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So Marcus picked him up and held him above his head, flying him around the booth, and Everett picked up little Jason and joined him.
When they set the two kids on the ground, Everett looked down at his sons, who both were grinning, then he turned his attention to Marcus. “Out of the two of us, I always figured you’d be the first to settle down with a wife and have a couple of kids.”
Marcus turned to his ice cream buckets and started stacking them into the wagon he’d used to pull all his ice cream and supplies to the booth. “Me, too.” His mind immediately flashed to his 12th-grade English class. Mrs. G had them write down where they were going to be ten years from then, and he wrote that he’d be married and have a bunch of little kids. They’d done the assignment not long before graduation, so he had to have been eighteen. It must have been about ten and a half years since he’d written that prediction.
“You haven’t mentioned dating anyone seriously for a while.”
Marcus dumped the water he’d had his ice cream scoops sitting in into the snow, and then put the scoops and the container into the wagon. “That’s because I have no life. I wish someone would’ve warned me back when I decided to be a chef that it would mean working mostly the same hours that everyone else was off work. It’s sucking the life out of me.” He didn’t meet people to date at work, either. Everything about it had been wearing on him for quite a while, and he’d been trying to work through all the possible solutions.
Everett’s younger son put his arms in the air and said, “Hold you?” so Everett picked him up.
“You look like you already have an idea of what you want to do about it.”
Marcus shrugged. “All I know is I can’t keep going as I have. This isn’t what I want my life to be. I became a chef to honor the memory of my mama and because food brings families together. But what it’s really doing,” he said as he added the stack of remaining cones and the stack of cups to the cart, “is keeping me from having my own family.”
He picked up the handle of the cart and started pulling it through the pathway shoveled free of snow, Everett and Jason beside him, Drew skipping ahead of them.
“You still get days off work, though,” Everett said. “Why aren’t you dating anyone in your time off?”
Marcus shrugged. “You know how important family is to me. I guess I haven’t found someone who feels the same way.” That wasn’t entirely true—he had found someone who felt exactly the same about it as he did, and he’d been in love with her since his senior year of high school. But he couldn’t exactly say “Because I haven’t met someone that I love as much as I love your sister and probably never will” to his best friend. And it wasn’t for lack of trying to find other people to date, either. He’d gotten to the point that he was ready to give up.
Everett popped the hatch of his compact SUV and Marcus lifted the wagon and fit it into the space behind the back seat.
“Keep looking,” Everett said. “You’ll find her.”
“Actually,” Marcus said, eyeing his friend, dreading saying his next words because Everett would hate hearing them, “I’m thinking of moving back to Hawaii.”
“What?” Everett boomed as he slammed down the trunk.
“Now that Nana is gone and my cousins moved out of state, there’s not so much for me here. I haven’t been back to Hawaii since my grandparents took me and my cousins in when I was nine, but I have a lot of family there. I need family, Everett.”
He thought Everett would tell him that hedidhave family here, and honestly, he probably wouldn’t have survived his teenage years without the feeling of family that he got from the Zimmermans. They were his family, real as any blood relations, and they were the one thing that had kept him from packing up and moving to Hawaii before today.
But he was standing on the sidelines watching the Zimmerman family grow, and the need to have his own family grow was strong. If he moved, maybe he would finally get over Joselyn and be able to find someone he could imagine having a life with.
But instead of trying to convince Marcus that the Zimmermans were all the family he needed, Everett just studied him for a few moments. Then he said, “Hop in. I want to show you something.”
Marcus buckled in Drew while Everett buckled in Jason, then Marcus got into the passenger’s seat, his mind going through possibilities of what Everett might want to show him. Something at the Zimmerman family home that he spent so many hours in growing up? Something at Everett’s house?
But when Everett pulled out of the parking lot, instead of turning left, toward the big square of land where Everett’s parents, he and Hannah, and three of his six siblings had built homes, Everett turned right, and then on to Main Street. As they drove toward the top of Main, Marcus looked out at each of the buildings. It never mattered how long it had been since he had last visited Nestled Hollow; Main Street always made him feel like he was coming home.
When they got to the very top, Everett pulled into a parking spot right in front of the hardware store and turned off his engine but left his headlights on.
“Why are we stopping here, Daddy?” Drew asked.
“We’re just going to talk for a minute. Can you do me a huge favor and tell your brother a story so he won’t get bored?”
As Drew’s voice in the back seat changed to the storytelling cadence of a three-year-old, Everett asked Marcus, “Which makes you happier: cooking food or making ice cream?”
Marcus thought about it. He’d gone to culinary school to make meals, and other than his schedule at Kleinman Terrace, he really did love creating masterpieces on plates for people. He also loved making ice cream and didn’t do it nearly often enough. He especially loved coming up with new flavors, like the ones he’d made for tonight.
So he closed his eyes and pictured himself in the restaurant, cooking the food on their menu, and paid close attention to how he felt as he made it. Then he imagined himself making ice cream and developing new flavors. When he paid attention to how he felt then, the answer became obvious. “Ice cream. Especially because it allows me to flex my creativity more.”
Everett nodded but was quiet for a moment before he said, “Okay. Now, if you couldn’t be a chef at your restaurant but had to pick another job there and still got paid the same amount, what would it be?”
Marcus didn’t even have to stop to think this time. “Waiter. I hate that I don’t get a chance to interact with the customers when I’m in the kitchen.”
“So what I’m hearing is that you have a job whose hours are keeping you from living the life that you want, you don’t get enough opportunities to create new foods and flavors, and you need more chances to be around people.”
