Mary was tired of the stupid kid who always ordered the impossible. Here’s how it worked. Here’s how it always worked, and, in fact, how it was currently working:
The boy showed up at the side of her ice cream truck wearing a fedora (probably his grandfather’s) and a beige leisure suit stretched tight across his pudgy belly. He was eleven, she thought. Maybe twelve. He walked up to the side of her ice cream truck—no, sauntered up to the side of her truck, the way her ex-husband would—and presented her with a crisp fifty-dollar bill.
“I can’t break this,” she said. “Go ask your mom for change.”
They’d been over this already.
They’d been over being over this already.
It was unusual for a thirty-year-old woman to despise a child so much. Mary knew this and didn’t like it. But she accepted its truth.
Because the boy refused to leave. He always refused to leave. While Mary dispensed Bottle Rockets and Screwballs and ice cream sandwiches, while she scraped the frost off a freezer-burned Fudgsicle for a spray-tanned old lady wearing a ton of gold, the boy leaned against the side of the truck and sweated through his polyester.
She conceded that it was a practical suit, or would be a practical suit if this were the seventies and the boy was a man. With spirals of chest hair. And a hair-salon afro. As it was, she thought, no one should wear a suit to the beach. Especially little boys who looked vaguely like they wanted to slit your tires with a pocketknife.
When the last child—a little girl with spectacularly tight cornrows—wandered off toward the swing-set, licking drips of vanilla off her wrist, Mary allowed herself a moment. The ocean practically begged her to leap through the service window of her truck and into its waves. The breeze was hung with humidity. Wheeling gulls edged in on the sun. Mary watched a small cloud of them dip close to the cornrow girl. The girl batted them away with one arm and hugged her Choco Taco to her chest with the other.
Mary thought of her own little pest—imagined him with a beak instead of those slobbery lips, imagined him with wings too small to carry him off. There was something weird about the boy. Something not quite right. Like his nose didn’t match his eyes, or his mouth was a little off-center or something.
“Mary,” the boy said. “Hey. Mary.”
She could swear she saw the glint of a pocketknife in the boy’s hand, but then concluded that it was probably the Rolex the kid wore, and that the combination of sun-heat and air conditioning was making her a little nutty. (All these weeks and she still didn’t know the boy’s name. Maybe he’d told it to her once and she’d scrubbed it from her memory. Who knew? Who cared?)
In any case, Mary was distracted.
Surfer Guy walked from her peripheral vision into her direct line of sight. Mary followed him with her eyes. His wetsuit clung to every inch of his body. She watched him reach the edge of the water, bend down to wax his board, drawing the soap-like chunk around and around in large circles. Then he was standing and then there was the boy in her face, blocking her view of Surfer Guy.
“Marrrry,” the boy said.
“What?” she snapped.
“I’d like a Neapolitan shake, please,” he said. He slid the fifty-dollar bill across the counter at her.
He was always asking for things he knew she didn’t have and couldn’t make. Last week it was a virgin daiquiri. The week before that it was rum raisin gelato.
“I can’t break the fifty,” she said. In truth she could now, but refused to on principle. No kid should be walking around with that kind of money. But this was South Florida. And unexpected people were privileged in South Florida.
“You won’t break the fifty,” said the boy.
She looked into his simpering blue eyes.
“I won’t break the fifty.”
The boy looked thoughtful for a moment. The sun sweat-reddened his face and glued his blond hair to his forehead.
“You know,” he said. “I really hate you sometimes.”
This was a relief to Mary.
“You never have the right kind of ice cream,” the boy continued. “And you never have any change.”
Mary conceded that these points were, in fact, true.
“So let me level with you,” said the boy.
“Okay,” said Mary. She laced her fingers together and leaned a little further out of her air-conditioned truck. “Level with me.”
The boy stood back and shielded his eyes from the sun. Mary realized that she didn’t actually know how tall the boy was since her station in the truck was fairly high off the ground.
“If you don’t start stocking the truck with the ice cream I want—the good ice cream,” the boy said, “I’m going to have your truck towed.”
Mary watched a couple of grackles pick scraps out of a nearby trashcan while the boy spoke. She was distracted and still looking for Surfer Guy. She thought she maybe kind of saw his head bobbing in the water out past the buoy.
“You’ll have my truck what?” she asked. She’d heard him perfectly well.
“Towed,” he said.
“Mowed?” she asked. “I can’t hear you over the gulls. Did you say you’d have my truck mowed? Because that doesn’t make any sense.”
“Towed,” said the boy. Mary could see the sweat gathering along his upper lip. Her ex-husband used to sweat that way, too. Disgusting, she thought.
“Oh,” she said. “Loaned. To who?”
The boy began to lose his cool. “No. No. Towed. Tee Oh Double-U Eee Dee. Towed. Why are you laughing?”
Mary couldn’t help it. It began as a snicker and progressed to full-on snorting before hitting her diaphragm and bouncing right back up out of her throat.
“Stop laughing at me,” said the boy.
“I can’t,” said Mary. “I can’t. I’m sorry. You’re in a leisure suit and I’m in an ice cream truck and I can’t stop laughing.”
She did the one thing she could do. She scooted back into the front of the truck and flipped the switch next to the steering wheel. “Do Your Ears Hang Low” played out in a crackled low-fi. But inside the truck it sounded different—it sounded deeper and somehow muffled.
“Shut it off!” the boy shouted.
She hadn’t heard the boy shout before, so this was slightly surprising. But she’d gotten under his skin. She’d found a way to maybe drive him off.
“Mary,” said the boy. “Shut it off. Shut it off or I’m going to get angry.”
“Yeah?” said Mary. The music got louder and louder, drowned out the gulls, muted the ocean until it became just another layer of static. “You’re going to get angry and then what? You’re going to have my truck towed? Out of a public parking lot?”
The boy grew redder and the sun was hot on the blacktop and Surfer Guy was a spec in the distance and Mary couldn’t hear the ocean over the music.
“You’re horrible,” said the boy. “Horrible and mean.”
The boy pouted. He puffed out his cheeks. He huffed and ground his toe into the graveled pavement. And then there was a finger coming out of his mouth and then five fingers and a forearm. An elbow. A dark head of hair and a pair of broad shoulders and then there was her ex-husband standing there in the parking lot. He handed her a fifty-dollar bill and she handed him a Drumstick because she couldn’t make a milkshake, and she sang, “Do your ears hang low? Do they wobble to and fro?” And he stared and stared at her and threw his Drumstick to the gulls.