Grandma’s Peach Ice Cream on the Porch

Then she turned the handle toward her daughter.

“Here,” Grandma said. “I’m going to need help next year. I’m 89, you know.”

Pamela stood there a second. I thought she might argue. I thought she might say something about the heat, or her father, or doctors.

She opened her mouth to say something, and then she closed it.

She came up the steps. She took the handle in both hands. She started turning.

“Slow and steady,” Grandma said. “Let the cream do the work.”

“I know, Mother,” Pamela said. Her voice cracked right in the middle of it. “You told me that when I was eight.”

Nobody in that line said a word. The firemen kept turning. The girl on Lavern’s squeaky crank kept turning.

Grandma sat back down in her rocker, right beside her daughter, and picked up her bowl again.

After a while Pamela said, without looking up from the crank, “I called Augusta because I didn’t know how to tell you to stop. Every time I tried, you’d just smile at me.”

“I know,” Grandma said.

“I found Daddy,” Pamela said. “I keep finding him. Every time you’re out in that heat, I find him all over again.”

Grandma reached over and put her hand flat on Pamela’s back, between her shoulder blades, the way you would on a child who has had a bad dream.

“I know you did, honey,” she said. “I know. But I am not your daddy, and you can’t keep me in a box till I die. I’d rather go turning a crank than sitting by a fan.”

Pamela laughed, a wet, surprised laugh. She wiped her face on her shoulder without letting go of the handle.

“You could have just asked me to help,” Grandma said. “That’s all you ever had to do. Ask me, not Augusta.”

“I’m asking,” Pamela said.

“Then turn,” Grandma said. “It’s getting hard.”

It was. You could hear it. The gear was laboring and the handle was coming slower, and Pamela had to lean her hip into it.

Her husband came across the street and stood at the bottom of the steps, and when she looked at him, he just nodded.

Rowan stood up on the top step with his empty dasher in his hand and watched. Finally he said, very seriously, “If it gets too hard, I can turn it. That’s the rule.”

Pamela looked down at him. “Are you the one getting all the dashers?”

“Four,” Rowan said. “Mrs. Ladd says whoever turns hardest gets it.”

“That used to be my job,” Pamela said. “Since 1974. I was twelve.”

Rowan thought about that. “You can have this one,” he said. “If you turn it all the way.”

Pamela laughed again, and this time the whole line laughed with her, and something on that porch let go.

The kids went back to their cranks. The firemen started telling a story about the year a dog got into the ice.

Pamela cranked that batch all the way to the end. When it got so hard she had to set her feet like Rowan, she did not stop. Grandma did not tell her to.

When Grandma finally said, “That’s it, stop,” Pamela stood back with her arms hanging.