Chapter 18
Chapter
Eighteen
Aparlor without Mari is a parlor with the lights on and the pilot out.
Everything still worked. That was the unnerving part.
The machine ran, the registers rang, the cones came out the right shape.
We were down one counter girl, and on paper a counter girl is the most replaceable thing in a soft-serve operation, the line item you can lose without a tremor.
We had lost a body with excellent vitals and no pulse.
The parlor kept performing every measurable function of a parlor and stopped being one, and there is no row on any ledger I own for the difference, which is the whole story of my summer in a sentence.
Tuck tried to cover for both of them, Odette and Mari, and Tuck covering for two people is a sight that would break a harder heart than I had managed to keep that week.
He greeted everyone twice in case the first one hadn’t taken.
He overfilled the cones until we were losing money on yield, then caught himself and underfilled them, then panicked and gave a little boy a free second scoop to apologize for the first one, which is not a business so much as a charity with a soft-serve machine.
He kept looking at the door. So did I. We were both waiting for a seventeen-year-old who was at her grandmother’s learning, I had no doubt, exactly how much I had cost her.
I worked the floor myself that week, to fill the gap, and I was excellent at it, but it was a disaster.
I could run a register faster than either of the girls Mari had trained.
I could call a line, count a drawer, turn a rush.
What I could not do was the thing Mari did without appearing to do anything at all — know that the Castellano boy was shy about his stutter and so take his order off his pointing finger before he had to fight a word out; know that Mrs. Pruett’s sister was visiting and ask after her by name; know that the cone is the easy part.
A little girl came in on the Wednesday, a regular, six or seven, who scanned the counter for a face that wasn’t there and then asked me, with the directness only children and Mari herself have ever used on me, “Where’s the girl who does the voices?
” I did not know Mari did voices. I had worked beside her for three weeks, and I did not know she did voices for the children, and I stood there holding a perfectly efficient cone and understood that I had run off the one person in the building who knew what the building was for, and replaced her with someone who knew only what it cost.
Greer came in on the third Mari-less morning. She did not come in as my friend. She came in as the owner, which I knew because she put her keys on the counter instead of in her pocket, a tell I’d had three weeks to learn.
“I’m going to say a thing,” she said, “and I need you to not manage me while I say it.”
“I don’t manage you.”
“Brooke.” She gave me the look. “You manage everyone. You manage weather. Sit down.”
I sat down. I am capable of sitting down when an owner puts her keys on the counter; I am not, whatever the island believes, entirely without instinct for self-preservation.
“I gave you the ledger,” Greer said. “Back at the start. I handed you a shoebox full of receipts and a parlor that scared me, and I told myself I was doing it for you — that you’d flown four hundred miles to my door with a marriage in a tote bag and you needed a thing to hold.
” She turned the keys over once on the counter.
“And you took it. You held it. Somewhere in the last three weeks, I watched it stop being a thing you were holding and start being a thing that was holding you. Under. I gave you a project so you’d have something to grab onto, and I think the project’s the thing pulling you down.
I think you’re drowning, and I think you’ve got both hands so full of improvements you can’t reach up. ”
It was, I want to be clear, the single most loving thing anyone had said to me in the entire summer, and I responded to it as I respond to all love, which is to reach immediately for the arsenal.
“I lost one counter worker,” I said. “Who will be back. I have a transition plan for staffing, I’m interviewing two girls from the high school Thursday, the numbers are actually up week over week despite the disruption, and Mari is a teenager having a teenager’s reaction to a menu change that I have already reversed.
It’s handled. I appreciate the concern, I do, but it’s genuinely handled. ”
Greer let me finish. She has the gift, which I do not, of letting a person get all the way to the end of their worst sentence.
“That,” she said quietly, “is the most words you’ve used all week, and not one of them was about you.
” She picked the keys back up. “I’m not going to take the parlor back.
You’d hate me, and you’d be right to, and anyway you’re not wrong about the fragility — I do lie awake about it.
I’m just telling you, as the one person on this island who’s stood exactly where you’re standing: the cone doesn’t need saving as bad as you need to be saving something.
Figure out which one you’re actually doing.
Because from where I sit, hon, they look real different, and only one of them ends with Mari coming back. ”
She left the keys this time. In my pocket, I think she meant. She left without telling me which.
Sophie called that night.
I let it ring twice, which is what I do with my daughter — not because I don’t want to talk to her but because I need two rings to take down the operations center, to stop being the woman who runs things and become, for the length of a phone call, a woman who once carried this person on her hip through a grocery store.
I have never managed to fully take it down.
Sophie has spent eighteen years talking to a mother with one hand still on the wheel, and she has, to her enormous credit, learned to talk over the noise of it.
“Don’t say anything yet,” she said, before I’d finished hello. “I’m coming down. I already booked the ferry. It’s Thursday.”
“Sophie—”
“I’m not coming to be managed,” she said, fast, the way you say the thing you’ve rehearsed in the car.
“I’m not coming for a tour of the parlor and a spreadsheet of what you’ve fixed.
Dad told me about — he told me his version, and Aunt Greer told me a different version on the phone that had a lot more in it about you, and I want to come see for myself which one’s true.
” A breath. “I want to know if this island thing is good-different or if you’ve just found a bigger place to hide.
I’ve watched you do the second one my whole life, Mom.
You’re extremely good at it. So I’m going to come down and watch you for four days and I’ll know. I always know.”
I stood in the back of a parlor I had nearly emptied of everyone who loved it, holding a phone, being seen straight through by a person I made.
“It’s good-different,” I said.
“Okay,” Sophie said, in the voice of a girl who has heard that exact tone deployed in defense of a lot of things that turned out not to be good-different.
“Then you won’t mind proving it. Bring a swimsuit Thursday.
We’re going to the beach, and we’re going to do nothing.
No clipboard. No plan. We’re going to lie on towels and be completely useless for one whole day, and you’re going to be so bad at it, Mom.
You’re going to be the worst at it I have ever seen anyone be. I cannot wait.”
“That sounds wonderful,” I said, and meant about sixty percent of it, which for me is a landslide.
We hung up. I sat down at the desk, opened a fresh page out of pure reflex, and started building Sophie an itinerary — a good one, beach at ten, lunch at the Sandbar, the dolphins if Hollis was running, because some part of me cannot love a person without scheduling their joy.
I got as far as 9:45 — sunscreen before I heard it, heard what I was doing, heard my daughter in my ear saying the worst at it I have ever seen anyone be.
I deleted the itinerary. All of it. It cost me something to do, a small private withdrawal I won’t pretend was easy.
Then I opened a clean page and wrote MARINA CART — PHASE ONE across the top, because if I could not be allowed to schedule my daughter’s rest, I was at least going to be permitted to scale something, and there is no terror on this earth I have not, at one time or another, agreed to bury under a project with a phase one.