I smile when I remember Tom.

Tom was the younger brother of a guy I had a huge crush on in high school.  The older brother had a magnificent deep bass voice for singing.  He was pretty much a jerk, though, but in the meantime I’d befriended Tom, sort of.  In any case, Tom had a crush on me, which got really annoying.  He even got a job at the local hamburger joint where I worked, and sure enough we got put on the same shifts.

Those dark November nights could be pretty quiet, because in those days there was only a walk up window and no one wanted to stand outside in the rain to place an order.

On one of those rainy dark nights, the owners had to run an errand in the city and wouldn’t be back until eleven pm.

I was refilling the ice cream cone dispenser, with those pale crisp cones which went into a tray above the soft-serve machine.  I had removed the tray and was filling it across the room next to the grill. Tom was chatting away and fiddling with things, as usual.  Then he pulled the pin out of the ice cream machine, and suddenly there was an ice cream volcano going off.  Within seconds the geyser of liquid ice cream had hit the ceiling, it covered the counters, it sprayed the windows, and then it started oozing across the floor like lava.  Tom was covered in it, it coated his hair, his clothes.  I stood there with my mouth open and finally heard him yelling:  “GET THE PIN!  GET THE PIN!  QUICK!”

I ran to look where he was pointing and fished the pin, a little bobby pin like piece of metal, out from a puddle of cream on the floor.  I handed it to Tom and he put it back into the machine which immediately stopped spewing.  We looked at each other in crazed horror and then shrieked with laughter.

For the next three hours we cleaned that place from top to bottom.  Tom washed his hair in the back room and rinsed off his shirt.  We mopped the floors, we scrubbed the counters and cupboards, we washed the windows, we mopped off the ceiling, we wiped down the posters and the display racks and freezer chests, we scrubbed and polished every surface of every piece of equipment in the room.  And we were quiet and cool when the owners returned at eleven.

I was terrified that we’d get in trouble and be fired, but I did my best acting to look calm and serene, at least until the owner noticed a tiny drop of ice cream on the pin itself.

He roared: “Did this thing come off of here tonight?”  At that moment I stepped into the cooler with a tray of condiments and hid there for a minute.

When I came out again Tom was saying, with great innocence and concern in his voice: “Why?  Is that under pressure or something?” I made a U turn and went back into the cooler and took several deep breaths to pull myself together.

If the owners figured out what had happened, they never said another word about it.  But later, when Tom went outside to pick up the garbage he grinned at me through the window.