"Busy day," Ethan said, dodging an elbow from a customer at the counter.
"Tell me." Liz rolled her eyes, deftly wrapped the sub in white paper
and handed it, along with three others, over the counter. "Y'all want a
sub?"
"Ice cream," Aubrey said definitely. "Berry."
"Well, you go on down and tell Mother Crawford what you have in mind.
Oh, Ethan, Seth was in here shortly ago with Danny and Will. I swear,
those kids grow like weeds in high summer. Loaded up on subs and soda
pop. Said they were working down to your boatyard."
He felt a faint flicker of guilt, knowing that Phillip was not only
working but riding herd on three young boys. "I'll be heading down there
myself soon."
"Ethan, if you don't have time for thisa" Grace began.
"I've got time to eat an ice cream cone with a pretty girl." So saying,
he lifted Aubrey up and let her press her nose to the glass-fronted
counter that held the buckets of hand-dipped choices.
Liz took the next order, and spared a wiggling-eyebrow glance toward her
husband that spoke volumes. Ethan Quinn and Grace Monroe, it stated
clearly. Well, well. What do you think of that?
They took their cones outside, where the breeze was warm off the water,
and wandered away from the crowds to find one of the small iron benches
the city fathers had campaigned for. Armed with a fistful of napkins,
Grace set Aubrey on her lap.
"I remember when you'd come here and know the name of every face you'd
see," Grace murmured. "Mother Crawford would be behind the counter,
reading a paperback novel." She felt a wet drip from Aubrey's ice cream
plop on her leg below the hem of her shorts and wiped it up. "Eat around
the edges, honey, before it melts away."
"You'd always get strawberry ice cream, too."
"Hmm?"
"As I recall," Ethan said, surprised that the image was so clear in his
mind, "you had a preference for strawberry. And grape Nehi."
"I guess I did." Grace's sunglasses slipped down her nose as she bent to
mop up more drips. "Everything was simple if you had yourself a
strawberry cone and a grape Nehi."
"Some things stay simple." Because her hands were full, Ethan nudged
Grace's glasses back up--and thought he caught a flicker of something in
her eyes behind the shaded lenses. "Some don't."
He looked out to the water as he applied himself to his own cone. A
better idea, he decided, than watching Grace take those long, slow licks
from hers. "We used to come down here on Sundays now and then," he
remembered. "All of us piling into the car and riding into town for ice
cream or a sub or just to see what was up. Mom and Dad liked to sit
under one of the umbrella tables at the diner and drink lemonade."
"I still miss them," she said quietly. "I know you do. That winter I
caught pneumonia--I remember my mother and yours. It seemed every time I
woke up, one or the other of them was right there. Dr. Quinn was the
kindest woman I ever knew. My mama--"
She broke off, shook her head.
"What?"