Stay Sweet(50)

“Grady, your feet!”

His black Adidas are covered in thick white glop. Moo jumps down from the desk and licks the footprints he’s left in the hallway.

Amelia does as Grady has asked, filling her arms with towels, and follows him as he speeds back down to the basement, where Molly Meade’s Emery Thompson ice cream machine is spurting like a fountain, a geyser of half-frozen white ice cream spewing out from the top hatch, the spout, pretty much anywhere there’s an opening.

Grady has set an empty cardboard drum underneath the spout, but it has long since filled, and as the ice cream continues to flood out like soft-serve, it splashes down in a frothy white cascade onto the floor.

“Shit! My phone!” he says, slipping as he lunges toward the counter. He fishes a dripping rectangle out of the spillage on the counter, which is oozing down the front of the cabinets and making a pool on the floor.

“Turn the machine off!” she shouts. The spill is icy on her feet. Like stepping into a slushy winter puddle with bare feet.

“I did, but it won’t stop coming!”

Amelia reaches over and pulls the plug. A few more chugs, a few more spews, and the machine comes to rest.

Grady shakes his head, stunned. “I followed the recipe exactly, except I upped the quantities to make three gallons’ worth. But I double-checked my math. I don’t know what happened.”

“Grady! When you freeze something, it expands. Three gallons of liquid in won’t be three gallons of frozen ice cream out!”

After a pitiful breath, Grady takes a taste of the ice cream with his finger. He winces and gags. “That’s maybe the worst thing I’ve ever tasted.”

Amelia carefully carries the three-gallon drum, full to the brim, over to the sink. She tips it in and runs the hot water.

“Don’t help me clean up. Just go back upstairs and keep looking.”

Amelia swallows. She hasn’t done much today besides read Molly’s diary. “It will go way faster if I help you.”

*

It takes the better part of an hour to get the kitchen back to decent shape.

“Is there a manual for this thing?” Amelia asks. “I wonder how you’re supposed to clean it.”

“If there is, I haven’t found it.”

Amelia Googles Emery Thompson, hoping she can find some instructions online.

She finds better. It turns out that Emery Thompson has been making ice cream machines for over a hundred years. And their website is full of useful information: recipes, video demonstrations, and troubleshooting Q&As.

Grady gathers up a full trash bag. “I have to go upload some discussion questions for one of my summer classes, but then I’ll start over.” He shakes his head, like that’s the last thing he wants to do. “My friends rented scooters and are tooling around Milan tonight on a guided street food tour. And instead I’m here, destroying a business that’s been in my family for generations.”

“Why don’t I try making the next batch?”

He looks sincerely grateful. “By all means.” He places a hand on her shoulder and playfully says, “You can’t do worse than I did.” As he lifts it off, his fingers graze her neck every so slightly, and Amelia finds herself holding her breath. She doesn’t exhale until he’s gone.

She sits down on the couch and cues up a video from the Emery Thompson website called Ice Cream 101. Just as it starts playing, she gets a text from Cate.

Hey. Any chance you can come down here for a sec?

Shoot. Terrible timing. Amelia presses Pause and types back Why? Are you slammed?

No. I want you to try this lipstick!

Amelia doesn’t feel like she can tell Cate no. So she slips out and hurries down to the stand.

She’s a few feet from the door when she hears the girls squealing and laughing and singing along to the radio. Amelia’s relieved everything’s okay, though she feels a little pang of jealousy, at how much fun they’re having without her.

But her heart sinks as she steps inside. Cate has the stand radio turned up loud enough that customers have to shout their orders over the music. The trash can is overflowing, the order windows are greasy with fingerprints. No one is looking at her chore chart, that’s for sure.

Amelia could stay down here and clean up the mess before returning to the farmhouse. But she did just promise Grady that she’d get to work on the ice cream. That’s just as important, if not more so, than what’s happening down at the stand. Isn’t it?

Thankfully, none of the girls even noticed Amelia come in.

Or, just as quickly, slip back out.





CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO


AMELIA TWISTS HER HAIR INTO a tight bun and secures it with an elastic. She selects one of Molly’s aprons, a peach cotton one with tiny embroidered strawberries running along the edges, less for the mess and more for the luck it might bring her.

She begins with a simple batch of vanilla. With the help of the ice cream videos, she can see where Grady’s attempt went wrong, aside from his measuring.

A few places, actually.

He slid in the eggs too fast, into cream that was too hot. And he didn’t allow his base to properly chill before running it through the machine.

Whether she’ll do any better remains to be seen.

Her hands are shaking as she measures out the ingredients she’ll need, but she’s comforted by the fact that Molly Meade didn’t know what she was doing at first either. Amelia knows this for sure. She read it in Molly’s own words.