Page 50 of Soft Serve

I watch him catch Millie's tray when it tilts, quick and quiet, without making her feel clumsy about it.

Small things.

Accumulated.

Just before noon, a woman comes in who I don't recognize. She’s a tourist by the look of her. She pulls out her phone and angles it at Charles with the lack of subtlety of someone who thinks they're being discreet.

I feel my shoulders tighten. Charles sees it too.

He turns to her and says pleasantly, "I'd rather you didn't."

Not aggressive. Not corporate. Just a man setting a boundary in someone else's space with the ease of someone who has decided that protecting this place is part of what he does here.

The woman lowers her phone.

"Sorry," she says, surprised.

"No problem," he says. "What can I get you?"

I turn back to the prep counter, and I feel something loosen in my chest that I didn't realize was still knotted.

That's the second small thing.

The afternoon lull arrives, and Charles disappears for twenty minutes, which he does sometimes, and I've stopped needing to know where he goes because he always comes back and he always tells me without being asked, which is the important part.

He comes back with a small jar and sets it on the prep counter in front of me without ceremony.

Smoked fig and black cardamom, handwritten label, the producer is forty minutes outside town, which he found during my supplier call two weeks ago.

"I drove out this morning," he says. "Before the shop. They had three jars left."

I look at the jar.

I think about a man who took a photograph of something in a shop window because it made him think of me.

"You drove forty minutes before eight in the morning," I say.

"The timing on the base needs at least a day to develop properly," he says. "If you want it ready before National Ice Cream Day."

He says it practically, technically, like it's a scheduling observation and not a man who has been paying close enough attention to the way I work to know that a day isn't enough time and I'll want two.

"Two days," I say.

"I know," he says. "That's why I went this morning."

I pick up the jar.

"Thank you," I say.

He nods, already moving back to his station, and I stand there for a moment with the jar in my hands and the kitchen humming around me and the feeling of someone who has been waiting for the other shoe to drop for so long that they've stopped hearing the silence that means it isn't coming.

It isn't coming.

The day winds down the way good days do, slowly and without drama, the light going golden through the windows, the last customers filtering out, Rosie and Millie doing the closing tasks with the comfortable efficiency of people who have done this together many times.

Millie hugs me on her way out, the slightly longer version, and says nothing, which is its own kind of everything.

Rosie pauses at the door.