Stay Sweet(36)

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.