Betty

Fraya gets a job at a diner called Dandelion Dimes and says goodbye to her siblings as she moves out to live in an apartment above it. At the diner, a dandelion is equal to a dime, so she gets plenty to use for her lotions.

While braiding Betty’s hair, her mother tells her about a time she boarded a bus to New Orleans, planning to leave Landon. Landon rushed onto the bus, shirtless and in his underwear. He had sold his clothes to give her a dollar for her journey. Before getting off the bus, he gave her his “Apache tear,” a teardrop-shaped piece of obsidian he carries with him. Alka explains to Betty that when the US Cavalry massacred the Apache people, the tears of Apache women turned to stone. From then on, whoever has an Apache tear “will never weep again because the Apache women will cry for them” (244). When Betty asks why she didn’t go to New Orleans, Alka says that she was like a sheet on a clothesline, wanting to be free of the pins, but then she realized that if she were free, she’d just be a tattered sheet. With pins, she could at least pretend she had a place in this world.