Rocky Road (16 page)

A cold draft from the storage room caught my attention.
The back door was open again, and a juice box lay in a purple puddle. A cartoon blasted from the TV, but Jordan wasn’t here. Where was he? I dropped my paintbrush by the slop sink and looked outside.

“Jordan!” I shouted, as if yelling did any good. The wind whipped through the alley, and I smelled pizza, but I saw no one. My hands and legs started shaking, partly from the damp cold, and then I heard a screechy noise. A garbage truck was backing up toward the giant Dumpster. Suddenly a yellow flash caught my eye. Jordan! He was standing on a chair up against the garbage bin, perched on tiptoes, trying to pull himself up to look in.

I rushed over, grabbed his waist, and yanked him down. I couldn’t recall the sign for
dangerous
, but I looked straight at him and mouthed the word as clearly as I could, shivering.

He jumped, startled. “Want big box,” he signed, jerking back toward the Dumpster.

“You could fall in!” I grabbed his cold hand and pulled him away, just as the garbage truck stopped in front of us and the driver gave me a dirty look.

“No going near garbage. You almost got hurt!” I glared with wicked eyes.

“Want big box for … for … Want box! Want box!” Jordan signed, furiously forming his hands in a box shape. He was getting frustrated because he didn’t know the sign for whatever he was trying to tell me. I grabbed his wrist and pulled him along. All the while he yanked back like a puppy resisting a leash.

Inside, he bawled with a snotty, runny nose. “Meanie Tess!” his fingers roared.

But I wasn’t playing the sympathetic sis. I left him in the storage room, tossing sponges against the supply boxes. I walked out to the counter, where Ma was scrubbing a metal topping dispenser, and told her what happened. “You gotta punish him. And get that back door fixed!” My hands were still trembling, even if it was a hundred degrees in here.

As I spoke, Jordan came running out.

“Jordan Dobson, no running off like that,” Ma signed in her pidgin sign. Her
run
was so wrong, it looked like she was shooting an arrow from her chest. She turned to me. “I’ll call the building manager. Between that dad-blasted door, the rusty pipes, and the broken radiator, this place is giving me hot flashes—and I’m not in menopause.”

Now
my
face felt hot. “Aren’t you going to let Jordan have it? At least take away his TV privileges?”

Ma looked at me calmly, like she’d just woken up. “Who’s got the ID card that says parent, you or me? He got a good fright. It won’t happen again.”

I wanted to stomp my foot, make Ma understand this
was
a big deal. Part of the problem here was that Jordan and Ma couldn’t even understand each other.

But Ma wasn’t seeing it that way. Not one bit.

“This makes no sense,” I mumbled. I grabbed the paints and brushes and walked away.

For the rest of the afternoon I painted in the men’s room and stayed clear of my mother and my brother. Jordan kept
squealing and tossing his plastic animals at the wall near the door of the men’s room, but I ignored him—except for when he almost spilled the water I was using to wash my brushes. Then I had my own mini meltdown when I smudged the brown hot-fudge paint and had to sponge down the picture and start again.

Later in the afternoon I heard a whirl coming from the front counter. Then Jordan came over and handed me a milk shake with a cherry plopped on top of a dab of whipped cream.

“For you. Yummy,” he signed, rubbing his belly.

I took a sip. Wow. That was
creamy
vanilla.

Ma appeared from behind the counter, her hair pulled back in a hairnet. “This place did feel empty without ice cream, so I got some from the grocery store. It’s just enough to test the equipment—
our
product will be far superior, of course. You’re sampling a Schenectady Snow Shake—thick with whiteout conditions, like the blizzards we get here. I added heavy cream and a teaspoon of pure vanilla extract.”

I gave her a thumbs-up and kept slurping. The only improvement I’d make would be a scoop of chocolate along with the vanilla ice cream, and a handful of mini marshmallows and almonds. A Rocky Road milk shake.

Ma walked over and sat in the dining area and put her feet up. She was sipping a shake, too. “You’re right about the back door being trouble. And that building manager moves slower than a beetle dipped in molasses. I’m going to install a dead bolt.”

I was glad to hear it. Once in a while Ma
can
be reasonable.
“So you’re going to name
every
ice cream special?” I asked, glancing at the menu board.

“You bet your jim-dandy. The
Inside Scoop
says you have to give your customers a razzle-dazzle experience. Otherwise, folks might as well head to the supermarket for whatever’s on sale. We’re naming specials after movie stars, Schenectady attractions, friends, and whatever else sells. Guess what ice cream magic I dreamed up this afternoon?”

“I give up.”

“The ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough’ Mocha-Fudge Frappe. In honor of Winnie.”

“I like that!” I said, laughing.

“And how ’bout the ‘Jordan Peanut Butter Party in a Cup’? Three scoops of peanut butter ice cream ladled with peanut butter sauce, whipped cream, and a cup of chopped peanuts dumped on top. Definitely not for the peanut-allergy crowd.”

I couldn’t help but wonder,
What about me?
I’d made the curtains. And I was deep into making ice cream art. Never mind the hundreds of hours of babysitting I’d logged in for the boss’s son.
Where’s my namesake?
But I didn’t ask. If I did, Ma might think I had fully joined her ice cream brigade—and I hadn’t.

Then I thought of Pete, and how he had spoken about his dad—happily, not at all embarrassed—and I smiled. A smile didn’t cost much.

About the same moment, Jordan picked up my brushes, stuck them in his ears, and started hopping and scratching his armpits like a monkey.

A laugh popped out of my mouth. I made the Y hand, pulled it toward my face, and twisted it back and forth. “Silly.”

“You should name it the ‘Jordan’s Driving Tess Nuts’ Special,” I said to Ma, taking the brushes back.

I sat down and looked around. Ma had leaned the empty chalkboard box beside the window, and Jordan was eyeing it. So I took his hand, and in that instant, I forgave him. What’s that saying? “Curiosity killed the cat”? It’s also what keeps Jordan going, even when he can’t let us know what’s on his mind.

“Follow me,” I signed, leading him to the box. I cut the box in two pieces, balanced it on the floor like a tent, and placed a towel underneath it. “Cowboy Jordan’s tent,” I signed and spoke, deep like the western-movie voices I heard through the apartment wall last night. I gestured like I was riding a horse.

“Playing western comes natural for me,” Ma said, tugging her fudge-streaked cleaning rag into her shirt like a bandanna and walking bowlegged with her thumbs tucked into her pockets like gun holsters. “I grew up on the OK Corral.”

Within minutes we transformed A Cherry on Top into the Wild West, with three gun-slinging cowboys having a showdown with a pack of invisible, good-for-nothin’ outlaws who were trying to make off with a Schenectady Snow Shake.

“Yee-haw! Go get ’em, Sheriff Dobson!” Ma shouted as Jordan took off in pursuit of the bandits.

Jordan rode furiously in and out between dining tables, then behind the ice cream counter before lassoing the bad guys. All the while Ma and I foot-stomp-cheered back at camp
in front of the tent. “The sight of that brave cowboy makes my Texan-born-and-bred bones proud,” Ma called, with her twang cranked up two hundred percent.

Minutes later Sheriff Jordan crawled back into the tent triumphantly with a six-foot grin spread under his milk-shake mustache. His fingers signed faster than a speeding bullet: “I caught the bad guys!”

T
he cold luck of the Irish, that’s what they called the nor’easter that hit on March 17 and dumped eighteen inches of snow. Nearby, the city of Albany canceled its Saint Patrick’s Day parade. School was closed, and crocuses ready to bloom got trapped under monster snow mounds.

The wintry wallop made me homesick for mild spring days back in San Antonio, especially after I got a letter from my little friend Juanita. In her purple smudgy handwriting, she wrote how she and her grandfather were already turning the
soil in the garden. “Guess what? We’ve added a new vegetable this year: the tomatillo. It looks like a little green tomato, and my grandma says it makes a great sauce.”

I didn’t miss my old school, but I missed the redbud trees with their blooms bursting everywhere. I missed riding my scooter out front with Juanita and eating sopapillas on her front stoop. Come springtime, her
abuelita
always made those crispy pastry pillows and drizzled them with honey so sweet and sticky that we’d have to lick our fingers clean like cats.

But there was no time to get homesick. School here in Schenectady was copying the weather and coming at me like a blizzard. I had a Cell-ebration science lab to finish, a
“¡Vamos comer!”
restaurant poster to design for Spanish, and an English project due that involved writing ten different kinds of poems, including one called an American cinquain, which took five lines only and was created by a poet from upstate New York named Miss Crapsey. (That got the whole class giggling.) On top of all that, Mr. Win had noticed the lanyard key chain I made dangling from my jeans, and he’d asked if I would design the shirts for Peer Mediation Club. Now doing
that
kind of peer-mediation work was appealing. Only problem: he needed it soon.

Meanwhile, Ma was still charging ahead for the April 15 Grand Opening. In an effort to be part of the business neighborhood, she’d hosted a “Howdy, Partner” social at the shop and invited all the nearby retailers, including from the street’s bakery, pizzeria, shoe-repair shop, dry cleaners, and insurance brokerage. “Some of these folks haven’t turned a profit since
before there was an Internet,” she told me afterward. She’d gotten an earful about their soap-opera lives and business struggles.

Ma wasn’t worried that the late-in-the-season snowfall would hurt business. “I bet this weather gets folks stir-crazy,” she said. “A Cherry on Top will give ’em a good reason to pull on their boots, saddle up their horses, and head downtown.”

I told her that business would do better if she toned down her Texas twang, but she had no intention of doing that.

“Yankees like us Longhorns. They know we’re not quitters. Which is why I looked high and low to find a deluxe, custom-made Lone Star flag. I just ordered it, and it’s going to hang proudly by the cash register. Well worth the two hundred bucks it set me back.”

“Two hundred bucks?”

Ma rested her hand on her waist. “It’s a collector’s item,” she said.

Hearing about that pricey flag got me worrying. And not just because a Lone Star flag didn’t fit with a cozy café theme. What else was Ma blowing money on that I didn’t know about? And did this spending spree mean that Shooting Stars was back? Ma was regularly pulling all-nighters too. “Start-up demands” was her excuse for not sleeping. Marketing ideas popped from her mouth randomly like Mexican jumping beans, and she couldn’t sit still, not long enough to finish a Dr Pepper. Nobody could keep this pace up forever, and it was starting to show. When Jordan had a fit, Ma would lose patience quickly. Or when she’d drop or lose something, cusswords would fly.

I tried to get Ma to rest more and to ease up on the shopping sprees. “You’ll run out of gas and
we’ll
run out of money,” I said. But she always quoted that annoying
Inside Scoop
—“You gotta spend money to make money.”

As the Grand Opening got closer, Ma put my work gears in overdrive too. She was so pleased with how the animal parade turned out in the bathroom that she asked me to paint paw prints on the shop floor leading to the serving counter, representing the four-footed critters that lived in the nearby Adirondack Mountains. I painted moose, deer, bear, raccoon, possum, fox, woodchuck, and chipmunk tracks (that took a size 00 miniature brush). I even painted a humongous hairy print next to the trash can because I read on a Web site that Bigfoot had once been spotted in the Hudson Valley some years ago. And as a finishing touch, Ma assembled a motorized beaver riding a unicycle on a tightrope across the dining-area ceiling since that was New York State’s official animal.