And wrong for even entertaining those joyful bursts.
I give up the game. That’s when I hear the break-room door unlock. Mateo steps out, tearstained and sullen.
Our laughs stifle as we all take him in.
“Brandon’s coming to pick me up.” He tosses his apron onto the pile behind him. “Thanks for covering, Derick.” He won’t make eye contact with me or Avery.
“Wait, you’re leaving?” I ask.
He huffs. “I’ve got coverage. What does it matter? I’m ‘incapable of doing menial tasks’ anyway.” I wish Avery would be better about hiding her sassy eye roll. Mateo clocks it and storms out the open door.
The heated moment hugs me like a trash compactor. The friend in me wants to run after him. The manager in me is thankful he’s out of my hair. Thinking back on Earl’s strikes policy, I can’t let the friend win out.
“Incoming!” Avery shouts as the hordes of early arrivers cram themselves into the shack.
“All hands on deck, sailor,” I say to Derick, shaking off the worrisome feelings.
“Aye, aye, Captain.” He salutes again. It makes me snort, but by the grace of God, nobody hears it.
We batten down the hatches and brace for impact.
***
At the end of the shift, Avery rewards Derick and me with ice cream Popsicles shaped like SpongeBob. They have gumballs for eyes, and I can’t wait to cool myself off.
Even at night, mid-June is blazing into July. Derick, standing in the glow of the neon lights, still stuffed into that tiny T-shirt, does nothing to stop me from sweating.
Earl thanks me for a job well done tonight, which means I’m floating on a cotton candy cloud for once. He even seems excited about the Alice Kelly event and lets me put up a Post-it note on the large calendar, a tentative space holder. August 14, here we come. I neglect to mention that we’re refurbishing her farmhouse in our spare time because what he doesn’t know he can’t be angry about.
He slips me two twenty-dollar bills from his wallet. “For the Haverford kid. If he’s as good as Avery says he is, we should make him a permanent fixture.” He thinks a moment, scratching his dimpled chin. “Eh, maybe. Depends. I’m already paying him for those TweetToks.” He huffs. “Good help is hard to find but harder to finance.”
“How are we doing so far?” I try to cover up my concern. I do a bad job of it.
He swats at a mosquito and says, “We’ve done better and we’ve done worse. We can’t make any price cuts, or we’re kaput. The projections I wrote up were less promising, so Derick’s social media must be doing something. Though I’m afraid Mateo might raze the place to the ground if we let him keep working here.”
“It’s only strike two,” I remind him.
“You’re right. Rules are rules.” Aggressively, he claps the mosquito between the palms of his greasy hands. Here’s wishing Mateo doesn’t suffer a similar fate before the summer is out. I don’t want the unfortunate displeasure of having to fire him.
“The Alice Kelly premiere could really give us a boost.”
“You’re really turning the tide, kid. Keep it up.” Earl saunters back into the shack.
Derick waves his ice cream stick in the air as I approach. “We survived!”
“Did you doubt we would?”
“There was a moment there, wrestling with the soft serve machine, where I thought I was done for. Who knew swirling an ice cream cone could be so complicated?” he asks, shaking out his overworked hands. His muscles came in handy when we needed him to keep refilling the ice bin in the soda fountain. We were flying through Cherry Cokes.
I pat his shoulder. “It’s all in the wrist.”
“Can we go sit on the swings in your backyard and eat these?” He tosses his pop up in the air. It flips and lands softly back in his palms. The crinkle of the paper hitting squishy flesh is satisfying. “For old times’ sake. Remember the Summer of Free Ice Cream?”
“Of course. How could I not? We almost got T-boned by the teenager driving the ice cream truck.” It was a total life-flashes-before-your-eyes moment.
“She looked about sixteen and scared shitless to be behind the wheel of that monster.”
“I was haunted by that jingle for months.Do-do-duh-do-do-do-duh-do.” My singing is nails-on-a-chalkboard bad. The owner of the truck called me that night and offered us free ice cream for the rest of the summer if we promised not to report the incident. We had so,somuch ice cream squirreled away in my freezer.
