Chapter 2

So we talked for another hour and a half -- until 11:30. Annette finally suggested I might want to start the drive back to Carlton.

"Hey, y'know, we were talking about Sideways," I said. "I liked that movie so much, I bought the DVD!"

"I didn't even know it was out already," she said.

"Yeah, just recently, it came out. Y'know, my older sister saw it when I brought it home, and she hated it. She said she hoped she never ran into any men who were as rotten as those guys."

"Wow. I had heard it was about some pretty lovable characters."

"Well. I thought it was! I still think so! --I guess who's lovable and who's not lies in the eye of the beholder."

"I'm still going to try and see it," Annette said.

"Hey -- do you have a DVD player?"

"Well. My folks do," she said. "I still live at home, between semesters at State."

"Y'know -- if I forgot to load your ice cream again sometime, I could bring it over -- and bring the movie along, too."

"I work every week night," she said, "including Friday."

When the Carlton Creamery brought by several cartons of ice cream on Friday, I filled out waybills for all the Columbus and Dayton destinations, but told the delivery guy that he needn't pay for the three destined for Marty's Ice Cream Parlor in Newark. "I know those people," I explained. "I'm going over there tonight, and I'll deliver their ice cream for free. Tell your boss to credit Marty Granville's account for the delivery costs."

So my boss would lose a few pennies in commission. I'd make a few brownie points with Annette's dad. Hey, never underestimate the power of cultivating the parents!

By ten p.m., I was outside Marty's Ice Cream Parlor for the second time that week. This time, I brought along one of the ice creams on my first trip inside. "Annette?"

"I'm back here. Is that the Ice Cream Man?"

"The Ice Cream Man Cometh," I intoned.

I almost did cometh when Annette came out through the door to the back room!

This time, there was no pink and white-striped apron, her usual uniform while at work. She was wearing a one-piece short set -- one of those little starched-shirtwaist outfits that had always given me conniption fits whenever I saw an attractive woman wearing one.

They're especially wonderful when the wearer bends over.

"Wow, you look great!" I said.

I just came up with that -- right on the spot. Charles Boyer had nothing on me!

"My civilian clothes," Annette said. "If we're going to watch the movie, I thought it would be nice to get out of the milkmaid costume first."

"Well, you look fantastic as a -- uh -- milkmaid, too, if that's the look you were going for. But I kinda like the shorts set, too!"

"I get the definite impression," Annette said, "that you wouldn't care if I wore a gunny sack."

"Or not!" I agreed.

"One step at a time, Bud." She walked over to me, gave me a hug, and then jumped away. "Yikes! Your hands are cold!"

"All in a good cause, M'lady. I just brought in the first of your three ice creams for the evening."

We loaded the three cylinders into the freezer, turned out the lights, and prepared to depart. "Do you have your car here?" I asked.

"Nope. And you can just grab the DVD and leave your own tired old jalopy right where it is. My parents live only a half-block away."

Mr. and Mrs. Granville turned out to be a lot younger-looking than my own parents. For an ice-cream purveyor, Marty Granville was in pretty good physical shape. He evidently didn't sample his own product much.

Annette's mother, Sylvia, had probably not seen her 40th birthday yet, and she looked almost as beautiful as her daughter.

But -- there were maybe a few scoops of raspberry in Sylvia's recent past. Briefly, in my imagination, I compared the two Granville women -- both of them nude, of course -- and found neither of them exactly wanting. (Except they both wanted me, of course.)