“Mark!” the proprietor—a woman in her 30s with a pair of huge horn-rimmed glasses and the brightest purple lipstick I’d ever seen—called to him from the back of the store. “And you brought a different one!” she enthused.
“This is Hayden,” Mark said.
“You could’ve warned me he was pretty,” she responded, clicking over to us in short heels as purple as her lipstick.
I liked her already.
“Call me Caroline, and come with me,” she said, offering her hand.
I took it, and as soon as her fingers curled around mine a wave of comfort and familiarity and warmth did, too.
I hadn’t held anyone’s hand in…
In…
I couldn’t remember. Aaron hadn’t been the hand-holding type. I’d spent our whole relationship telling myself that was fine, because I wasn’t either, but that was a lie.
Would Wes let me hold his hand?
Maybe. Maybe I could ask.
Caroline dragged me through to the back of the shop, avoiding the piled up bric-a-brac, racks of clothes that smelled strongly of lavender, and weaving our way around the bigger pieces at the back.
A pitch black hippo figure carved out of some kind of stone caught my eye on the way past. I’d promised myself I’d pick something up for Marissa, and that wasperfect. Small enough for carry-on luggage, unique enough to be a worthy souvenir for a friend who’d supported me through all the hardest years of my life.
“Mark says you’re some kind of big-shot New York chef who makes ice cream,” Caroline said, grabbing the corner of a tarp on the floor. “I was telling him this was about to go to the big storeroom in the sky.”
She whipped the tarp off in a cloud of ancient dust to reveal a hand-turned ice cream maker. Wooden bucket, steel mechanism, aged and worn but not cracked, with a big paper label that’d seen better days.
I could still make out the nameFre-zee-zeeon it, andBEST ON EARTHalong the bottom.
The days before advertising standards and subtlety were wild.
“This must be…”
“A little more than a hundred years old,” Caroline supplied. “Or eight quarts, whatever you were estimating.”
“Eight quarts,” I said, though the over a hundred years old thing was arguably more impressive. A commercial machine made more at a time, but this wasby hand.
“It’s yours if you can carry it out,” she said. “Otherwise it’s going to old junk heaven.”
I didn’t have anywhere to put it, I’d never get it home even if I did, and there was almost zero chance it still worked.
“I can carry it out.”
* * *
“I’m not lettingyou take Hayden out again,” Dad said as Wes and I carried the ice cream maker between us into the entryway. Now that I was thinking about it, the shed might’ve been a better option.
Wes had already helped me dust it off in the bed of his truck, but it still had the marks of age on it.
Almost no rust, though. On closer inspection, I was starting to think it actuallymightwork.
“This was Mark’s fault,” Wes defended. “I’m not takinganyof the blame for this, I’m just helping him carry it.”
“Whatisit?” Dad asked.
“It’s a nineteen-sixteen ice cream churn,” I said. “Might even work.”
