The Music of What Happens(29)

“Cool,” he says. “Organic lemons and sugar, both?”

“Yep,” I say, swallowing.

“Okay.”

I nod. This is not exactly true, but there’s really no way he’ll find that out unless he comes on the truck and roots through our trash.

“Is that it?”

“Um. Well, there is usually a special … ingredient,” I say.

“Sure. I know Bruce’s truck down the way has pomegranate and that stuff is great.”

“Ours is prickly pear,” I say without thinking.

“Hmm,” he says. “Okay. I’d try that.”

“Well, it’s not quite ready,” I say, backing up and smacking into Max, who is standing at the grill.

“Did you forget the prickly pear again?” he asks.

I say, “Dang it.”

The guy says, “When do you think you’ll have it? Would love to try. Frozen prickly pear lemonade sounds off the hook.”

“An hour,” I say, and he smiles, salutes, and walks away.

So that’s how I wind up in an Uber, heading to the closest grocery store, Bashas’. It’s only half a mile away, but in this heat? I don’t think so.

I ask the Uber to hang when we get there. He takes that as an opportunity to drive away when I close the door, and I think, Well, there goes your five-star rating. Bashas’ doesn’t have prickly pear in any form, of course, so I make an executive decision that probably won’t win me a place in heaven but should get us through today.

Max is busy doing two jobs when I get back, and there’s an actual line. Impressively, I see he’s actually sold some frozen lemonades, and I remind myself to keep trying to get back into his good graces. The dude is a machine, and a nice one, to boot. I decide if we do make a ton of money today, I’m gonna give him a percentage on top of his salary. He’ll like that.

“What’d you get?” he asks when he sees that the bag I’ve brought back could not hold even a single prickly pear.

I beckon him over, hiding from the view of those in line. I show him what I have. He laughs.

“Seriously, dude?”

“Hey. It’ll be like a psychology experiment.”

He shakes his head, but at least he has a smile on his face, and I feel like maybe we’re back, past the trouble from yesterday. And I haven’t even unveiled my secret weapon yet. I might not either. Depends how I feel, I guess.

I cross out my menu item and write it again. It’s even longer now: Jordan and Max’s World-Famous Organic Homemade Prickly Pear Frozen Lemonade.

I turn the sign toward Max, and he squints as he reads it. He grins, and when I get back on the truck, he whispers, “Leave me out of this, dude.”

I mumble, “Too late. You’re in. If I go down, you’re going down with me.”

Something about the sentence sounds vaguely sexual to me, and when Max’s eyes don’t leave mine, I feel this jolt of energy climb up my spine and look away. It’s super weird.

I find that a drop of the red food coloring does a nice job of turning the lemonade a pleasing, light shade of electric pink. My heart is pulsing as I pour our first lemonade for our first victim, a girl maybe in her twenties who barely looks up from her cell phone while ordering, waiting, or receiving her drink. I watch as she takes a sip.

“Mmm,” she mumbles, licking her lips, and as she walks away, I turn to Max. He’s watching too.

“One down,” he says.

The next one goes to a hipster guy, who scares the shit out of me when he starts talking about prickly pear, and how it’s one of his favorite flavors.

“I’ve never had it in lemonade, let alone frozen,” he says. “I’m actually a little excited about this.”

I’ve already taken his money, and I kind of want to give it back to him, because surely someone with great prickly pear knowledge will be able to tell that his favorite flavor is absent from our drink. But instead I make change for him and walk the figurative plank, back to the Vitamix in the back of the truck. My heart pulses as the blender buzzes, and when I hand him the light pink frozen concoction, I keep my eyes averted from his.

He isn’t going away, however. He inserts the straw, sucks in a worthy sip, and gives us his report.

“Mmm,” he says. “Taste that prickly pear tang. Wow. It’s actually even better than I thought it would be.”

I smile, and Max comes up to the window. “That’s why we call it ‘Jordan and Max’s World-Famous Organic Homemade Prickly Pear Frozen Lemonade.’ ”

“Amen, amigo,” he says, and I wonder how often Max gets spoken to in Spanish, and whether it bugs him. I’ve never heard him speak in Spanish, not even once.

My success leads Max to get a little more brash too, and when we have a lull in service, he goes out to the whiteboard, erases something, and writes more. He turns the sign to show me.

Coq Au Vinny uses all organic and locally sourced ingredients, he has written. I laugh.

“We are so going to hell, aren’t we?” I say.

“Probably,” he says. “But we’ll go there a lot richer. Just watch.”



Max wasn’t lying. The lines grow and grow, and suddenly we’re this incredible moneymaking machine. At one point, our line is more than ten people long, and what I notice is that when people stand in line, others tend to take notice and come investigate. From about ten until twelve fifteen, when we close up, we are swamped, and I barely notice that the oven and grill have heated the truck to a level that makes it just about impossible to breathe. My body begins to feel chilly, with sweat soaking through my red T-shirt and white shorts, and Max, who is even closer to the flame, is even more drenched. He also looks radiant. Like he was meant to do this. And the amazing thing is this pang of something that goes through me as I watch him in action, speeding around the grill, spritzing water next to the grilled cheese sandwiches to make the grill sizzle, going through plastic glove after plastic glove, lifting tray after tray of cloud eggs out of the oven and spatula-ing them into red-and-white checked paper dishes with the grace of a pro.