man ran his fingers over the blades, deliberating. The other man in the store came over to where they were standing. “She’s got eighty-eight for ’em,” the first man said. The second man looked at Aria, cracking a smile most likely because of the amusement he got from how out of place it was for a girl wearing a little sundress to walk into a pawnshop and buy a wood-carving set. “OK, let her have ’em,” he said.

Aria placed every dollar and cent she had with her on the counter. The man slid the coins back toward her, taking only the bills before rolling the case back around the little tool set and putting it into a used plastic grocery-store bag. When he handed it to her, Aria looked at the clock on the wall. Trying to make it to the car lot before going to Griffith Park was cutting it close, but she had to do it.

Robert had found a tent again. When Aria peered inside it, he was napping, but the pressure of her presence startled him awake. Besides Darren, who held up a drunken peace sign when he saw her, everyone else at the lot had gone somewhere else for the day.

Aria kneeled down to place the rolled plastic bag on the floor next to Robert. “Hey, I gotta run, but I got something for you. I’m putting it right here,” she said. Robert twisted to look. “You don’t have to look at it now, just open it whenever.” She stood up to leave again.