Rocky Road (25 page)

Little kids do like clowns
, I thought,
even though they give me the heebie-jeebies
. Mostly I was pleased it wouldn’t be
me
under a big red nose and wig.

All afternoon, Ma kept shouting out more Cinco de Mayo ideas fast and furious, including hanging a ten-foot ice cream cone piñata outside the shop and sponsoring a raffle.

“What’s the prize?” I asked.

“So far all I can come up with is a gift certificate to Little Miss Muffet’s, but I’ll keep thinking,” she said.

I thought about Victoria’s Classic Interior Design with its upscale image. What would Fancy Vicky say about Ma raffling off a bar gift certificate, peddling sangria, and inviting kids to swing a bat, right near our front window?

As exciting as all this was, Ma and I agreed on one thing. The shop wasn’t ready for the Grand Opening. Menus needed to be made, the three top-selling ice cream flavors were still on back order, and we hadn’t figured out how to work the waffle-cone griddle without making the cones look like fat pencils.

On the drive back to the apartment, Ma asked me to get the word out at school about Cinco de Mayo and A Cherry on Top’s Grand Opening.

“Tell all your teachers, your friends, and your peer
mediators. Heck, tell the kids who need mediating! Ice cream warms the heart, no matter what you’re fighting about,” she said as we turned into the Mohawk Valley Village parking lot.

Imagining the kids from school recognizing me behind the ice cream counter made me think about my wardrobe. What would I wear? Ice cream called for a whimsical style. I could sure use a pair of capri pants with a smocked top, preferably in a bright, spring pattern. Silver bangle bracelets would be swell too since customers would notice my wrists as I scooped.

“Any chance I could get a new outfit for Saturday—and a haircut too?” I asked, touching my big ears.

“Not now. We’ve got to concentrate all our efforts on making the product look good.”

“But we can’t host a Cinco de Mayo celebration with sloppy clothes and messy hair. I bet the
Inside Scoop
has a whole section on dressing for success.”

“Clothes don’t make the retailer. Besides, you’re a beauty as is,” Ma said.

“Well, I think you need to review that section on employee attire,” I growled.

Ma saying no again made me cranky like a tired toddler. For months I’d met every one of her paint-it, sew-it, and clean-it requests. I’d never asked for so much as a tube of lip gloss. But
I
was the one who’d hatched the whole Cinco de Mayo plan. Wasn’t that worth something?

Even if I didn’t get new clothes, I wasn’t going to be her ice cream slave laborer without having some demands met.

“Now that you’ve appointed yourself grand marshal of
Cinco de Mayo, who’s going to help behind the counter? If we get the kind of crowds you expect, Gabby and I won’t be able to handle it alone. Customers don’t like long waits.”

“You’re right. I’ve got to hire someone special. Special
and
hardworking.”

“Not Chief,” I said. “I can just see him barking at customers to lick their drippy cones ASAP.”

“Chief will be our guest, not a hired hand. And not Winnie either—she’s done enough babysitting for Jordan, plus her band will be playing. No, I need someone young and peppy with a good work ethic
and
charm. Someone who’s not afraid to get silly. And in keeping with tradition, it should be a male.”

“All that just to scoop ice cream?”

“The job I’m filling is soda jerk. Problem is, I don’t know any young men in Schenectady who fit the description, and I sure don’t want to ask that brainless twenty-something bartender at Little Miss Muffet’s. Last night, he got distracted making drinks and grabbed the wrong bottles. Customers got tomato juice in their piña coladas and pineapple juice in their Bloody Marys!”

“Can’t think of anybody,” I said. But then, as Ma turned into the Mohawk Valley Village, a face came to mind. A face surrounded by red hair, on a kid riding a tandem bike.

Pete was hardworking, plus he was the only one I knew who seemed as interested as Ma in all this soda jerk business.

“I’ve got just the right person for the job,” I said. “Mr. Alamo himself.”

I
n the final week before the Grand Opening, Gabby and I turned into lean, mean cleaning machines. We scrubbed the cracked, dirty sidewalks up and down State Street. Automobile-oil and cigarette-butt stains were the toughest to remove, and they were everywhere. So was nasty old chewing gum, but Mr. Bianco gave us a secret weapon that got it off: WD-40.

We washed the windows and awnings at A Cherry on Top and Civitello’s Italian Pastries too. (Ms. Civitello had bad knees from forty years of standing and making pastry. Ma insisted we
help her, and she insisted on rewarding us with a tasty cannoli each.) Gabby hosed down all the nearby city trash cans and rearranged them in a gentle curved pattern along the sidewalk. Curves, she said, allowed chi energy to flow better than sharp angles.

Oh, we made fudge too. Tray after tray. I trained Gabby, and within a few days she was turning out fudge that met our high standards. Ma and I both agreed that it was a little strange how she closed her eyes and hummed as she stirred, but Gabby called it Zen fudge, and who were we to argue?

If Gabby and I were busy, Ma was busier. She borrowed benches from Daly Funeral Home and placed them up and down the sidewalk for watching the parade. She went door to door, offering shopkeepers an extra hand fixing this or dressing up that so their businesses would shine during Cinco de Mayo. She spent afternoons rehearsing customer greetings, posting pricing, hauling in more glasses and takeout containers, fixing wobbly chairs and tables, and practicing how to operate the shake machine. She wanted Gabby and me to get used to handling the cash register, but I said it looked as easy to use as a calculator. Our creative juices were put to better use elsewhere.

“Keep on prettying up this place,” Ma kept shouting, and did we ever. We hung colorful streamers across the ice cream counter, arranged potpourri baskets by the entrance, and set yellow silk flowers in porcelain ice cream cone vases on each table. (Ma bought the vases during a shopping spree at a cutesy boutique for twenty-five dollars each.) “Yellow’s a yang
color that promotes warmth and happiness. Warm, happy people splurge for ice cream,” Gabby said. I agreed. Besides, yellow matched my curtains.

On top of all the shop prep, Ma was still working at Little Miss Muffet’s at night. I wished she would quit. “You need sleep!” I pleaded, but she said we needed money more. I kept bugging her to eat too because she looked like she was getting skinnier by the minute. I hardly saw her eating, just drinking Dr Pepper.

I stayed home from school the day before the Grand Opening. There were a million and one things to do, and meanwhile Ma had scheduled a meeting of the RSSA, this time at A Cherry on Top, and she needed help. I could tell that Grand Opening jitters were rattling inside her, because she was running around the shop with a straw pressed between her lips.

But, thankfully, there was no sign of her crashing. She was bright-eyed and on her game. She greeted the RSSA members as they arrived for the meeting in her
hace grande
style, dressed up in her fiesta clothes again and blasting “La Bamba” from the jukebox. Talk about a fired-up bunch of storekeepers! They wore cactus-print vests and custom “State Street Cinco de Mayo” baseball caps, shouting
“¡Arriba! ¡Arriba!”
as they piled in. Ms. Civitello gave a groundskeeping update, beaming from beneath her thick glasses when she announced that her niece had planted the pansies up and down the nearby State Street sidewalks. Mr. Harley from Adirondack Jewelers had a total change of heart. He kept calling Ma the Can-Do Cancan Lady
because of her cheery outfit and way of offering everybody marketing ideas. He even held up a sparkling emerald bracelet and donated it for the raffle, as long as the proceeds went toward a Safe State Street neighborhood watch. And Mr. Bianco ran through the parade lineup since he would be leading the way. Even Mac Kelsh, the Barley’s Convenience Store manager, showed up and announced that he’d provide free coffee and donuts to the parade marchers. He didn’t say much besides that, but I caught him smiling at Ma.

After the meeting ended, Ma treated everybody to free sundaes plus a sample slice of fudge, and they sure liked that. Moose Tracks was to be our featured ice cream flavor for the Grand Opening, and they all agreed this was the perfect pick to “cause a buzz.” Being around Ma seemed like it got all the RSSA members talking in retail lingo.

Then Chief arrived with a toolbox, ready to mount a fiesta flag in front of each shop. Ma had already dashed off to the bank and to run last-minute errands, but before she left, she gave strict orders
not
to let him do the installing. She’d said, “Chief’s been around since Paul Bunyan was swinging an ax. Climbing ladders is too dangerous, especially with one leg.” I told her I’d do it. With all my experience installing curtains, handling the power drill was a piece of cake.

Sounded good until I told Chief. You would’ve thought I’d tossed a pie in his face, with how he huffed and puffed and stormed out of the shop. Then he grabbed the ten-foot ladder off his truck and dragged it along the sidewalk, fully intent on installing those flags himself, no matter what I said. Smoke
was coming from his ears, and lugging that ladder made his prosthesis limp even more apparent.

“Nothing personal, Chief. We just don’t want you to get hurt!” I pleaded.

“
Me
get hurt?” he growled. “Young lady, I’ll have you know I was running up and down gun-turret ladders aboard battleships before you were even born!”

I shrugged. Reasoning with him was like trying to pull an aircraft carrier across the ocean on a string.

“If I held steady on two legs during a North Atlantic storm, by God I can handle a landlubber job with my one leg,” he barked, setting the ladder down in front of Bianco’s Pizzeria.

I gave up. You can’t beat the U.S. Navy. I handed him the flags and hardware, but I insisted on being his “assistant.”

What a painful job
that
was. Chief kept dropping the screws from the top of the ladder, misjudging where to drill the holes, and complaining that the materials he was working with were to blame. “They don’t make parts like they used to,” he said. After nearly two hours we’d only managed to get one flag flying. We’d just crossed the street to install one by Polaski’s Dry Cleaners when the sun disappeared behind a cloud. Wind picked up and thunder rattled, and before you knew it, rain was slapping at us sideways.

“Shouldn’t we finish this later?” I called up to Chief, holding the bottom of the ladder steady. Water dribbled off my forehead.

“This job has to get done ASAP,” he said, just as lightning crackled near the fire hydrant.

Suddenly Mrs. Bianco came shuffling toward us, wearing her hairnet and sauce-stained apron and holding a rolling pin in her hands. “You old fool!” she roared at Chief. “Get yourself and poor Tess out of the rain before you both get electrocuted!”

Well, you would have thought she was Admiral Bianco, what with how fast Chief flew down that ladder, grabbed my arm, and hobbled back to the ice cream shop.

Inside, Ma gave Chief and me towels to dry off. Winnie and Jordan had stopped by on their way to playgroup, and Ma fixed us all a Schenectady Snow Shake. We laughed as Winnie described the fancy vests that the guys in the band would be wearing for Cinco de Mayo and the bombshell gown that would be her costume.

“Melvin says my sparkly dress reminds him of Diana Ross,” she said. “And who cares if one of my thighs weighs more than both of hers?”

The Salty Old Dogs had been rehearsing some hot little Tejano numbers for five days straight. “None of us speak Spanish, so we don’t know
what
we’re singing, but it sure sounds good. Even Melvin’s warming up to it, and he’s strictly an Ella Fitzgerald type.”