20
Key Lime Season
NUMBER OF INDIVIDUAL PIES PRODUCED PER DAY: Thirty to sixty.
CARDBOARD BOX ASSEMBLY SPEED: Twenty-five seconds.
KEY LIME JUICING SPEED: Four average-sized key limes per minute.
NUMBER OF CURRENTLY BAND-AIDED FINGERS: Three.
CREAM-WHIPPING SPEED WHEN PICKING UP KITCHEN SLACK: Hummingbird on five cups of coffee.
RISK OF DEVELOPING CARPAL TUNNEL SYNDROME BY AGE EIGHTEEN: High.
Spring at the Bone Yard came with yet another tradition, something that Austin had no shortage of between UT Longhorns gear, the music festivals, and annual film events that peppered downtown. In this instance, apparently, it all came down to key lime pie.
“As in: condensed milk, sour cream, lime juice, and graham cracker?” Norris asked incredulously.
He had arrived early to find a sweat-stained Jim McElwees installing a very hand-painted placard under the Bone Yard’s sign: Key Lime Days Ahead, framed with neon limes and an acid-green pie.
“Don’t forget the whipped cream,” Big Jim answered, tapping the board and confirming himself as the proud artist. “Special homemade recipe. None of that canned nonsense!”
“Cool,” Norris commented. “Is this, um, seasonal?”
“Through the spring and the summer! This bad boy is our ice cream truck. In the summer we deliver it around town. People love it! Give the people what they want—in a timely fashion and at their door—and you can charge eighteen dollars a pop! Free life lesson for you, Nor!”
No one could say that Big Jim’s zest for life wasn’t infectious. Ha. Zest. Norris had smiled and gone in assuming that this simple menu addition would not change much in his life, unaware of how utterly wrong he was.
“Ha, is that what he said?” Maddie scoffed, adding the seventeenth case of limes to the backup storage. Norris followed her lead and placed the eighteenth case on top. Julio was right behind them, carrying number nineteen.
“Let me tell you how it usually goes.” She launched into her explanation. “Spring rolls in and we get about five dozen of these things delivered in three days, because Dad bulk orders. Every year he bulk orders. He has an old bandmate who farms them in Fairview. He thinks he’s getting a deal, but really these are standard prices. I’ve checked online.”
“Every year we tell him.” Julio sighed, picking up the narrative. “And every year he forgets.”
“It’s Key Lime Spring. Key Lime Prom. Key Lime Graduation. Summer finally rolls around,” Maddie continued, sending a quick text without missing a beat. “And our delivery guys always bail by the end of the summer because their band has gotten a new gig, or because the heat is just too much. Plus, the smell of baked-in lime and sugar gets to you. Believe me.”
“So by the end of the summer,” Maddie said again, “we’re drafting servers and busboys to pick up the slack and do delivery in the morning and evening. Not to mention that these things rot. They rot real bad. Half of these will go to waste. That’s usually when Mom and Bobby come in here to try to salvage what they can.”
Bobby was the twins’ father and one of the brothers-in-law. He stopped by the Bone Yard occasionally, and Norris had met him a few times: pair of sunglasses hanging from his V-neck and a college ring. Norris knew the type and had slipped back into the kitchens before receiving an unsolicited fist bump. Working at the Bone Yard meant slowly falling into sync with the McElwees clan’s extended family tree. Norris knew who married who, who still called Big Jim “Mr. McElwees” and who called him “Big Jim,” “Pop,” or “Sir,” and what the distinction between each title meant. Bobby was a “Pop,” but, as far as Norris could tell, that had been a premature claim on his part.
“These are long, limey days, Canada,” Julio concluded, with the gravitas of an old sailor who had seen some shit in his days and looked at a sunny day knowing the storm was ahead. “Long limey days indeed.” He tied his apron and headed into the main seating area.
Maddie grinned at Norris as she began to juggle two stray limes.
“Believe me, by October you’ll be so sick of these you’ll see them in your nightmares,” she warned, eyes focused on the half-steady loops she was attempting to create. Whenever two dropped, she automatically grabbed two more from the nearest case. “Mushy, sweetened, gained-ten-pounds-in-six-months nightmares.”
“Wait, what?”
“They’re . . . really good pies,” she admitted, bouncing a lime at Norris with her arm. “You’ll see.”
“Stop dropping all those limes!” Norris admonished as two more rolled to the ground.
“I only dropped four,” Maddie replied.
“Listen, Madison,” Norris quipped, stopping another one before it rolled too far. “Nobody likes a pretty girl who can count, all right?”
“Just hand me your phone, all right?” She sighed. “Let’s do this.”
Norris didn’t quite know why he’d agreed to this, but as they’d been working, Maddie had somehow made a pretty successful argument for giving her full access to his previous exchanges with Aarti, which meant his phone. After making sure his browsing history was clear of any recent embarrassing and/or pornographic searches (like most red-blooded teenagers, he had a healthy curiosity about these things), Norris handed over his phone and walked to another corner of the back room, leaving Maddie to process like an android processing data. Her back was arched and her thumb took long, vertical swipes through his past month of pseudoromantic history.
“Well, there’s your problem, right there,” she eventually noted, eyes still glued to his phone. “You’re trying so hard! Everything you send her is a snarky joke—I don’t want to alarm you, but some of this stuff just borders on cheerleading squad–level cattiness, by the way. It’s stressful to receive that stuff! Especially in writing. You’re barraging the poor girl with Ping-Pong balls she has to whack back.”
Your goddamn mouth, as Judith had warned him. Only in text form.
“I never meant to do that!” Norris moaned. “How do I fix it?”
“Cut through the bull and say something real.”
“Like what?”
“Aarti,” Maddie began to recite as she swiftly typed on his phone, keeping Norris at bay with her foot as she scooted back onto the counter.
“I am so horny for you. I want to squeeze your tits and your butt and then have you squeeze my butt and my nipples as we dissolve into a human meat puddle together, XOXO.”
Norris snatched his phone back, tripping over himself and hitting the counter to read the actual text Maddie had typed.
HI, AARTI
LOOK, I KNOW THINGS ARE KIND OF WEIRD AND YOU’RE UNDER A LOT OF STRESS WITH LIFE, ETC. BUT I’D LOVE TO TAKE YOU ON ANOTHER DATE IF YOU’RE UP FOR IT. SOMETHING REALLY SPECIAL! NO EMOTIONALLY MANIPULATIVE SNOW GLOBES WILL BE INVOLVED. OR, IF YOU JUST WANT TO BE FRIENDS, THAT’S COOL TOO.
“You cheerleader,” Norris snarled as Maddie batted her eyes whimsically.
“Trust me,” she sighed, jumping off the counter. “That’s a lot better than this endless stream of quips you’ve been vomiting at her.”
“I thought girls liked funny guys?”
“Girls also like six-packs, but I don’t see you hitting the gym,” she sneered. “It’s aggressive! Like, ‘Aren’t I funny! Notice my humor! Laugh! Laugh, I say!!’”
Norris was still grumbling when the response from Aarti, the fastest he’d ever received, arrived with a ding: OK
Chastened, he was forced to admit Maddie was—as always—right. Clearly Aarti had been scared off by his eagerness, and the apparently obvious effort he’d been putting into his carefully crafted, carefully timed responses had only been pushing her further away.
So. He had another shot with Aarti. He looked back at the text Maddie had penned for him.
“‘Something really special’? What does that even mean?”
Maddie shrugged, jumping off the counter. “Whatever you choose to make it.”
Norris groaned, racking his brain. Another dreary documentary was not his idea of a magical evening. He and Aarti clearly weren’t aligned there.
“So a candlelit dinner or something?”
Maddie shook her head in visible disgust.
“Well, no: not that. So cliché. Is the inside of your head an ABC Family sitcom?” she asked. “For some reason, this girl likes you. Your entire . . . thing, it works for her. So, as counterintuitive as that is . . . I would say to be yourself on this one. Take her on a date that only Norris Kaplan could take her on.” By her tone, that instruction was the worst advice she’d ever issued in over sixteen years of advice giving.
A Norris Kaplan date. That would definitely require some diary mapping.
“So,” Norris said, exhausted with talking about himself, which might be a historical first. “Um, how is our deal working out on your end?”
“What do you mean?”
“Are you getting more time to sleep, eat, successfully lead cheers?”
Their shifts hadn’t been overlapping lately because of all her practices and gymnastics and whatever it was that cheerleaders actually did to prepare for the leading of cheers.
“Um, good,” she said, almost sounding coy. “It’s going pretty . . . well, great, actually.”
Maddie took a look around the room and leaned into him, suddenly quieter.
“Coach Armbruster said that she wants to make me squad captain next year, officially, which also comes with insane college scholarship opportunities. Like, I could get a free ride. Or something close to it.”
“Maddie!” Norris screamed excitedly, shoving her lightly. “That’s freaking awesome! Congratulations!”
True, Norris had no idea what being squad captain actually entailed. He pictured something between a crown and a whip being bestowed upon Maddie by Armbruster, the gym teacher, as dozens of freshmen cowered in the corner.
“Yeah,” Maddie sighed, palming a lemon.
“Wait, why aren’t you more excited?”
“Well, I mean, this has kind of been Meredith’s dream for forever. . . .”
Norris nodded; he unfortunately knew far more about the Anderson cheerleading squad than he ever could have predicted, and seemed to remember Meredith waxing poetic on all the things she’d do for the team when she was captain. “This is so much bigger than that, McElwees. We’re talking money, sister!”
“I feel like a bad friend,” she eventually admitted with a sigh, resting her head against the stack of crates. “She’s definitely going to kill me.”
“Please, you’re like the best person in all of Texas,” Norris said with an eye roll. “It’s kind of annoying, truth be told.”
“Mer’s just not always the easiest person when it comes to these things,” Maddie admitted. “She banished Ellie from our table—in the second grade, mind you—for wearing her hair the same way as her at her birthday party. She actually said that: ‘You’re banished.’ What kind of second grader even knows the word banish?”
There did not seem to be any animosity at the memory; just a sort of wonderment at her best friend’s quirks. Norris sighed. Meredith Santiago’s emotional well-being was not something he’d ever planned to spend any energy considering, let alone preserving.
“Y’know, if you shatter the amulet she always wears, she’ll just dissolve into dust and all your problems are solved.”
Norris received a soft kick to the shin as Maddie turned to throw her arm over a case of limes. It wasn’t like her to be this dramatic.
“Look: you haven’t done anything behind her back, right?”
Maddie shook her head violently. Of course she hadn’t.
“Well then, there you go.” Norris shrugged. “Besides, you apparently stepped aside for Patrick. . . . She can give you this win. At worst, she will lose her tiny—ever-so-tiny, we’re talking pebble-size—marbles for a couple of hours, sure. But she’ll come around. No banishments. And at some point, you have to accept the spotlight instead of just being in the background clapping for Meredith.”
She undid her ponytail and redid it again, slightly tighter than before, clearly stressed by the situation.
“Or,” Norris continued, leaning in and lowering his voice. “Use your newfound status to broker an alliance with the theater kids, borrow a few ships from the swim team, and strike before Meredith even knows what hit her. Keep her younger siblings as hostages and, should the remaining Santiagos get any ideas of insurrection, exterminate their lineage.”
She stared at him for a moment.
“Have you tried stopping yourself two sentences short?” she suggested, rolling her eyes on the way out. “I feel like every facet of your life would benefit from it.”
“You’re too nice,” Norris commented. “That’s your problem. Like, just stop worrying about everyone else’s feelings all the time. Being selfish sometimes is good too.”
She raised her eyebrows, unimpressed. “You should consider a career in politics. This inspirational crap belongs on a hat, Canada.”
“I’m serious, Maddie,” Norris insisted. “You have to be selfish sometimes. Not always—please don’t ascend to Meredith levels of awfulness—but, like, put yourself first sometimes.
“What?” Norris mumbled when she stared at him too long, as if he’d grown a second head. “You’re not the only one who wants your friends to be happy.”
Maddie smiled at the word friend, as if she’d caught him at something embarrassing. But in truth, Norris didn’t mind how easily the word had come. Liam had been in it for the hockey, at least at first, but between securing him this job and all the help with Aarti, Maddie had been kind of a weird gift from the gods, delivered to make his life easier, in the same chronic, compulsive way she seemed dedicated to making all the lives around her easier.
“Thanks, Norris,” Maddie said, all traces of smirk and sarcasm gone. She pulled him in for a hug, and Norris found himself settling into it for a moment before remembering himself and ducking away. “Now help me with these pies.”