Stay Sweet(77)

“What are you going to do about Truman?”

“I’ll figure it out. So long as I have the stand, I’ve got something.”

Their ride is coming to an end. As their carriage lowers to the ground, Amelia sees Cate and the other girls emerging from the fortune-teller tent, looking around for them. She squeezes Grady’s hand tightly.

“It’s cool,” he tells her. “You can let go. I’m not offended. I knew what tonight would be like.”

She eventually does let go, but not a second before she absolutely has to.

*

That night, as she snuggles into bed, Amelia reads a diary entry.

August 10, 1945

I don’t quite have the words for how I am feeling tonight. Or what to put in my letter to Wayne.

Almost a month ago, I wrote to Wayne, overjoyed about how well my ice cream went over at the benefit.

He never wrote back.

And then, two weeks ago, I wrote to him again about what might be the happiest day in my life thus far. My first day selling ice cream at our farm stand.

Maybe that is the problem.

I’ve never been more tired in my whole life as I was that night, but I was desperate to put the entire day down on paper, so I wouldn’t forget a single wonderful moment. I knew I only had it in me to write it once, with all the emotion I was feeling. But instead of writing it here, in my diary, I decided to put it down in a letter to Wayne.

It was my longest one yet, pages and pages and pages. I wrote for more than an hour, even though I had a burning cramp in my hand from all the scooping. I didn’t dare stop, afraid some little thing might slip away from me and be lost. The aprons all the girls wore. How long the line got and who was in it. Just wanting to get down every single moment for Wayne, so he could feel as if he were here with me, living it with me.

I have been checking the postbox every day. Waiting for his reply. Or for both my letters to be returned. Undeliverable would almost be better.

Today, his response finally came. A quick note, just to say hello and that he loves me. Nothing about my letters, even though I know he at least received the last one, because he casually mentioned one small thing I had written about a friend of his—Paul Hockey—who’d asked after him when he reached the front of the line.

No pride in me.

No excitement for what I had accomplished.

When I got to his signature, I burst into tears and ran straight to my room. Mother came right up after me and pushed open my bedroom door, convinced I’d received some sort of bad news about Wayne. She took the letter straight out of my hand and read it and was so relieved.

But it was bad news, to me.

I told Mother how upset I was, but she thinks I’m batty for caring this much about ice cream, especially in light of the things Wayne and my brothers are facing every day. She made a million excuses for him, that he could have been going off to battle, that maybe a second page of his letter had somehow not made it into the envelope.

She said, in all honesty, “How could he care, Moll? This is a hobby for this summer. Once Wayne comes home, you’ll get married and start a family. And, God willing, if things keep going well for our side, your brothers and Wayne will be home before you know it, and you can go back to being just Molly. And everything will be the way it was always supposed to be.”

Mother said it to comfort me, but it did the opposite.

The war changes people. I’ve seen it in Sy Sampson and Harry Gund, who came back. I sense it in Wayne.

But I think the war is changing me, too. And I’m not sure I can go back. I’m not sure I want to.





CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE


“CAN YOU PLEASE STOP?” CATE asks her, poking her head out of the office door, the same way she’s already asked twice before. But Amelia hears something in Cate’s voice now that has shifted. From playful teasing to straight-up annoyed. And so she puts down the broom and gets on one of the windows.

She’s been back down at the stand for nearly a week now. And she’s been very careful not to annoy Cate, especially after the county fair night, where it felt like they’d begun to patch things up. But even walking on eggshells, she seems to bug Cate every time she tries to do something that wasn’t asked of her.

Grady’s down at the stand too, doing the work that Cate has been complaining about. It’s true, it’s not the most conducive to business. The customers keep shouting What? over the bang of his hammer, and occasionally Grady lets out a frustrated curse.

Today, his focus is on the roof; he’s trying to seal up the shingles with some kind of solution. The smell is pungent and sulfuric, and it’s making the girls dizzy. Every so often, a gooey drip of it will fall through the ceiling and land on the floor with a splat. Grady’s shoes are sticking to the roof. Every footstep sounds like ripping two pieces of duct tape apart.

“I can’t hear myself think,” Cate groans, and fans herself with a schedule she’s been working on for the last hour. “I’m going to pass out from the fumes.”

Amelia scrapes the last scoop from a drum of strawberry and then goes to the walk-in freezer to fetch a new one. She notices that something is wrong right away. She doesn’t get goose bumps the way she normally does when she ducks inside.

“Has anyone heard this kick on lately?” she asks, ducking out.

The girls all shrug.