Grandma’s Peach Ice Cream on the Porch

Nobody meant it as a snub. They just wanted Geneva’s peach. They always had.

I am not proud of the first thing I felt. It was a small, hot flicker of something that was almost glad.

I pushed it down. I thought about Pamela finding Grandpa in the feedlot with the mineral block beside him, and it went away.

She was not a villain in her own head.

She was a daughter who had decided her mother was going to die doing something foolish, and she had tried to stop it the only way she knew, by managing it.

But she had done it by going around her mother instead of to her. And now she was standing behind a table full of melting store tubs while the whole town walked past her.

That was the consequence, and I did not have to say a word to make it.

By three o’clock, we had made twenty batches. Thirty gallons of peach ice cream, give or take, out of six old cranks on one porch.

My arms were shaking and my shirt was soaked through with salt water and sweat.

Rowan had turned the handle on every batch of Grandma’s crank. He had gotten the dasher four times. He was sticky to the elbows and he would not stop smiling.

I looked across the street again, and Pamela was looking back at us.

She was looking at the line, which was still going down the walk.

She was looking at Lavern in his chair, and at the firemen at the cranks, and at the boy on the top step with the dasher. Mostly she was looking at her mother in the rocker.

I watched her set the scoop down on the red tablecloth. She said something to her husband, and he nodded. She stood there another few seconds with her hands at her sides.

Then she walked out of the pavilion and started across the street.

She did not hurry. She waited for a pickup to pass, and then she crossed, and the people on the sidewalk moved a little to let her through.

A few of them said hello. She said hello back.

Grandma stopped rocking. I saw her hands tighten on the arms of the chair, and then let go.

Pamela came up the walk past the line of kids. She stopped at the bottom of the porch steps.

She looked at the six cranks, one at a time, the way Grandma had in the garage.

“Mother,” she said. Just that.

Up close, I could see she had been crying, or close to it.

Her mascara had run a little at one corner. She is not a woman who lets her mascara run in public.

Nobody on that porch said anything. The kids at the cranks kept turning, because kids do. Lavern looked at his bowl. Rowan looked up from the dasher with his mouth open.

Grandma stood up out of her rocker. She did it slowly, with one hand on the arm of the chair, and Pamela took a step forward like she wanted to catch her, and then stopped herself.

Grandma walked to the nearest crank, which was her own, the green-gear crank that Grandpa bought for four dollars.

Rowan had just started a fresh batch on it. She put her hand on Rowan’s shoulder and he let go of the handle.