by Rose Kent
“And I brought dessert!” I added, holding up the pound cake.
I sat beside Jordan on the futon. He was rubbing his palm against the spots on his belly.
I shook my head, snapped my fingers, and clawed at the air. “No scratching,” I signed.
After dinner, Winnie stacked the plates in the sink, but I stopped her when I heard her getting flustered about the lousy sinks around here that always back up.
“Go on. I’ll finish this. You must’ve skipped your nap today,” I said, grinning.
She wiped her forehead with a napkin. “Guess I am getting a little cranky. But I’m not leaving yet. I’ll park my old bones on this stool and let you do the dishes while you give me a lesson.”
“A lesson on what?”
“Sign language. If I’m going to be caring for Jordan, we need to understand each other. I took a trip to Paris ten years ago. For the month before I left, I memorized ten French words every day. That sure helped when I had to read menus and get directions. How about you teach me ten new signs a day? Ten basic signs.”
I showed Winnie sleep, school, play, bathroom, mom, sister, happy, sad, thirsty, and hungry. She got just about all of them right too—except bathroom. That one confused her, and I told her it gave Ma trouble too.
I shaped her hand into the letter T with her palm facing out, then shook it side to side a couple of times.
She tried again, and this time bathroom looked right.
Then we practiced the signs for Tess, Ma, Delilah, and Jordan. “Name signs are picked by the person they describe,” I explained. “You have to capture what makes you unique. What do you want yours to be, Winnie?”
She paused. “Hmm, that’s a tough one. I’m not sure.”
She asked me to show her nurse, singer, and super senior, but none satisfied her. Then I signed piano player and gourmet cook, but she passed on those too.
“It’s tough to capture my plus-sized personality in a word or two,” she said, laughing.
It was Jordan who finally gave Winnie an idea. As he ate his pound cake and ice cream, he pointed his fork to Winnie’s left hand and giggled.
“Snake!” he signed, waving a bent V hand from his mouth, still giggling as he touched the ring on her pinkie. It was silver, shaped like a snake with gold-studded eyes and a sparkly red tongue.
Winnie looked down at her ring and smiled. “Elston gave me this for my birthday when he was in the second grade. Hard to believe it was forty years ago,” she said, dreamy-eyed. “It might’ve come from a gumball machine for all I know, but it sure made me feel special. No other mom in the neighborhood had one.” Then she paused and turned to Jordan and spoke very slowly. “Show me snake again,” she said, and he read her lips.
When he did, she asked me to sign the letter W.
Then she finger-spelled W and signed snake, and that became Winnie.
Chapter 16
Man does not live on ice cream alone. Stock the shelves with cookies, candy, and other sweet-tooth satisfiers. Secondary products are first-rate for your bottom line.—The Inside Scoop
Sweet surprises blew in the late March wind. I got a perfect score on my Cell-ebration lab and an A on my poetry project! The teacher even scribbled “Very moving!” near the cinquain I called “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants.” (And Pete was flattered when he discovered I wrote a poem about our outing.)
One afternoon I showed up at Winnie’s apartment after school to pick up Jordan and discovered a side of my brother that I’d never seen.
Winnie was belting out her Motown tunes at the piano, and Catherine was sitting in her wheelchair choreographing a dancer—Jordan! He was standing on the coffee table, wearing sunglasses and a black felt hat and shaking his body like a dog coming out of a pond. A CD player blasted music from underneath the coffee table.
“Don’t you just love the Four Tops?” Catherine said, smiling. Rudy the cat was stretched out on the rug, all whiskers and grins, as if he was a true Motown fan too.
“Next one goes out to Tess,” Winnie shouted and signed as a new song began.
“Ooooh, Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch. You know that I love you,” Winnie sang along with the Four Tops, and Jordan signed with his head bobbing.
Meanwhile, Catherine stuck her arm up to demonstrate the next move, and Jordan twirled around.
“Legs. Use legs!” Catherine signed, and I was impressed that she finger-spelled legs properly.
Jordan’s timing was good. Really good. He shook his leg like a tambourine with each ooooh. He clapped his hands to the beat. And every time Winnie sang the chorus, he tipped his hat and jiggled his shoulders. Even his tongue wagged to the rhythm.
I couldn’t believe it. How could Jordan be dancing? He couldn’t hear!
But he was dancing. And then it hit me fast, like the drumbeat. Jordan felt the music from his sneakers, through the wooden table. That was why Winnie put the CD player underneath. Just like how I thump the floor hard to get his attention when he’s not facing me.
“Bravo!” I clapped. And I laughed. But I also felt guilty. All these years we could have cut loose together dancing, had I given Jordan the chance. I’d gotten on Ma for not signing enough, but I hadn’t even thought about finding another way to help him enjoy music.
Jordan had come through the chicken pox without one scar thanks to Winnie, so Ma asked her to stay on as his regular afternoon babysitter, five days a week. I worried that Ma didn’t have enough money to pay for babysitting, but when I asked, Winnie just said she was compensated more than adequately, thank you. And Winnie found out about a playgroup nearby for deaf kids. I got the feeling that she liked the company as much as Ma liked not having to run back and forth between the shop and the apartment so much.
Something was different about Jordan lately. Maybe it was the friends he was making at playgroup and all the new signs he was learning at school. Or maybe it was because life at the Mohawk Valley Village was improving. Chief had posted a DEAF CHILD PLAY AREA sign in the parking lot so Jordan could ride his bike, and he’d gotten a telecommunications device for the deaf installed in our apartment. The TDD looked like a tiny laptop computer, and it allowed Jordan to phone Ma at the shop whenever he wanted by typing messages across its screen and reading Ma’s messages. Thanks to a relay service, the TDD helped him communicate with others too. Jordan even learned how to order takeout. One week we had pizza four times!
Whatever it was, FrankenJordan wasn’t rearing his ugly head as much. And that was fine by me.
Another surprise waited for me at A Cherry on Top one cloudy, drizzly afternoon. I’d just come from my last “observational” peer-mediation session. This one involved Ellie (my meet-and-greeter) and another player from the girls’ basketball team. They’d gotten into a shoving match on the basketball court. Kim and Gavin did the mediating, and it turned out the hidden agenda was a doozie. Way back in kindergarten Ellie had been a bed wetter, and the other girl had blabbed to the whole team about it in the locker room, embarrassing and infuriating Ellie. (Basic need: to be treated with respect.) Kim and Gavin looked like they’d been running sprints themselves by the time the mediation ended. Listening to that verbal dueling made my neck break out with blotches again. And I was scheduled to mediate at the next session.
When I walked into A Cherry on Top, Ma was leaning over the counter, pouring goopy chocolate on a marble slate with a big copper kettle beside her. “Howgozit with peer mediation?” she called.
“Intense. There sure are lots of people getting mad at each other.” I poured lemonade from the mini fridge Ma had just bought and took a long sip. “What are you making?”
“Homemade fudge, aka a revenue booster that’s gonna bring in gobs of money. Tourists always splurge on fudge.”
“What tourists?” I asked. I doubted rusty old Schenectady was listed in a travel guide as a vacation destination.
“Tourists from NYC or across the Canadian border. ‘If we make it, they will come.’ That is, if we make it taste g
ood.”
“I don’t get it,” I said. “This is an ice cream shop. Shouldn’t we stick with ice cream?”
“Customers want all sorts of treats, and that’s not just me talking,” she said as she banged the wooden spoon inside the kettle. “The Inside Scoop says so.”
The problem with selling homemade fudge is that it has to be homemade. Both of the trial batches Ma made that afternoon came out terrible. One tasted sickly sweet, and the other, like stale oatmeal.
For hours on end she made batch after batch, adding more corn syrup, then less corn syrup, boiling it five minutes longer, then boiling it five minutes less, but it all looked like a gloppy mud cake—tasted that way too.
Eventually Ma started to melt down. First she let out a loud “Hell’s bells!” and then she flung the spoon toward the sink but missed, splashing chocolate across the counter and against the wall.
“I feel like a chocolate train wreck. This is terrible, terrible, terrible! I can’t afford to mess this fudge up—or this business,” she moaned, slinking down against the counter and putting her head between her knees.
Her crying, and acting like this was a life-or-death matter, got me worried again. Was this the start of a crash?
I rinsed off the spatula. “Rome wasn’t built in a day, right? We’ll figure this out with some time and practice. I’m taking over as official fudge maker.”
Turned out that fudge making is kind of like doing a science lab. The secret is following the recipe directions precisely—Ma’s style of guesstimating when she measured out ingredients didn’t work. Using the very best unsweetened chocolate helps too, and the right tools. When our dollar-store candy thermometer cracked in the boiling mixture, I went out and bought an upgraded model that gave a more accurate reading.
Not that I mastered fudge making all by myself. My first batch didn’t set, so I called the best troubleshooter I knew: Winnie. “Fudge isn’t my expertise, but I’ll refer you to a specialist,” she said.
Talk about a coincidence. Catherine was born on Mackinac Island, Michigan—also known as the fudge capital of the United States—and she gave me The Authentic Mackinac Island Fudge Cookbook. After reading it, I realized my problem: the mixture needed to be spread more smoothly, and I had to allow more cooling time. And Catherine gave me a tip that explained our first day’s disaster: “Make fudge when the sun shines. It doesn’t set well when it’s humid.”
I have to admit I got caught up in fudge mania. I should’ve been spending every waking moment on homework, preparing for peer mediation, and sewing patchworks for Winnie’s bench cushion. Instead, I was at A Cherry on Top, listening to Elvis on the jukebox and whipping up dozens of exotic varieties of fudge. White chocolate, peanut butter, cherry rippled, coffee and ginger, macadamia nut, Kahlúa—and my favorite, of course: Rocky Road. Ma was thrilled with all of them, giddy like a little kid as she watched me mix and pour each new creation. And every night I’d bring back samples for Jordan to taste. He always gave the peanut butter fudge five stars.
Then, after I’d created more fudge flavors than you could count in a minute, Ma reconsidered and decided to stick with three classics: chocolate, caramel, and peanut butter. “No sense in overwhelming customers,” she said, biting into a freshly made piece. “Better to save the variety for the real stars of the show: the ice cream.”
Ma made me wear an apron, plastic gloves, and a hairnet while I cooked.
The hairnet itched something awful, but she was a stickler about sanitation. “The Schenectady Health Department will be checking on us,” she said. “And besides, right is right. Who wants hairy fudge? Good grief!”
On the first Friday afternoon in April, I was delirious from a marathon candy-making session. There I stood in my apron and hairnet, stirring the chocolate-butter-cream mixture over the heat to make yet another batch of fudge. Only I wasn’t feeling like a cheery Food Channel chef. My clothes smelled like fudge, my fingernails were rimmed in fudge, and I had a callus on my thumb from gripping the wooden spoon. The last thing I wanted was to make more of this stuff. And to make things worse, the old radiator was running on overdrive again. The shop felt hot and steamy like a rain forest.
“One more batch and you get time off for good behavior,” Ma said, rubbing my shoulder as I smoothed the mixture.
Then she pulled red dress heels from behind the counter, stuck them on her feet, and dabbed matching lipstick on.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“Out to dinner,” she said, slinging a purse over her shoulder.
“Without me? No fair.”
“This is strictly business, Tess. The monthly meeting of the Schenectady Chamber of Commerce. Winnie’s having Jordan for his first sleepover at her apartment, and I’ll be back here for you by ten.”
But I didn’t want to stay at the shop alone at night. It was almost dark outside—and creepy. “That’s too late. I’m tired. And it’s so hot in here.”
“I know, honey. That sorry excuse for a landlord says he can’t fix the radiator until tomorrow. In the meantime, I’ll crack a window open.”
I looked around. The shelving unit behind the ice cream counter had to be assembled, the menu board still wasn’t complete, and the windows needed washing. Plus we hadn’t designed a flyer to circulate yet for the Grand Opening.
“There’s so much to do, Ma, and we’ve got less than two weeks. Why waste time at some boring dinner?”
“You gotta schmooze to make a buck in Schenectady, Tess. If I give these folks some attention, they’ll spread the word about A Cherry on Top. And Mayor Legato will be there. I’m going to ask him to do the honor of cutting the ribbon at our Grand Opening.”
I frowned. “Why would he want to help us after what happened to his car?”
She nodded as she buttoned her jacket. “One hand washes the other in local politics. This shop is going to brighten Schenectady’s business horizon. Believe you me, every politician’s mouth drools for sweets and publicity.”
Ma handed me a five-dollar bill and a check made out to the ice cream wholesaler. “After you finish this batch of fudge, get yourself supper next door at Bianco’s Pizzeria. I was over earlier helping Mrs. Bianco wash her blinds, and I said you’d be by. But hurry back. The ice cream delivery is coming later and it’s a costly frozen bundle. We have to make a killing when we open.”
Ma started for the door, but then stopped, looked back, and smiled.
“What?” I asked, wiping fudge from my elbow.
“You, working so hard. This business. It’s all good. We’re out of the storm. Once that cash register starts ringing, it’ll be sunny skies.”
“Don’t jinx yourself,” I said, pointing the drippy spoon at her.
“That reminds me,” Ma said as she plugged in the dipping cabinet’s electric cord. “I better get this chilling before the ice cream arrives. And be sure you lock the door behind you later!”
Chapter 17
For optimal flavor, store ice cream at 0 to −25 degrees Fahrenheit.—The Inside Scoop
An hour later I was back in A Cherry on Top, nibbling on pizza crust, reading through the peer-mediation training folder, and rehearsing lines like “Please explain what’s been going on” and “What would you like to see happen now?” in my best take-charge voice when someone tapped on the door. It was a UPS guy with a package. The deluxe Lone Star flag Ma ordered. Three cheers for Texas.
A few minutes later, the ice cream wholesaler arrived with a full load of five-gallon tubs. I showed him the dipping cabinet, and he started filling it with the ice cream.
“Phew. Is this working?” he called, banging his hand inside the case. Sweat glistened on his ruddy face.
“Think so,” I said. “It just got turned on.”
He swiped his forehead. “Well, it’s not cold yet. And it feels like the Sahara Desert in here.”
He went back to his truck for two more loads, and I gave him Ma’s check.
“How much ice cream is this a
ltogether?” I asked, looking at the jam-packed dipping cabinet.
“Twenty-eight tubs: twenty-one ice cream, four frozen yogurt, and three sherbet. Don’t you have an extra freezer in the back?”
I shook my head. Ma had bought plenty of overpriced gizmos, gadgets, supplies, and decorations, but not an extra freezer.
After he left, I stuck my hand in the dipping cabinet. Yikes. It wasn’t cool at all. The thermometer hanging in the corner read sixty-six degrees. I touched the side of the mint chocolate chip. Rock hard—good.
I shut the glass top quickly to keep the heat out. Then I put my peer-mediation folder away. I started embroidering another patch for Winnie’s bench cushion, a tribute to her favorite Motown music group, Gladys Knight and the Pips. Cross-stitching four singers on a six-inch square was hard enough, but fitting three Afros was really tricky. I planned on presenting Winnie with the cushion for her birthday in June. Summer might seem like a long time away to most people, but not quilters. I had sixteen customized patches to go, and each took a long time to make.
Embroidering in a steamy room made me sleepy. I took a break, stretched my legs, and then started writing the ice cream flavor label cards using my nice calligraphy pen. Twenty minutes later I opened the dipping cabinet to put the label cards in place, but the temperature hadn’t dropped; it went up another degree! The shop did feel like the desert. How long would the ice cream stay frozen before the freezer kicked in? I opened the top of the mint chocolate chip tub. It wasn’t rock hard anymore.
An hour later, Ma still wasn’t back. I touched the strawberry tub, afraid to open it and discover a pink puddle. Luckily, it was still cool—but not cold. And instead of having a thin layer of ice on the outside, it had tiny water beads.
I thought about carrying the ice cream outside. The April night air was downright cold, but then I remembered Ma warning me to keep the place locked up. Troublemakers walked the streets at night, and I didn’t want them messing with our product.