Ice Cream

    In a small city, right next to the shopping district, two ice cream parlors on Flint Road were locked in the most appropriately-named cold war in history.  During the city’s hot summers, McSweeney’s Sweet Treats got almost exactly the same amount of business as Ice by Abigail.  The tiebreaker, as it were, was the group that both owners privately thought of as the Sundae Sisters.  This name was not entirely accurate, since none of the six of them were related and two were in fact men, but it seemed to fit and in any case neither Abigail nor Mr. McSweeney ever used the name aloud.
    It always began on the first fine spring weekend, when the sun had been polished by the winter and the summer was preheating the hemisphere.  The six Sundae Sisters tended to go shopping every Sunday afternoon from early spring to late fall, and between 4 and 6 they would walk to Flint Road with their bags in hand.  They would get their ice cream and sit at a table, talking and relaxing until either they finished or it melted.
    Every sunday, Abigail and Mr. McSweeney would watch with great anticipation as the Sisters approached.  Over the years, they got to know them. The route that the Sisters took gave them an excellent view of both shops, and any number of things could determine which one they chose.

    Mackenzie, who was diabetic, would check her insulin and usually order a single scoop of black raspberry ice cream in a cone.  This gave Abigail an advantage, since her staff had neater scooping skills.  The size and style of a scoop can be a surprisingly major factor in what a person thinks of their ice cream.  However, on sunny days Mackenzie liked to sit outside, and McSweeney’s had a lovely patio with flowers all around it, maintained by Mr. McSweeney’s wife and business partner Clarice.
    The flowers on Mr. McSweeney’s patio would, in the spring, aggravate Jillian’s allergies, so she would want to sit indoors with her favorite vanilla milkshake, which Mr. McSweeney had elevated to an art form.  She, however, also hated Mr. McSweeney’s taste in music, which was mostly limited to country and classic rock.  Thus, she would generally nudge the group over to Abigail’s.
    Mike, the one who carried most of their bags, loved both classic rock and McSweeney’s frozen yogurt, but he also had a very obvious crush on Jillian.  He followed her decisions without question.  Yet Jillian’s job had a very sporatic schedule, and sometimes she would need to leave the group early.  On those occasions, Mike would emphatically steer the Sisters towards McSweeney’s with a commanding personality that consistently took them by surprise.  This frustrated Abigail, since one of her servers, a girl named Rose, would flirt endlessly with Mike whenever she could, and Abigail’s guilty pleasure was matchmaking.
    Determinedly ignoring all matters of unrequited lust, Ken (the group’s second Mackenzie) was the one grinning and giggling all day.  Ken was short and round and loved to experiment with her desserts.  She had invented the Panda Diplomat, hot chocolate with soft serve ice cream, a drink that McSweeney served frequently on the colder days or when customers were feeling depressed.  Yet McSweeney believed that mixing too many things into the ice cream was a crime against dairy, so for sheer innovative potential he could not match Abigail’s “Mix-in” blasphemy, offering candy bars and cookies to be crushed and used to corrupt the ice cream.
    “Mix-ins” horrified the hypochondriac Aria.  But, more importantly, she loved saying McSweeney’s name. He assumed that she was a singer or voice actress, and he was astonished to find out that she was the former mayor of one of the city’s suburbs.  Whenever he could, Mr. McSweeney would get Aria her order personally, just to give Aria an opportunity to say “Thank you, Mister McSweeny” in that delightful way she had of holding the ‘M’ for a moment and swinging the ‘E’ like a roller coaster.
    Robert didn’t like Mr. McSweeney’s name, mostly because he had a severe lisp.  Of the six Sisters, he had the most severe body image issues, and felt guilty at how generous Mr. McSweeney was with portion sizes.  He was also unique in that he knew Abigail better than the rest, having entered the same college shortly before she had dropped out.  

    Time rolled on in this way.  For most of every year, Mr. McSweeny and Abigail subtly competed for the Sundae Sisters.  She would introduce new Mix-ins to delight Ken, until it all became too much for Aria.  He bought new albums from trendy European pop bands to satisfy Jillian, until Robert started to mention that he missed Abigail.  And the hundreds of other customers who walked along Flint Road stopped by the two ice cream shops each week just for ice cream, because it was cold and sweet and that was what they wanted.

    It was early May when Abigail, in a bad mood and unwilling to play the “will they or won’t they” game, half-cheered half-bullied Rose into asking Mike to join her for dinner that evening.  In the time it took Abigail to crush a cookie into powder, Mike began to turn towards Jillian, paused, frowned, sighed, smiled at Rose and nodded.
    Mike started to spend more of his Sunday afternoons with Rose, at least on the days when she wasn’t working.  When she was, he would wave to her but bring the Sundae Sisters to McSweeney’s, claiming that it was to to give them both room to breathe.  The rest silently agreed that Mike just preferred to breathe air with country music in it.  Jillian was of course baffled by Mike taking charge.  As the one person poised to resolve romantic tension, she had been entirely ignorant of it as decreed by the laws of the universe.
    With Mike consistently directing the Sisters to McSweeney’s, Ken began to grow bored.  To an artist such as her, such a limited selection was like a composer being forced to work on a xylophone.  Eventually she decided to start getting her ice cream from Abigail and chat with the rest of the Sisters by leaning on the patio fence.  Robin followed her lead, determined to eat his way skinny with an average of five percent less ice cream in his usual root beer float.  By this point, it was mid-June.
    On the first of July, Mrs. Clarice McSweeney took a bad fall down the stairs and suffered a serious leg injury.  To cheer her up, Mr. McSweeney brought most of the flowers from the patio into her hospital.  The Sundae Sisters, though sympathetic and hating themselves for being selfish, felt that the patio was less welcoming than it had been, and anyway the days were getting a lot hotter, so they started sitting more at Abigail’s air-conditioned indoor tables.
    Yet Aria, whose hypochondria was getting worse, decided to keep going to McSweeney’s for her preferred dish, a scoop each of strawberry and chocolate.  She was joined by Mackenzie, who privately said that she preferred Aria’s company over the rest of the Sundae Sisters, if only by the narrowest margin.  The two of them started talking for hours on end, once or twice going until McSweeney had to close up shop.  There they worked out that Aria’s hypochondria was partially caused by her perception of a lack of control in her life.
    Eventually the two were joined by Robert, who had finally worked up the courage to ask Abigail out to dinner, been gently but firmly rejected, and now was worried that meeting her again would cause what he described as an “awkward party.”  The next week, Robin brought the draft of a screenplay that he had been working on.  It was a tangled mess of plot holes where all the characters were essentially himself, but it gave Aria an idea.  Next time, she brought the draft of a short novel, a science fiction romance about a starship captain finding love among her crew.  Robert dismissed it as cliche, but Mackenzie encouraged her to send the manuscript to some of the publishing companies in the area.
    Aria disappeared for the next few weeks.  Mackenzie, acting as a surrogate source of smugness, told Robert and Mr. McSweeney that Aria’s manuscript had been accepted by a publisher and would be printed the following year.
    By this point, Mike had stopped joining the Sundae Sisters and was spending most of his time with Rose, who had altered her schedule to give them more time together.  Without Mike carrying bags, the remaining four were tired, and started sitting more at McSweeney’s, which was slightly easier to walk to than Abigail’s place.

    By mid-August, Mackenzie, Ken, Robin, and Jillian, the four remaining Sundae Sisters, were sitting on McSweeney’s patio eating ice cream.
    Jillian and Robert were splitting the largest vanilla milkshake that McSweeney had ever made.  Robert was struggling to comprehend how easily Aria had mastered the written word.  Jillian had just figured out what had been suppressing Mike’s confident side, and was attempting to drown her embarrassment.   Ken was picking at a small cup of chocolate ice cream, painfully underwhelmed by its monochromatic flavor.  And so, Mackenzie decided that this was the perfect time to announce that she had lost her job and couldn’t afford their weekly shopping sprees anymore.  She insisted that, as much fun as she had with them, her lack of self-control would drive her bankrupt.  Her health insurance was already a major drain on her finances, and her insulin was more important than ice cream and shoes.  Besides, she grinned, I’ll find a job soon, and then it’ll be like I was never gone.
    Now it was Jillian, Robert, and Ken.  All three of them preferred Abigail’s shop as a rule, So that was where they went.  Yet Robin still felt uncomfortable seeing Abigail, Jillian was developing negative feelings towards Rose, and even if they hadn’t felt that way Ken was beginning to suspect that she had tried all the possible combinations of ice cream and candy.  They agreed that it would be best if they postponed their next trip indefinitely.
    The last Sunday of August, a slightly baffled Mike was sitting in McSweeney’s.  He was joined by Aria, who had made a large amount of money from her book and was experiencing that unfathomable depression of having no one to share happiness with.
        Abigail and Mr. McSweeney watch them part ways.  She handed things over to the assistant manager while she took the rest of the day off.  He gave a heavy sigh and made himself a Panda Diplomat.  Although it was still warm outside, it felt like winter already.

    It was the first fine spring weekend.  The sun was gleaming like a newly-earned trophy, and summer was dusting off its cookbook.  The clock ticked 4:36.  Mr. McSweeney was cleaning the tables on his patio, the flowers replaced after Clarice’s full recovery.  Abigail kept glancing out the window, filling in the time until she found someone who could replace Rose.
    Down the street came four women and two men, talking and laughing and carrying bags full of things.  The two ice cream shop owners watched, grinning ear to ear, as they started a friendly argument about which shop to visit.