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“Max! Come on, I’m trying to run a business here! I need an extra pair of hands and I can’t afford to employ anyone else just yet, the lease on the shop wasn’t cheap and the overhead at the moment-”
“Sophie, jeez, calm down. God, Mom was right about you-”
That rubbed Sophie the wrong way. “Right about what? What did Mom say?”
She heard a long, drawn out sigh down the line. “You’re working too hard, you are taking it too seriously, this whole ice cream cafe plan was meant to be fun and you bringing joy to others and for us to work together, like a family business so we could have a good work life balance, but all you do recently is snap back to us about financial stuff-”
Sophie clenched her teeth together. Yes, she had wanted to open an ice cream parlor, and she wanted Max to work with her. She could create an environment where it was safe and supportive for him. She was set on it. She wanted to bring joy to others, the kind of innocent joy that only a taste of ice cream could bring. Cut through grief and stress and just let people have a moment to enjoy great tasting ice cream. Her parents were touched, she remembered her mother welling up with tears when she outlined her plans. She’d taken some classes at the local community college in business management. She researched, saved, and planned. She had wanted somewhere in their hometown, but no spaces were available, so she took something further north. When she came to scope out the town, she knew Max would like it. Close enough to the mountains, a decent hustle and bustle, somewhere they could call home. The plan was, Max would come for the summers, he was going to finish school, and then she wanted him to move up here with her. She wanted to renovate the apartment above the shop for him. It wasn’t in a fit state right now, hence why she was living in another apartment a few blocks away. But she’d get it fixed up once the profits started coming in. Then she wanted to get a little portable food truck, so she could branch out to events, take the ice cream to festivals, county fairs, weddings even. She wanted Max to be safe and happy. Her parents discussed getting a small condo up here, and visiting on weekends, retiring perhaps and coming to support them both.
Sophie pursed her lips and took a deep breath. She wanted to growl at him, she strained to keep her voice calm. “That’s because I’m trying to run a business here, Max! Yes, I want to bring joy and all that, but I need to make money, ultimately-”
“Probably if you worry less about it and focus more on providing what your customers actually want, you’d remember why you set it up in the first place!”
“Catering for boring men in boring suits was not the plan! But it was the only shop I could afford!”
“They probably want healthy snacks and shit-”
“I’m not going to start cooking-”
“You don’t have to, outsource it Soph, honestly, you did take business classes, right?” She silently fumed at his tone. “Find someone to make stuff those professional dicks can eat for lunch, like those bowls of couscous and falafel and hummus and pulses and tofu and salad and seeds and all that stuff, they’ll come in for that, then upsell dick magnet coffee and kale ice cream and the suckers will be eating out of the palm of your hand!” Max exclaimed.
Sophie was annoyed that he made it sound so simple. And annoyed that they were actually good ideas. And that her Mom had clearly spoken to Max, and that they all thought she’d become some sort of cold, money obsessed, cut throat, ice queen business woman. She was just trying her best. She took a breath. She could cry right now. She really could. But she wouldn’t. She’d go home, dream of Phantom taking her for the ride of her life, sleep, and come back tomorrow and experiment with kale vegan ice cream. Because she wasn’t a quitter and she wasn’t too proud to admit when someone had a better idea than she did. Max’s ideas, annoying though it was that a teenager had been able to spot this hole in her business plan, his thoughts were actually pretty sensible.
“Fine!” she said moodily.
“Well fine then,” Max replied, equally moodily.
They huffed at each other down the phone for a moment. But neither hung up. Sophie took a breath and she heard Max do the same.
“What’s the town like, anyway? What are the people like? You met any friends yet?” Max asked, sullenly.
Sophie pursed her lips and immediately thought of Phantom.
“I’ve met someone, I mean, not like that, well, kind of like that-” She trailed off. She and Max always were close, she could talk to him about the guys she dated. PG stuff but still, he always was happy to listen. She was getting flustered now though.
“A guy? Sophie!” She could hear Max rolling his eyes down the phone.
“Nothing’s happened, we just talked-” She bit her lip, they hadn’t talked though, not really.
“Mom always says you’re a magnet for the weird and wonderful. Is he normal, one of these suited and booted white collar dicks?”
Sophie huffed. “No, he’s… what do you mean, weird and wonderful?”
“Like that guy who was into extreme fishing, whatever that is, and then that guy who did drag races on the weekends, then there was that guy who did cosplay-”
“Yes, yes, alright-”
“I don’t know how you do it but you always end up hanging around with the weirdest people,” Max finished lightly.
She squared her jaw. She liked chatting to strangers. It always opened doors to new things she hadn’t experienced before. She didn’t have a type, exactly, she just embraced the beauty in the people she met and if she felt a connection, she went with it. Her father called her a hippie at heart, her mother warned her to be more sensible, and not just follow her nose down the rabbit hole, to look before she leapt, and all those old adages. Well, she never had before and she wouldn’t start now. Take Phantom, for example, some might call him weird. She was curious. He had whet her appetite. She wanted more.
She cleared her throat and wanted to change the subject, deflect the heat from her and her own life choices.
“So, have you had any more doctor appointments?” she asked.
A stony silence greeted her at the other end of the phone. It had been a gamble, asking about that. Max was getting touchier and touchier about it.
He had a brain tumor. Benign. A meningioma to be precise. They’d spotted it early, when he was a baby, after he’d had a seizure. She remembered trailing through the hospital, holding her daddy’s hand, on their way to visit him. He was sitting up in bed, looking like his usual self, so she hadn’t been worried about him. Her parents had been, she didn’t understand. They’d talked to the doctors and looked on with worried, pale faces. He’d had to have regular scans, trips to the hospital, and specialist consultants. Their parents would take him to get ice cream from a little place just a block from the hospital, and Sophie was always jealous. She’d talked about starting her own ice cream shop from a young age. Sometimes, they played shop, she had a plastic till and he had a toy kitchen. They’d set up shop and play, he would ‘cook’ and come up with all kinds of mud pie variants. She’d be ‘front of the house’, chatting to teddy bears and Barbies that stood in for paying customers.
