Chapter 25
Chapter
Twenty-Five
Sophie left on the Wednesday ferry, and she left me with a kiss on the cheek, a half-finished argument about whether I knew the difference between being wanted and being needed, and the distinct sense of a woman who had come to take a reading and gotten one.
“I’m not worried about you,” she said at the gangway, which from Sophie is a complete sentence and also a diagnosis.
“I want to be. It’d be easier. But you’ve got a friend who’ll tell you the truth, and a man who’ll wait you out, and a daughter who’s going to call you every Sunday whether you’re free or not.
” She hugged me. “You’re not alone down here.
You just keep building things so you’ll have an excuse to act like you are.
Stop it. Or don’t, and I’ll come back in August and yell at you on a beach again.
” She got on the boat. She did not look back, because Sophie has the thing I never learned, which is the ability to leave a person without managing how they feel about it, and I stood on the dock and watched my child not need me all the way to the horizon.
Then I turned around and went back to work, because the cart, it developed, had begun to eat the parlor alive.
Here is the arithmetic I had not done, the one piece of arithmetic in the whole catastrophe I’d somehow skipped.
The Whippy Dippy ran on three people who mattered and a machine.
Pearl’s machine, Odette on the register, Mari on the floor, Tuck being Tuck.
I had lost Odette to a sign and Mari to a red pen, which left Tuck and two high-schoolers who’d started in June and knew the scripts but not the island.
And then I had opened a second location, a mile away by water and twenty minutes by the bridge road, and staffed it out of the same shallow pool, which meant that on any given afternoon I was asking four people to be in two places, and four people can be in two places only by being fully in neither.
And I learned the bridge road by heart, which is how you know a thing has gone wrong — when you’ve memorized the potholes between your two problems. I spent those two weeks in the car, twenty minutes each way, ferrying mix, change, and myself back and forth between a cart that needed me and a parlor that needed me, arriving always at the one I’d just left in my head.
The worst of it came on a Thursday when the cart’s compressor flagged at the exact hour the parlor hit its afternoon rush, and I stood in the marina lot with my phone in my hand and understood that I had built, with my own two competent hands, a machine whose central feature was that it forced me to choose, every single day, which of two beloved things to fail.
I chose the cart, because the cart was newer and I could not yet bear to watch it falter.
Which tells you everything. I had started, without noticing, to triage in favor of the thing I’d added over the thing I’d been given.
Tuck took the cart shifts, because Tuck takes whatever you hand him, and so the parlor — the actual parlor, the soul of the operation, the room where Pearl had decided a widower’s ice cream counted as supper — spent its busiest July afternoons being run by two seventeen-year-olds from the mainland who were perfectly nice, perfectly fast, and did not know that Hutchins took butter pecan, or that the Pruett twins split everything down the middle and would argue about it as a form of love, or that when Boone came in at four you started his coffee before he reached the counter because Boone would rather disapprove of you than ask you for anything.
The cones were the right shape. The line moved. The numbers, God help me, were up. And the place stopped knowing anybody’s name.
I watched it happen, and I called it growing pains.
A regular named Dot Mathers — eighty-one, came in Tuesdays and Fridays for a small dish of strawberry she ate with a teaspoon to make it last — came in on a Friday, stood at the counter while a mainland teenager waited politely for her order, and discovered she did not know how to be a stranger in the one place on the island that had never once made her be one.
She ordered her strawberry. The girl rang it up correct and quick and called “next.” And Dot took her dish to her usual table by the window and ate it alone in a room full of tourists.
She did not come back the next Tuesday, and when I noticed the gap in the receipts I told myself old people miss days in the heat.
Tuck noticed. Tuck noticed everything, which is the whole tragedy of Tuck.
He came to me at the end of a double, gray again the way he’d gone gray over the whiteboard, and he said, “Miss Dot didn’t come Tuesday.
Or today. That’s three.” He turned his cap in his enormous hands.
“I’d have started her strawberry. The new girls don’t know to.
It’s not their fault, they’re real nice, they just don’t — they don’t know her, Brooke.
I know all of ‘em and I’m at the marina now.
” He said the last part like a confession, like the marina was a thing he’d done wrong instead of a thing I’d sent him to do.
“I think we’re losing the morning people.
The quiet ones. The ones who won’t say nothing, they’ll just stop. ”
“The numbers are actually up week over week,” I said, which is the single worst thing I said all summer, and I said a great many bad things that summer.
I said it to Tuck. I said it to a young man telling me, in the only words he had, that the heart was going out of the place he loved, and I answered him with a metric, because a metric was the one thing in the room I knew for certain was on my side.
Tuck looked at me. He is not a clever boy, and he would tell you so himself. He looked at me with the whole of his uncomplicated heart and said the truest thing anyone said to me before the storm came, and said it for everyone.
“I don’t think Miss Dot can taste the numbers,” he said. Then he put his cap back on and went to close out the cart, because I’d scheduled him there, and Tuck goes where you schedule him, and that, right there, was the entire problem wearing an apron.
I stayed late that night and ran the figures, because running the figures is what I do instead of feeling the thing the figures are standing in front of.
Revenue up. Ticket up. Two locations clearing what one had cleared, plus a margin.
By every measure I owned, I was winning, and I sat alone in the back of a parlor that no longer knew Dot Mathers’s name and felt the win sitting on my chest like a stone, the exact weight of the record month, not one ounce lighter for all the extra volume I’d bolted onto it.
I had a thought, that night, sitting there.
It came from somewhere under the plan, in Sophie’s voice, or maybe Hollis’s, or maybe the part of me that fell asleep in a chair at a lake twenty years ago.
The thought was: you are getting exactly what you asked for, and it is making you sick, and you have decided the cure is to ask for more of it.
I wrote it down. Then, because I did not know what else to do with a true thing that had no column, I turned the page and started planning the August tourist push.