Page 15 of Soft Serve

The after-school rush arrives like weather, loud and immediate and entirely without mercy. A wave of teenagers, young families, and tourists who've spent the morning at the lake and have decided collectively that now is the time for ice cream. The shop goes from quiet to capacity in approximately ninety seconds.

Paloma straightens immediately, snapping into a different register, efficient and warm and completely in command.

"Stations," she calls to Rosie, who appears from the back already untying her prep apron.

She glances at me.

"You're on cones," she says. "Rosie takes cups. I take the complicated orders. Don't improvise, don't offer substitutions, and if anyone asks for something that isn't on the board, tell them it's coming soon and mean it."

"Understood," I say.

"And Charles."

I look at her. Something moves briefly through her expression, the morning still sitting in it somewhere underneath the efficiency.

"Good instincts on the flavor," she says. "Don't let it go to your head."

She turns to the first customer before I can answer.

I take my position at the cone station and work the rush with the focused attention I give everything, and if I'm aware of her moving beside me the entire time, of every almost-touch and redirected glance and careful inch of distance, I keep that information exactly where I've been keeping everything else since I walked into this shop.

Chapter 5

Paloma

There's a version of this morning where everything is fine. In that version, I slept properly, the delivery came on time, and Charles is simply a business proposition I'm considering with appropriate professional detachment. In that version, the inside of my wrist doesn't feel like it's been rewritten.

I'm working very hard on that version.

"You're quiet today," Millie observes, appearing at my elbow with the stealth she deploys when she wants information.

"I'm always quiet at this hour," I say.

"It's eleven thirty," she says.

"Exactly," I say. "Very early."

She gives me the look, the one she's been giving me since we were seven years old, and I tried to convince her I wasn't upset about something when I very clearly was. Twenty-five years and it has lost exactly none of its effect.

"He's coming in today," she says.

"He's been coming in every day," I say. "He's part of a business negotiation."

"Right," Millie says.

"That I haven't agreed to."

"Right," she says again, in exactly the same tone.

I point at the prep schedule. She takes it off the wall and gets to work without another word, which is either restraint or strategy, and with Millie, it's usually both.

The morning builds the way mornings do here, steady and layered and familiar enough that I can almost stop noticing the low-grade awareness I've been carrying since yesterday. Almost. The shop fills with its usual Thursday crowd, the bell ringing its cheerful indifferent note, and I fall into the rhythm of it gratefully.

Charles arrives at nine on the dot, which I'm learning is simply who he is. Not early, not late, present with a consistency that is either professionally courteous, and I can't yet determine which.

He washes his hands without being asked now. I notice that I notice this.

We work through the first rush in the productive almost-silence we've developed, close enough to function efficiently, careful enough to maintain the fiction that yesterday's kitchen moment was unremarkable. Rosie works the register. Millie takes the counter. Charles and I move through the prep space with the choreography that has arrived between us uninvited.