Stay Sweet(12)

“You should get the first taste, Amelia,” Cate announces. “After all, this night was inspired by you. And you’re our Head Girl.”

Amelia appreciates Cate’s saying that, though it’s strange, how meaningless the distinction suddenly feels.

“It’s okay, someone else can go first,” Amelia says, because she’s embarrassed, but the girls insist and pass the ice cream drum to her. Amelia dips in her spoon and finds that the ice cream has warmed to a perfectly scoopable temperature. Color-wise, it could be mistaken for vanilla, though it’s far more buttery yellow.

Amelia closes her eyes as she brings the spoon up to her lips. Flipping it over, she uses her tongue to pull the egg-shaped taste into her mouth. Instead of swallowing, Amelia holds it on her tongue, letting it melt, cream filling the hollows of her mouth. Though the taste of Home Sweet Home is hard to describe, Amelia is desperate to commit some language about it to memory.

For the first few seconds, her brain simply rules out the typical flavors one might expect to taste in ice cream. It’s not chocolatey, or nutty, or fruity. It’s the least sugary of the Meade Creamery ice creams. There’s a warmth and a depth to whatever makes it sweet, yet it isn’t sticky like honey. It has a freshness and a brightness and a cleanness, nearly lemony, except not.

The best Amelia can do is to say it tastes like summer, like Sand Lake itself. Not the water but the feeling of sliding into it on the hottest, most humid day. Of everything and everyone she loves. And that, unfortunately, must be good enough. The truth is that no one knows exactly what’s in Home Sweet Home. And no one ever will.

Amelia passes the ice cream drum to Cate next, and silently mouths Thanks.

The girls make small talk in between spoonfuls. Loose plans form to go to the county fair together. There’s talk of a weekly lake day, maybe a monthly movie night. Though the girls no longer have the place that will bind them, they have good intentions of not letting each other go.

By twelve thirty, the fire has died out and everyone is full of ice cream. They fold up their blankets, pour water on their fire, and walk back toward the cars.

Amelia and Cate bring up the rear of the pack. It’s so dark Amelia can’t make out the three girls in front of her, only hear their whispered conversation.

“Do you think Molly had a will?”

“Doubt it. She didn’t have any family.”

“She had to be rich, though, right? With how popular the stand was?”

“Oh my God, what if Molly left the stand to us?”

“Huh?”

“Like a stipulation in her will. Whichever girls are working for me when I die will inherit my stand and all my money.”

Cate, staring into the glow of her phone, rolls her eyes.

Amelia has a moment of fun thinking about the possibility. Better, anyway, than what is likely the reality—that there will never be another summer at Meade Creamery. That tonight is truly goodbye.





CHAPTER SEVEN


WHEN AMELIA ANSWERS HER PHONE the next morning, Cate is undiluted cheer and brightness. “Since we don’t have work, let’s spend the day at the lake!”

It strikes Amelia as funny to hear Cate put it that way because it’s not like this is a normal day off. Everything about their summer has changed. Amelia rolls over and looks out her window. It’s sunny with a cloudless blue sky. A perfect lake day. “Great idea,” she says, because really, it would be a sin not to enjoy a day like this. “I’ll make us sandwiches.”

She makes turkey and Swiss with mayo for herself, lettuce and cucumber and Swiss with mayo for Cate. There’s one Coke in the fridge, which is fine; they’ll split it.

Back upstairs, she digs in the bottom of her underwear drawer for her bathing suit. She puts it on, slides on a cotton sundress over top, and pulls her ponytail through a Gibbons baseball cap.

Then, as she waits on her front steps for Cate to arrive, she sends a text to the other girls, letting them know that she and Cate will be at the lake, in case anyone wants to join them. A few say they’ll try to make it. But then the group conversation shifts to what the summer will hold for the girls now that the stand is no longer around. They talk about which stores at the mall would be cool to work at. Sephora seems to be the consensus, that or Barnes & Noble.

Amelia can’t blame them for moving on. Maybe she’d be excited for something new too, if this weren’t her last summer here. If she hadn’t been the one to find Molly’s body. If there weren’t already so much change on the horizon for her, with college just around the corner. She will have to get a new job, for sure. Her Meade Creamery salary went straight into her college savings account, but her tips funded her summer fun—money to chip in for Cate’s gas, clothes, movie tickets, and Starbucks.

Before heading to the lake, Cate stops at the gas station to fill up and buy a pair of cheap sunglasses. They walk inside and wave hello to Peyton Pierce—a junior who was in Amelia’s Spanish II class—working behind the register.

Peyton, Amelia remembers, orders either a vanilla cone with chocolate sprinkles or a cup of Home Sweet Home with peanuts, and he reliably throws his change into the girls’ tip jar. It’s never very much, maybe sixty cents, but Amelia appreciates the gesture. Kids their age hardly ever think to tip. She wonders if Peyton, or anyone else in town for that matter, knows that Meade Creamery is closed forever.