CHAPTER TWENTY
GRADY AND AMELIA SPEND THE rest of the day digging through Molly’s office. The fan he’s bought doesn’t provide relief so much as a disappointingly warm wind, but she is grateful that Grady locks it so it blows primarily in her direction.
At the end of first shift, Cate texts Amelia and lets her know that she and a few of the other girls are heading to the lake, and does Amelia want to come with?
Ugh. I should stay and keep looking. But hopefully I can meet you guys there in a bit! Amelia knows it’s a stretch. It’s not as if they seem any closer to finding anything. But she is trying to remain hopeful.
She readies herself for a bit of pushback from Cate. Maybe a guilt trip that Cate had to work the whole shift without her, or a bit of teasing.
But Cate doesn’t even respond.
Amelia has been attacking the oldest files, Grady the newest.
Grady moves with assembly-line speed, setting aside anything he thinks might be helpful for his business plan, sending everything else through his brand-new shredder, which he picked up with the fan at Walmart.
Amelia winces every time the shredder’s blades whirl. This takes care of any lingering remorse she might feel about slipping Molly’s diary inside her tote bag.
But Grady is making better time with the job, that’s for sure. Amelia’s pace is far slower, in part because her boxes contain more mementos and ephemera, especially the ones from the late 1940s and early 1950s, when Molly was just starting out. She’s tempted to read everything. And Amelia can’t determine what, if anything, she should shred. An ad in the Sand Lake Ledger from 1947? A certificate of recognition from the Sand Lake Chamber of Commerce?
And what about all the photos? Of summer picnics at the farmhouse, of the girls at the county fair, and what seems like an annual tradition of the stand girls posing in front of Meade Creamery, their scooping arms flexed, exactly like they had the first year in business. Why did that end? she wonders, and examines the faces in each one, looking to spot town residents, noticing how hairstyles changed, in curls one summer, up another, then cut into bobs. Eventually, she sets them aside in a separate, neat pile. Grady might throw them away eventually, or shred them, but she’s not going to be the one to do that.
While she tries to lose herself in the work, her thoughts drift back to Molly’s first diary entry. Her goodbye kiss with Wayne. Even though Amelia doesn’t think she ever actually heard Molly’s voice, she can imagine it now, somewhere faintly inside her, urging him to promise to come back to her, with no idea that it would be the last time she ever laid eyes on him.
Amelia’s eyes begin to tear, her throat tighten. A tear rolls down her cheek.
It is so tragically romantic.
“Whoa,” Grady says, his blue eyes intent on her. “You okay?”
“Ugh. It’s so dusty in here,” she complains, dabbing at her eyes with her sleeve and shifting the direction of the fan, and only then does she peek over at Grady to see if he’s bought her performance. Only he’s not watching her anymore.
Grady’s got a bundle of papers in his lap.
And from his stunned blinking, Amelia assumes they are something.
“What did you find?” she asks, crawling toward him.
He glances up, startled. And as Amelia nears, he seems to want to hide whatever’s in his hands.
“Grady?”
“These are letters my mom sent to Molly.”
Amelia sucks in a breath. “Whoa. I bet she’ll get such a kick out of seeing them. You should send them to her!” Grady lowers his head and rubs the back of his neck, which makes Amelia feel suddenly unsure. “I mean, maybe wait until she’s home from New Zealand. I don’t know how much international postage costs. Probably a lot.”
He wets his lips. “These are from my real mom,” he explains. “She died when I was six. My dad married Quinn a year or so later. That’s who raised me, basically.”
Avoiding her eyes, he passes over a stack of envelopes held together by an old rubber band. They’re addressed to Molly Meade. The return address is from a Diana Denton-Meade.
“Oh.”
“She got cancer. The summer she and I spent in Sand Lake was her last one.”
She passes the letters back to him. Maybe this, and not the heat, is why Grady’s confined himself to one room of the farmhouse. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s fine. I’ve tried not to think too much about it.”
Except Amelia knows he has thought about it, at least once. The moment he tasted Home Sweet Home. The sadness she saw in those lake eyes.
Grady sets the bundle on the mantel and goes back to flipping through a bank ledger. Maybe he’ll read them once she’s gone.
Or maybe he won’t.
* * *
By the end of the night, what sounds like a thousand crickets are chattering away in the dark, and they still haven’t found the recipes. Grady says, tiredly, “I’ll drive you home.”
Outside, it’s much cooler. Almost cold. The girls have already placed the evening deposit bag with the receipts in the mailbox. Grady sticks it in his waistband, then loads Amelia’s bike into the trunk of the pink Cadillac while she climbs into the passenger side. The seats are deep and made of smooth tan leather.
On the way down the driveway, Amelia says, “We should probably check the stock. See how much the girls sold today.”
Grady doesn’t slow down. “I’d rather not.”
So Amelia directs him to her house. His mind seems to be elsewhere, but he does make the correct turns. He pulls up to the curb and she asks him, “Have you asked your dad? Would he know something about the recipes?” Grady shakes his head nervously, as if answering both questions at once, and puts the car in park. Amelia tries again. “Well, maybe he’ll have some advice for you about what to do.”
“Come on. You don’t need a business degree to know that an ice cream shop can’t stay open without ice cream to sell.”
“Right, but—”
“Here’s the thing, Amelia. I can’t fail.” He leans back, his hands in his lap, and stares at the roof of the Cadillac, his shoulders sagging like he already has.
It’s clear Grady has a weird relationship with his dad. And he has his own emotional ties to Meade Creamery. But do those things add up to this level of anxiety? Because Grady’s making it seem like Meade Creamery going under is on par with the end of the world.
She thinks of Cate’s warning. Grady could be trying to play her.
“I don’t want the stand to fail either. This place is as important to me as it is to you.” Amelia is almost sure their reasons are different. But what does that matter now?
He rolls his head toward her. “So what do we do?”
She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. “How hard do you think it is to make ice cream?”
He shrugs. “I wouldn’t know.”
“It’s not like Molly had any formal training. We have her whole setup. And most of the ingredients. Her strawberry jam. Her fudge sauce. The vanilla beans she has soaking in that random syrup. Maybe we can find ice cream recipes that use those ingredients and see how close we can get.”
“What about Home Sweet Home?”
“Home Sweet Home will probably stay a mystery,” she concedes, getting out of the car. “But three out of four flavors would be enough to keep the stand in business. Meanwhile, we keep looking for the recipes. We’ll find them eventually.”
Calling after her, Grady says, “You’re making this sound easy.”
She calls back, “Look for green lights, not stop signs, remember?”
For the first time that day, Grady laughs. “What idiot told you that?”
* * *
Amelia’s mom is still awake when she comes through the door.
“Oh. You waited up?”
“No. I was coming to get some water. Cate dropped you off?”
“Yes,” Amelia lies, because she doesn’t want to get into it right now. She glances at her phone. There’s still no text from Cate. Not since her afternoon invitation to the lake. “Well . . . good night.”
Upstairs, Amelia gets ready for bed. She texts Cate Sorry I never made it and then brushes her teeth.
Cate’s response comes as Amelia moves on to flossing. Any luck?
No. Hopefully tomorrow.
Amelia carries her phone back into her bedroom, watching as Cate types a response. And then Cate stops. It takes another few seconds—until Amelia climbs into bed and pulls the blankets up to her chin—before Cate types again.
K.
Amelia sets her phone down. Cate’s clearly annoyed with her, probably because she was abandoned for an entire shift today. And since she just volunteered to try making ice cream tomorrow, there’s a good chance Amelia won’t be around for that shift, either.
The best thing that could happen, on all fronts, is that Amelia finds the recipes ASAP.
Though she’s tired, she opens Molly’s diary and begins reading.
November 29, 1944
I’ve been trying to help Daddy with his chores, not that he lets me do any real work, even though everything is falling behind without Liam and Pat and now Wayne around. He threw me out of the barn yesterday—that’s how much he did not enjoy the sight of his only daughter dripping with sweat during the first dusting of snow, shoveling a knee-deep pile of dung in the cow stalls. I can’t say I enjoyed it either, but he needs help and I desperately want to do something. Being physical did ease some of the heartache for me, calluses aside.
But no, Daddy says my job is to be a comfort to Mother.
I would really like nothing more. Except Mother steeps herself in her sadness like her tea, never lifting the bag out, letting the hot water go black and bitter and cold. I don’t blame her. She has so many worries. My brothers and Wayne. The business. Daddy. Me.
The only time she is happy is when she’s making wedding plans for Wayne and me. Tiggy thinks I’m a fool because I’ve let her take the reins on pretty much everything, but if I didn’t, I don’t know if she’d ever smile.
Amelia turns the page, intending to read the next entry, but her eyes can’t quite focus. Her Molly Meade history lesson will have to wait until tomorrow.