Amelia steadies herself against the wall. Sell Meade Creamery?
“I am serious,” Grady stresses again. This time, his voice is much quieter.
Amelia doesn’t want to hear more. Thank goodness Grady isn’t entertaining that thought. And the stand is already successful. His dad will figure that out eventually.
She looks for Cate so they can start painting the sign but sees that she’s busy chatting up one of their middle school English teachers in the line, so Amelia decides to clean up the toppings sideboard.
Grady comes out of the office, rubbing his temples. He glances at the schedule and then at Amelia. “You’re here early.”
“Yeah. Cate and I are going to paint the roof sign before our shift. Is, um, everything okay?”
He works hard to smile. “Yup.”
Though she doesn’t want to press Grady, Amelia doesn’t believe him. But she does feel bad for him. And she knows just the thing to cheer him up. “Hey, do you want some ice cream?”
“Nah, I’m good.”
“Really? I mean, this should be one of the biggest benefits to owning an ice cream stand, right? All the ice cream you want, whenever you want it? Come on. What’s your favorite flavor?”
“I don’t know that I have one.”
“I thought you spent a whole summer here as a kid.”
Something flickers across his face as he swallows. “Yeah, but that was a long time ago.”
“Well, then I’m bringing you a taste of all four. A taste test. You can call it market research.”
“Market research, huh?” Grady laughs. “I guess I haven’t eaten breakfast yet.”
“Wait here,” she says.
Amelia heads up to the windows and squeezes in between Sophie and Liz, who are both helping customers. She pushes the lid open on the scooping cabinet and gets a generous scrape of each of the four flavors on four white plastic spoons.
Grady has hopped up on the desk to wait for her. He’s scrolling on his phone when she walks in with the samples.
“Customers say the flavors in our ice cream are more intense than any other kind they’ve ever had,” she announces, and presents the ice cream spoons, two in each hand, with a little bit of a flourish, like a game show hostess. She holds vanilla up and takes a whiff of the rich, sugary smell.
“Vanilla,” she announces, and presents Grady with the spoonful of white snow. “Don’t look so excited.”
Grady doesn’t look up. “It’s vanilla. Vanilla, by its very nature, is vanilla.”
Amelia would be more annoyed if she weren’t completely confident in what she’s holding. If anything, Grady’s cockiness will only make her victory sweeter. She holds the spoon closer to his face and she can tell he smells it by the way he perks up. He puts his phone away and takes the spoon from her, examining it skeptically.
Grady says, “Vanilla can’t ever be a ten. The best vanilla in the world is, like, a six, max.”
“What an ignorant thing to say. Now, close your eyes. I want you to concentrate on the flavors.”
Grady barks a laugh. “Wow, you’re bossy today.”
“Don’t be sexist.”
His cheeks glow. “Sorry. I was kidding.” He closes his eyes.
Amelia hands Grady the spoon and watches intently, brimming with excitement, as he takes his first lick. “Huh. That’s pretty good.” His eyes flutter open as he takes a second taste. On his third, he cleans the spoon. “It’s, like, infinitely more vanilla-y than the fro-yo place on campus.”
“Duh. Fro-yo is basically frozen chemicals. This is ice cream.” She takes the used spoon from him and tosses it into the garbage can, pleased that his bad mood has already vanished and there are still three flavors to go. “Now, would you please look at this color!” she says, holding up the chocolate. “It’s like tar.”
“Marketing tip. Think aspirational. Tar is not a good descriptor for something you want people to eat.”
“Okay, it’s like”—her eyes brighten—“fudge at midnight.”
“Yes! That! Exactly!”
She hands him the spoon. “Hurry up before these melt.”
This time, Grady closes his eyes and goes right in, taking the whole bite at once. “Whoa. That’s intense. It’s almost . . . bitter.” He rubs his chin thoughtfully. “Not in a bad way. It’s really sophisticated.”
“Next is strawberry,” Amelia says, but Grady shakes his head.
“I want more chocolate.” Peeking at her, he opens his mouth to be fed.
Amelia feels her heart speed up. Ignoring him, she hands him the next spoon. “Our strawberry,” she announces, “is the most beautiful shade of pink. Not pale, like the weak stuff you get from the grocery store. Deep. Lively. Also, you’ll never bite into an icy chunk of strawberry. It’s completely incorporated.”
Grady’s eyes go wide as he tastes. “Holy shit.”
“No cursing in the stand, please. But I know, right?” she says. “And this . . . this is Home Sweet Home,” Amelia says, putting the spoon in his hand. She’s surprised how nervous she feels. She wants Grady to love it as much as she does.
“Ahhh yes. You know, that reporter guy told me this might be the biggest unsolved mystery in Sand Lake,” he says, examining the spoon.
“Last year, a guy offered me fifty bucks to tell him.”
“Did you?” he asks, grinning.
Amelia cocks her head. “Uh, no.” After all, how could she? The only one who knew the recipes was Molly.
And now, Grady.
“Come to think of it,” he says, “I should probably require all the girls to sign NDAs.”
“What’s an NDA?”
“A nondisclosure agreement. It means if they tell anyone our recipes, I can sue them for damages.” He pops the spoon into his mouth.
“That’s a bit overkill, don’t you think? None of us know—”
She quiets, watching Grady’s strange reaction. He blinks a few times, almost stunned by what he’s tasting. Then his jaw sets, his brow furrows, and he forces a swallow after a most unpleasant battle of his will. Once he gets it down, his face is totally unguarded, because he’s been blindsided. He can’t even pretend to hide what he’s feeling—an emotion Amelia never would have expected.
Sadness.
“Hey, Amelia? You ready to paint?”
Amelia spins as Cate enters the office, and she takes a giant step away from Grady; until this moment she hasn’t realized how close she’s been standing to him. Grady hops off the desk and hustles out.
“Market research,” Amelia tells her, answering a question that Cate hasn’t asked in too loud a voice.
Cate cocks her head. “Uh-huh.”
Amelia grabs the Panera bag with the sandwiches, nervously passing Grady on her way outside. She isn’t sure if he looks at her, but she sure as heck doesn’t look at him.
As Cate climbs up the ladder with the paint cans and the brushes, Amelia notices something from her vantage point on the ground. Certain boards—the ones higher up—are peeling white paint faster than others.
“Throw me up the sandwiches!” Cate instructs.
Amelia tosses the bag and climbs the ladder, pausing at the top to inspect that wood. More paint flakes away when she touches it; it’s barely sticking. Underneath, the wood is damp and soft with rot.
“Holy crap, Amelia. You have to see this.”
Amelia hoists herself up and over the lip of the roof.
At first, she thinks Cate is talking about the view. Because, on her tiptoes, she can make out a bit of the lake, see the green trees and the rooftops of a few houses, see up and down Route 68 for miles. She knows in her heart that Sand Lake is the most beautiful place in the world, even though she’s never really been anywhere else.
“Not out there! Look down.”
She does, and at her feet are signatures in pink paint, hundreds of them. The names of the girls who’ve worked at Meade Creamery over the years cover the entire roof. Some are faded, some fresh, and plenty a
re illegible because the shingles have shifted or chipped, the broken pieces clogging the gutters with last fall’s leaves. She bends down, wishing she had time to put the puzzle back together.
They pop their paint cans and get to work, adding another coat of white on the sign and pink for the letters. Though before they do, Amelia uses the handle of her paintbrush to scrape away an abandoned, flaking wasps’ nest from the bottom of the sign. No wonder they had so much trouble with them last summer.
They play music, shout hello to some friends in line, sit back and lazily eat their sandwiches. “Do you think you’ll come back to Sand Lake next summer?” Amelia asks.
“Amelia! Why are you already thinking about next summer? We’ve barely started this one.”
“I’m just saying that I definitely want to come home,” Amelia says, a tad defensive. “I already miss it here.”
“Just make sure you keep yourself open to other opportunities. You could score a killer internship somewhere.”
“Maybe.” Amelia shrugs. Though that feels like a remote possibility, considering she even doesn’t know what she wants to study. “You’re coming home for Thanksgiving, right?”
“If I didn’t, my mom would kill me. Christmas, too. Those holidays are mandatory.”
“Gibbons doesn’t go back from winter break until the middle of January. What about Truman?”
Cate shrugs. “No clue.”
They find a spot to paint their names. Right next to each other, where the roof tiles still seem in decent shape. Cate adds a heart surrounding them, and also the last two numbers of the year. It’s how she signed everyone’s yearbooks.
When they finish, they lie down next to their names and take a few selfies together for posterity. They have fifteen minutes before their shift when Amelia starts packing things up. Cate says, “Let’s hang out here for just a little while longer,” and pulls Amelia back down.
Amelia rocks into her. “See? Aren’t you glad you didn’t stay at JumpZone? You would have never known about this roof. Your name wouldn’t have been here with the other girls who’ve worked here. Now we’re officially a part of this place forever.”
“I was never going to stay at JumpZone!”
“Okay, okay.”
“But you’re right. This is pretty cool. I’m glad I didn’t miss it.” And together, they use their hands to help fan the paint dry, so nothing messes up their place in Meade Creamery history.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
BY THE END OF THE first week, things at Meade Creamery feel mostly back to normal.
Mostly.
On the whole, and to all the girls’ relief, working for Grady isn’t much different from working for Molly, because he’s hardly ever around. He spends the bulk of his days up at the farmhouse. Amelia assumes he’s untangling Meade Creamery’s financial picture, as his dad instructed him to do, and tackling his schoolwork. That’s all in addition to, obviously, making Molly’s ice cream.
Amelia suspects his distance might also have something to do with whatever happened between them in the office, during her ice cream tasting. Though it seemed to Amelia like they had been getting along well enough before that moment, their interactions feel more formal and stilted now. When Grady pops down at the stand—usually around five o’clock, when he stops in to grab any packages that have been delivered and to check the register totals—he barely speaks to her.
Not that she minds. It’s better this way.
And she reciprocates in kind, careful not to be too friendly or chummy, even the times she’s encountered Grady around Sand Lake—he was studying at the public library when she dropped off some checked-out books on Wednesday, and then again on Thursday, at the lake. Though she didn’t actually see Grady there, just spotted Molly’s pink Cadillac parked on the public beach side as Cate drove past.
The only way Grady seems comfortable talking to her is by texting . . . which he does plenty of.
Day and night, Amelia has been answering his random questions about the business. The girls get paid on Mondays. No, there is no premade waffle cone that might compare with the ones we make fresh. We average about one supersized container of sprinkles a week. So many questions that Amelia has taken to keeping her phone on silent, with no vibrate, because Grady often texted her when she was off the clock and doing other things, like on Saturday afternoon, when she was helping Cate weed her closet of fall clothes that looked too explicitly high school, or on Sunday night, when all the stand girls went to the movies together after closing.
This is, in part, because even when Grady’s visits to the stand are brief, Amelia notices there’s still a shift in energy that starts when he walks in and lasts until he leaves. Conversations get quieter, the girls less playful. Like on Monday, when a few of the girls were chatting with each other during a shift change, the topic of conversation was Liz and a guy she had a crush on.
Grady was in the office with Amelia, and they could both hear everything that was being said outside the door. Cate was doing most of the talking, pumping Liz up, giving some advice on how to act if the guy came to her window that night.
Amelia raised her head, pausing from the cardboard she was breaking down to see if Grady was listening. He seemed focused on prying their old punch clock from the wall. Grady had found a payroll app—one that had been created by a guy in his frat and that made him an insta-millionaire—and had all the girls download it onto their phones. It would make payroll easier for sure, but there was something sad about the punch clock getting the heave-ho. Amelia almost wished Grady would leave it, even if they wouldn’t be using it anymore.
Still, Amelia got the sense that she should say something to the girls, let them know Grady could hear them. They probably didn’t know he was there. But before she could, Grady walked to the office door, the punch clock under his arm.
“Hey. Here’s my two cents. If a guy likes you, he’ll call you. It’s really as simple as that.” He smiled, like he was being helpful. The girls stared at him blankly until he realized he’d majorly overstepped and hastily made his exit.
At least, as Cate said later, it provided her with a teachable moment about mansplaining.
Grady’s made a few other changes too, besides the time cards. Meade Creamery is now on all social media platforms, and he’s been talking about creating some kind of Instagram-friendly wall on the side of the stand, to encourage more online traffic. Last check, they had a measly sixty-four followers. Grady has asked the girls to share his posts, though none of them have, either because they don’t love the photos he’s taken (Amelia’s eyes were closed in one shot on opening day) or because he’s gone embarrassingly overboard with his hashtag game (#youknowyouwantit, which, ugh).
Grady’s also ordered two credit card readers, but he hasn’t gotten Wi-Fi installed, so they aren’t usable. For the time being, they live on the shelf near the radio. And the stand is now offering nearly double the toppings it did in summers past—a difference made up almost entirely by sugary breakfast cereals. It has made their already cramped sideboard area even tighter, but Grady thinks customization is a thing consumers expect, and it helps to give their four-flavor menu some depth.
For the most part, the girls have been accepting of, if slightly irritated with, these changes. Despite her own misgivings, Amelia has decided to pick her battles with Grady carefully.
Her first opportunity came this past Monday.
She’d just gotten to the stand when Grady texted Has there ever been another Meade Creamery storefront? Like somewhere on Main Street?
Nope. Just this one.
Before she could put her phone down, Grady texted back. This was unusual. He’d always taken her answers at face value. But not this time.
Mistake.
Amelia stared at the word. How so?
Main Street would be a way better location. We’re in the middle of nowhere.
Amelia shook her head. With her top lip curled, she typed, This is where everything started. And then adde
d, Also, you’ve probably noticed that people don’t have any trouble finding us out here.
Amelia waited for Grady to answer back. When he didn’t, she was a little bummed. She wanted to keep arguing with him. Or at least, that was what she thought, until he suddenly came in through the back door.
“Don’t get defensive, Amelia. It’s just an observation.”
“I’m not,” she said, even though she could feel her pulse in her throat. She’d been fine with changes and helping Grady wrap his head around the business. But she wouldn’t let him imply that Molly Meade didn’t know what she was doing. “Part of what makes this place special is that it isn’t close to other things. It’s a pilgrimage.”
“All I’m trying to say is that she could have been making more money. Imagine if she had a place down near the lake!”
“There are no shops at the lake.”
“I’m just brainstorming here,” he sourly informed her, lowering himself onto the yellow love seat. “And when brainstorming, you’re not supposed to shut down ideas.”
“I’m not shutting you down. I’m telling you the facts. There’s nothing around the lake but trees. So it seems silly to think about how much better business would hypothetically be if you moved the business to a location that doesn’t actually exist.”
After getting up, he chastised, “You have to dream big if you want to succeed in business, Amelia. Look for green lights, not stop signs.”
As Grady walked out, Amelia caught the eyes of the other girls in the stand. They were beaming at her, and Cate licked her finger and pretended to touch Amelia with it, making a sizzle sound. But while Amelia felt happy to have stood up for the stand, their conversation was more proof that any friendliness between her and Grady had chilled since she’d given him the ice cream. Now, even when they did talk, they argued. Something had happened in that moment, she just wasn’t sure what.
The next day, one week since the stand opened, Grady pulled up in the pink Cadillac, beeping his horn long and hard. He was being followed by a tow truck, yellow rooftop lights flashing. Hitched up to the truck’s hook was an old white van.
“Holy crap,” Cate said. “Is that a food truck?”