The slushie maker was too high up for the little kids to reach, so after watching them jumping up to try to reach the handles in a cute but utterly futile way, I went over and offered to make each kid whatever kind of slushie they wanted.
They cheered.
They had never known you could combine the flavors, so they were impressed with the layered slushies I made for them.
"This is the best slushie I ever had!" gushed a towheaded first grader named Max. He had a preposterous cowlick in the back of his head that made his hair stand up like a little blond fan.
"I had a lot of slushies in my life 'cause my dad's a long-distance trucker and he's always takin' me on the road," Max continued. "I probly had slushies in every state of America. One time my dad took me out of school for a week and he almost took me into Mexico but then my mom called him and said he'd better haul me back on up to Monument before she called the cops on him!"
I liked Max. I like a kid who holds nothing back.
One kid was Latino. I put him at about first grade, maybe kindergarten. He was chubby and jolly looking.
"What's your name?" I asked him.
He just smiled at me. He had two big holes where his top front teeth should have been.
"Cómo se llama? Your name?"
He said something that sounded all the world to me like, "You listen."
"I'm listening," I said.
"You listen," he said, nodding.
"Okay, I listen."
"No, no," he said.
"His name is You-list-ease," said Max, trying to help. "He's in first grade with me."
"You-list-ease?" I repeated.
The Mexican kid said his name again.
And suddenly I got it. "Ulysses! His name is Ulysses!"
The Spanish pronunciation, let me tell you, sounds a lot different than the English.
Ulysses was now grinning like he'd won the lottery.
"Ulysses! Ulysses!"
A tiny, hardscrabble victory for him and me: Now I knew his name.
Chloe was the third grader who had been whining when Mrs. Wooly said she was going for help. Chloe was chubby and tan and very energetic. I made her a blue-and-red-striped slushie, like she wanted. However, it was not good enough for her.
"The stripes are too thick!" she complained. "I want it like a raccoon tail."
But it turns out it's really hard to make a slushie with thin stripes, as I discovered after five or six tries.
I handed Chloe my very best effort.
"Not like a raccoon's tail," she remarked. She shook her head sadly, as if she were a teacher and I hopeless student.
"This is as 'raccoon tail' as I can do," I said.
"All right." She sighed. "If it's your best work."
Chloe, I had already decided, was a piece of work.
The McKinley twins were our neighbors, actually. Alex and I sometimes shoveled their driveway for their mom, who I guess was a single mother.
She paid twenty dollars, which was okay money.
The twins were a boy and a girl both with red hair and freckles. They had the kind of back-to-back freckles that overlap so they hardly had any other kind of skin, just a bit of white peeping through the thick be-freckling.
