Page 46 of Soft Serve

I look at her then.

"She wasn't sure she was staying?" I say.

"No," Mrs. Calder says. "First six months after Grandma Faith died, she ran that place like a woman completing an obligation. Efficient. Competent. Present in every way that mattered and absent in every way that didn't show." She turns her coffee cup slowly. "She didn't eat at the diner. Didn't come to the town events. She smiled at everyone who came through the door and went home alone every night and didn't let a single person past the counter."

The words land with a weight I feel in my chest.

"What changed?" I ask.

"She did," Mrs. Calder says simply. "Somewhere around month eight, she came in for breakfast one morning and sat at that table by the window and cried into her eggs, and I sat across from her and didn't say a word, and when she was done she looked up and said, ‘I think I'm staying.’"

I look at the table by the window.

"Not because she'd resolved anything," Mrs. Calder continues. "But because the shop had become hers by then, not just Grandma Faith's thing she was tending. Hers. And leaving it felt like leaving herself." She pauses. "That's when the shop nearly went under."

I still.

"What happened?" I say.

Mrs. Calder sets her cup down. "Equipment failure. The main freezer went in November, right before the holiday season, and the repair cost was more than she had liquid. She had two weeks to find the money or lose the inventory, and losing the inventory in November would have taken the season and probably the business with it."

"She didn't tell anyone," I say. It isn't a question.

"No," Mrs. Calder says. "She handled it. Sold her car. Took the bus to the shop for three months. Never said a word about it to anyone in this town except Rosie, who only knew because she found the bus schedule in the office and put it together herself."

I think about a woman who runs numbers at midnight, checks temperature logs twice, and keeps a photograph of her grandmother above a door she passes a hundred times a day.

I think about all the ways she has been protecting something that almost broke her, and never let it show.

"Why are you telling me this?" I ask.

Mrs. Calder looks at me with the direct attention of a woman who has decided something and is delivering the verdict cleanly.

"Because you need to understand what you've been given," she says. "Paloma Reyes shut herself down after Grandma Faith died, and she stayed shut for a long time. Kept everyone at exactly the distance she could manage." She holds my gaze. "And then you walked into her shop two weeks ago, and within four days she was letting you behind her counter."

I don't say anything.

"That's not nothing," Mrs. Calder says. "That's not charm or proximity or some temporary loosening. That's the first time since her grandmother died that she's let someone stand in the same space as the thing she loves most." She pauses. "I want you to understand the weight of that before you decide what you're going to do with it."

"I've already decided," I say quietly.

She studies me.

"I know," she says. "Paloma told me this morning."

Something moves through me, warm and settled.

"And?" I say.

Mrs. Calder picks up her coffee.

"And I'm sitting here, aren't I?" she says.

She finishes her coffee, sets the cup down with the precise click of a conversation concluded, and stands.

"You'll do," she says.

It is, I'm understanding, the highest available rating.