“You’re too old to be a scooper,” one of the brats from the local high school says to me just before closing time. He reeks of skunky-smelling marijuana, and from his smirk I can tell he thinks he’s being cute or clever.

“Are you the owner?” another of his idiot friends asks.

“No, I’m just the scooper,” I tell them.

Isn’t it obvious from my stained apron and the strained look on my face? Just because I’m the only one who doesn’t use pimple cream in the morning doesn’t mean I’m ancient.

“You’re just a scooper?” the friends say/ask in unison before they start laughing as if they invented humor.

“Yup, so let me know what I can scoop for ya because when I’m done with you, I can get back to the old folks home where us old people live,” I tell them.

They stop laughing, unsure of what to say.

The questions annoy me but not my answers. Being twenty years older than the average scooper isn’t my biggest problem. What bothers me sometimes is the way the customers look at me to see if something is wrong, what personal defect I possess that keeps me from graduating out of this summer job.

Then there are the people I knew before, way before, in what seems like a different life. They come to this beach town for vacation, and they see me behind the counter and start snapping their fingers, thinking they remember me: “Oh my God, Kelly, from Home Ec, right? You’re still here?” And I’d say something to quash the conversation when my name tag clearly says Kerri. 

Their memories are faulty, they don’t remember who I was, and they certainly don’t know who I am.

They don’t know this isn’t a step back; this is where I want to be, this is progress. I feel a warmth walking toward the bright orange lights that scream Cream Bros., each afternoon. So while everyone who steps up to my counter is searching for something—either because they are stoned for the hundredth day in a row or by riding the wave of a one-week vacation of sand, sunburn, and funnel cakes—I’m content, locked in a routine, and the truth is I wouldn’t want to be on their side of the counter.

Because when their high is over or their pockets empty, they will shuttle back to their miserable lives, waiting to come back to the place where I live.

All the kids call it “Cream Bros” when it’s clear there is a period at the end of Bros. It’s short for Brothers. I hate hearing them scream it into their phones, “Hey, I’m at Cream Bros…” Don’t they realize the whole sign is shortened because the owner couldn’t afford the bigger sign? If they had the money, they would have called it what they wanted, which was “Ice Cream Brothers.”

I am not one of the brothers. I just work for them. And I’m a girl.

I knew the brothers when we were younger, and then when I got sober and came back to town, my mom asked their mom to help me out. For a while I was pissed and humiliated, but like a lot of things, I ended up being kinda glad. I needed something to do every day. It’s one of the things they tell you when you get out: get a job, any job, as long as it’s legal. Just get the hell off the couch and slide into a routine.

In high school I worked here, we all did before, and we all got fired. “It’s not a career,” we’d tell our parents when we were dismissed for crushing a box of cones with a karate chop or letting our friends jump the counter to fill their mouths up with swirl until they couldn’t breathe.

So, when I came back as an adult, I knew what to do. Not much had changed except maybe the size of the scoop or the number of rotations on the swirl.

Every once in a while, I lean on the stainless-steel counter and stare across the boardwalk, and I tumble back in time. The vinegar from the Boardwalk Fries, the sound of the seagulls popping through the trash, the clip and clop of the older kids running, the dinging of the Funland games. It is in those moments that I realize how good it feels to be home. The cold counter on my sunburned arms is a time machine.

We get two types of people who come here in the summer: the Trunkies and the Ghosts.

The Trunkies are the renters, the ones who come from Saturday to Saturday one week a summer, packing everything they own into their trunk. They pray for good weather, buy stuff at the T-shirt and seashell shops, and order ice cream with their pale arms wrapped around a bucket of french fries on the first night.

The Ghosts are different. They know what they are doing. They grew up here or maybe they’ve been renting the same house for years or generations. They already have the crap from the crummy stores that line the avenue. Their T-shirts are worn and frayed, they have leftover tickets for Skee Ball in a pocket or a purse. They know what they want and where to go to get it. At the start of summer, they walk the main street, making sure nothing has changed.

In my first days back after the accident, I was struck by how little had changed. I know that for some people, it’s part of the town’s charm, a place you can return to and find your favorite stuff in the world’s least imaginative place. 

The most prominent monument, in my view, was Candy Citchen. It sits high on the corner of Main Avenue and the boardwalk, right next to my competition, an ice cream place with ninety-seven flavors, known as The Ice Cream Place. This was next to Pizza Place, Old-Fashioned Fotos, the T-Shirt Spot, and Sea Shell by the Sea Shore.

Nothing changed, except me. When I was a kid, this was a place to escape from. Now, after seeing life beyond the boardwalk, I feel lucky to be back. 

As happy as I am being at my perch, I worry about what ghosts might pop up on the other side. Who from my previous life might intrude, not knowing I’d changed. Maybe they hadn’t gotten the memo that I’m different now.

I had real nightmares in the early days that there was a big crowd in front of me ordering armfuls of cones. I couldn’t see their faces, but they were big and blocked out the sun. But when they turn away, faces pop out from behind them: It’s Mr. Hetherington from high school math, Mr. Sleete from the pharmacy where I was fired, and Ms. Asher, who caught me stealing from the shell shop. It was everyone who tried to chase me from this town. And I’d wake up, heart pounding as if I was still doing drugs.

The other time I felt nervous was when Skinny and Squeak showed up. I didn’t know what they’d heard, and I didn’t want to be tempted. It was too early in my career, if that’s the right word, so I didn’t even trust myself. I’d see them sitting on a bench nearby late in the day. They wouldn’t come over to the counter because they were probably worried about the cops or the cameras.

They’d seen Denny the night he died. They said it wasn’t their batch that killed him but I know it was. The morning after he died, I found his phone stuffed between the couch cushions. The last three phone calls Denny made were to them. Three unanswered calls. He must have known something was wrong and was panicking. If he was in normal trouble, he’d call me. He wasn’t in trouble, he was dying. He knew something was wrong, and these idiots didn’t have the decency to pick up the phone.

Denny trusted them and he was loyal. That’s the thing about this town: loyalty is a big deal. Even if it gets you dead. I’m sure they didn’t mean to kill him. You don’t kill your best customers. But it didn’t matter, that much I’ve learned. They were just middlemen. I called them “little men.” It didn’t matter to the police. And it didn’t matter to Denny’s heart.

And yes, I wanted to kill those idiots. Not that night because I was pretty high, too, but in the weeks that followed, when they tried to act like they were feeling bad for me and not for him or what they did.

Then, just like that, they stopped coming, stopped bothering me. Maybe they got busted.

For a while I thought Denny was the lucky one because he got out. We’d always talked about getting out of this town and away from the stares. The looks got worse after high school when the people who’d left came back. I used to think it was just to taunt us, but I learned in rehab it was something else.

Each summer gets busier than the previous one. They used to just come from the DMV, as they call it (Delaware/Maryland/Virginia); now it’s from all over the Northeast. For the Trunkies I can spot them at fifty paces whatever day of the week it is. Who is new and who is old, who just arrived and who has run out of money, who is pale and who is red, who is tender and who is burnt. It’s not just the face of the parents, it’s the kids, the grandparents. I can read them all before they cross the threshold and the bright lights of the cream machines scare up their facades.

The Trunkies look at me differently. They still come with their money and their saved-up Paid Time Off, and they think they are winning. They wonder why this thirty-year-old is working at a job alongside a bunch of high school kids. Why I’ve got a normal accent and my “co-workers” have Irish accents, kids they’ve flown in for the summer, who think sunshine is like the coolest thing. But by the middle of July, when their sunburn is blistering over for the third time, they think about those cloudy days back in Dublin and hope for “a bit of rain”.

I treat them all the same, but the kids are always crying, no matter how many stuffed toys they’ve won or how big the cone. Maybe I make the cone a little lopsided, a trick I learned early on, so it falls as soon as the dad hands it to them. It goes splat and the dad tries to scoop it up off the sidewalk. Everyone is looking at them, and there is no way in hell the other line-waiters are gonna let them order again, and so I don’t even look up. I don’t even give them the shrug, like “Hey, sorry, wish I could help.” Instead, I wait on the next person and pretend like I don’t see their pain.

But the Ghosts are the ones I’m fascinated by. I see how this life isn’t what they’d expected either. I know that their life back home in the suburbs, or wherever they landed, isn’t what they had hoped for. Maybe life was better when they were a big fish in this small pond beside the ocean. When they were the football captain or the kid who got to leave town for the Model UN. That was when they were really on top of their world because everyone told them they were, and they were young enough to believe it. Now they’re stuck in a neighborhood where they’ll never have the most, be the biggest or the best. They will no longer be voted most-likely to do anything because they’re stuck on the outside. They’ve gotten out but I can hear them asking me, “What’s it like being back in?”

They went to college and made their money, and now they come back and rent the big houses. They don’t even stay with their parents, claiming there isn’t room, but there is plenty of room. They want to rent the house on the beach, not stay with their parents on the other side of the highway. 

But I live in an alternate universe. When it’s vacation time for everybody else, it’s work time for me. The bigger the holiday, the more I work. And I don’t even make any more money. I make the same if I sell one cone an hour or one per minute. My only summer holiday is when it’s Bruce Carlson Day. It’s not on anybody else’s calendar but mine.

He never paid attention to me until high school was over; maybe then it was safe for him. We’d been going to school together since third grade so we knew each other. Everyone knew him because he was the rich one, the smart one. Everyone whispered around him, as if he had sensitive ears or something.

We didn’t date or anything, we just had a quick, fierce one in the alley behind the shops during the summer after high school. The night we got together, he was just hanging around the boardwalk like he would do sometimes. Never working. I was always getting fired and starting a new job. He spent his summers at the gym or on vacation with his family. Everyone said his parents had money, even though we thought no one had money. Usually if someone had money, they would leave town, but it turns out his grandfather owned some of the buildings on Main Avenue, and so they had to stay to watch over the real estate or collect the rent. Rumor was they used his grandfather’s wood to build the boardwalk. When we were kids, they said his family collected rent every time someone walked on their planks but it isn’t true.

Either way, he never looked tired except when he was drunk, which was about this time of night. His clothes always looked like he just took the tags off.

Watching him, I learned how rich people are different. Because of the money, everyone assumed he was smart. His nice hair and the rumors about his grandfather’s wood made him smart in everyone’s eyes, even the teachers.

“He’s gonna be Senator one day,” I heard a teacher say. “I mean after his football career.” 

And that was in middle school.

I was too stupid to be afraid of him, so I made fun of him. It was how he handled it that I liked. He’d smile or laugh. Maybe because nobody else made fun of him.

There’s a point at the end of the summer when it’s the hottest, just before the breeze from the ocean turns cool. We call it the Hell point, and that’s when Bruce returns every year. He was a Ghost, coming at the end of the summer. He’d come by Cream Bros. at least twice during the week. 

First, he’d come at night, when the place was packed. He’d bring the kids, never the wife. He wouldn’t make eye contact, instead asking his daughters what they wanted, and they’d order the same thing as the year before. Once they were distracted, he’d make eye contact with my body. I’d tell one of the junior kids to get the ice cream so I could ask him how he was, notice any new lines on his face or creeping gray at his temples.

At the end of the week, he’d come back alone, late in the day. My guess it’s when the kids were napping and his wife was shopping. He’d have on his running shorts and a pair of what looked like brand-new running shoes from the outlet mall. And without a bead of sweat, even on a blistering hot day, he’d come around back, where we’d done it twenty years before. He’d tell me how great everything was, and I’d tell him how things really were.

We’d stand there in the shadows of the big boardwalk signs, and he’d start sweating as he pawed at me. And as the minutes passed, he’d tell me how miserable it was on the outside. He’d close his eyes and shiver in the heat as I gave him the pleasure of the past. I’d seen too much since high school, since he went away to become rich and famous.

I don’t feel sorry for him, but I don’t know how we got reversed. How did he become the unhappy one?

I loved these moments when I was reminded that I was okay. I didn’t feel used by him. I’d seen someone I love die. I’d seen people leave town for something better, and I’d seen them boomerang back. Whether they were a Ghost or a Trunkie, I saw the look in their eyes at the end of their vacation, when they realized that beach vacations don’t last forever. Newness always fades.

It’s the same with drugs. There is nothing like that first time. Then you spend the rest of your days trying to get that feeling again. Just like there is nothing like that first smell of the beach, the first bite of pizza, the first time your toes hit the water. But by the fifth day the sand is hot, the pizza cold, and all you can smell is the vinegar from the fries. And that’s how they know it’s time to go home.

But for them home is fraught. They can’t come back here and admit defeat, and the place where they live now holds no excitement. And so they search for it somewhere else. But they can’t find it. It doesn’t exist in a weekly rental, or at Funland, or with a ghost in the sour-smelling alley behind Cream Bros. 

I don’t know where I learned it, maybe rehab or jail, but for me it exists only in my work. I’m not a scooper, I’m not an owner. I’m a creator of dreams, I’m Willy Wonka: vacations are broken or made on my watch.

About the Author:

By day Robert Granader is CEO of MarketResearch.com and a fierce defender of the English major. Most of his writing gets done after hours either in his Washington, DC home or around the city. His essays, articles and short stories have been featured in more than 80 publications including Washington Post, Washingtonian magazine, New York Times. A series of his published essays and short stories were compiled into Writing in the Q, which is filled with stories from the pandemic and Quarantine. “Cream Bros” is based on an encounter in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware and stems from the look on the face of a single scooper.

*Feature image by Bianca Van Dijk from Pixabay