Free Accidental Happiness by Jean Reynolds Page Page A

week before. I’d left the place in tears, no ice cream, nothing but a confused manager calling after me, asking what was wrong. The young man behind the counter had no recollection of me, but he would have remembered Benjamin.
    “What’s your pleasure?” That was all the kid had said, just trying to be cute. The same kid, spouting the same line he’d used six months before when Ben and I had gone in.
    Benjamin shot back, “I don’t know. Maybe a double devil with a halo, and make it insane.”
    “Where the hell did you hear that?” The kid was grinning.
    “I saw your T-shirt,” Benjamin said, and shook his hand.
    Some club at State, I gathered, where ice cream had worked its way into the vernacular. At any rate, we were the only ones in the place, so the kid challenged Benjamin to make it himself, and I sat down for the duration because my husband never backed down. The delighted clerk gave him a hat and a paper apron, and Benjamin made both of us a fudge ripple ice cream and brownie concoction with pistachios and whipped cream. Then he added some kind of flavored syrup that had me nauseated for the rest of the night.
    He was entirely himself that day—his mood high, his life easy. That was during the holidays. Sometime, not long, before he began focusing on having a child again. Bringing it up as if it was a new discussion we should have. The Ben at the ice-cream shop was the person I most wanted to see again.
    The guy wouldn’t take money from us, so Benjamin said he’d work it off. He’d stayed on serving customers with the kid for another half hour, the two of them cutting up like eighth graders. I finally told him to either go with me or take a taxi home. He left wearing the hat, the apron on under his winter coat. The kid was still grinning as we walked out the door.
    Benjamin was like that. People knew him as a friend in five minutes’ time. Loved him in ten. I loved him a lot longer, but it wasn’t enough.
    I’d sailed too far, lost myself in thinking, and completely missed early signs of a squall coming in from behind. I started the motor again, but by the time I turned the boat around and furled the sail back in, the storm was on top of me.
    “Damn.” I set the boat on autopilot, took Georgie below, and got my foul-weather jacket. Then I stepped back out into the fray, closed up the cabin hatch, and hunkered down to weather the stinging rain as it played out against the current on the slow ride home.
     
    Except for the sling, Angel looked like any kid climbing around on a boat. I had tried to talk with her, but she seemed indifferent. At least she wasn’t scared of me. She could still use the hand on her hurt arm, but the doctors wanted to keep the shoulder stable, immobile. She’d already gotten adept at maneuvering her fingers for tasks without shifting the rest of her arm.
    “Keep hold of the lifelines, please,” Reese called up to her from where we sat in the cockpit as the girl explored the deck. It was after five o’clock, but the August sun stayed high, had come out as bright as morning after the squall. Reese leaned back. Long curls of hair fell toward her face, so she fished beaded combs from her purse and secured the wild strands. My hair, too straight for combs, suffered a plain elastic band.
    “I couldn’t believe all the blood last night. Looked like buckets, didn’t it? I couldn’t tell how bad her shoulder was.” Reese was telling me about Angel’s injury; her tone had a manic quality, a notch up from her usual drama.
Buckets of blood.
She might have been talking about a horror movie, or a news story she read. She seemed to hold nothing sacred. “But after they cleaned it up, it was much more of a grazing wound than anything else, they said.”
    She relayed Angel’s ordeal with an enthusiastic narration, as if such terrible things came and went in their lives all the time. I felt dull next to all of her emotional colors. She seemed to have forgotten that I had been