Lonely Friday

She is behind the ice-cream counter late on a Friday night watching the clock tick, tick, tick, one second, two seconds, three closer to closing. It ticks slower without customers around. She rinses scoopers that don’t need to be rinsed. Shiny metal scoopers. She rinses them and polishes them until they’re clean as a mirror and she can see her own frosty red cheeks in the reflecting curves.  

Someone opens the door. Door chimes chime. She perks up and smiles and puts down the scoopers she was polishing. 

“Hello, sir!”

He steps inside, into the clean light, away from the night. A young man. He’s wearing a nice half-zip and a nice polo underneath and nice smoothed chinos. Nice polished loafers. He moves with a sort of sad precision. Like, this is life. These are the motions. 

“How are you tonight, sir?”

He glances at her. He has big brown eyes, sweet brown eyes. Sweet and sad. Then he peers down at the ice cream and says he’s doing alright. 

“Let me know if you have any questions,” she says. “We’re family-owned, all the ice cream here is churned locally, and we don’t use any artificial colors or flavors. Everything’s natural.”

His eyes drift across the menu above her. His hands are in his pockets with his thumbs out. The collar of his shirt is perfect. There’s not a wrinkle in his clothing. He doesn’t move. The clock ticks.

She says, “I like the pistachio the best.”

He asks for two scoops of the chocolate.

“Sure! You want that in a cup or a cone?”

He says he wants it in a cone. 

She rolls her sleeves up and takes the nicest looking scooper and the nicest looking cone and she digs into the tub of chocolate. Two scoops of chocolate. These two scoops need to be perfect. He needs this. She can give him this. Here is the quality of his lonely Friday night. Here, in these two scoops. She presses the first onto the cone, and then the second onto the first, the second a little off-center. It looks nice a little off-center. She hands it to him over the counter, and when he takes it, their fingers brush.

“I can take you down here at the register,” she says. 

He gives her cash then begins to eat his ice cream while she counts out the change. She miscounts and has to start over. She peeks up at him midcount. There’s a bit of chocolate on the tip of his nose. He tells her she can just keep the change.

“Thank you! I appreciate it, really.”

He takes a seat facing the wall and eats his ice cream slowly, with his lips over his teeth, with measured, cushioned bites. He lets each bit of ice cream melt in his mouth before swallowing.  

Behind the counter, she rinses and polishes the scooper she used, and she sneaks a few glances his way. He’s staring at the wall, still eating slowly, going through the motions. Like, this is life. These are the motions. 

She opens her mouth to speak, but what is there to say? So she says nothing and just paces and does little things to keep busy. 

Now he is down to the cone. She blinked and now he is down to the cone. She can hear it crunch. There is a mess of chocolate ice cream around his mouth. There is chocolate ice cream staining the sleeve of his half-zip. He pushes the last of the cone into his mouth. Chocolate ice cream drips from  his fingers. He slides his sticky hands back into his pockets and leans back, and he chews for so long the cone must be just about pureed by the time he swallows. Then he stands and leaves with the same sort of sad precision he came in with. The door chimes chime. They settle. Now it’s only the clock ticking. All quiet but for the clock. Like, this is life. These are the motions. Behind the counter, she can’t help herself. She starts to cry.

Lance Colet is a hobbyist writer from Virginia. He has previously been published in a handful of Penn State student publications, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, and Roi Fainéant.

A Song for Lance