I worked at Lynn’s Ice Cream Barn the summer Lynn was accused of sleeping with the farmer who grew the berries for her strawberry buttercream flavor. I was 21 and thoroughly fed up with my work as an event photographer, for which I shot sweet sixteens and the occasional bar mitzvah. I did a pretty shoddy job, having only taken one photography class in high school. I’d decided to give the ice cream shop a shot after my mother, who had known Lynn since junior high, ran into her in the cereal aisle at the supermarket and they got to talking. “Have your boy give me a ring. I could use a strong and silent type,” Lynn said.
The Barn was a true monument of Saugerties and had been built and passed down through Lynn’s family for generations. It was situated close enough to Esopus Creek that kids could bike or walk there after a day of swimming and mud wrestling, and tourists roaming the Hudson Valley could take a pit stop off the 87 to try our signature kettle corn flavor. I myself had taken my bike to the Barn on monotonous summer afternoons when there was nothing else to do besides swim and hang around empty parking lots. Lynn’s itself wasn’t really a barn, more of a large wooden shack with an enclosed patio painted friendly shades of green and pink. The counter was right at the front near the ice cream freezers, and behind that, the open kitchen where we fried onion rings and corndogs, assembled hamburgers, and blended up milkshakes. The wall beside the counter was covered entirely by laminated pictures of the various menu items and ice cream flavors: rocky road, cotton candy, moose tracks, butter pecan, brownie fudge and the likes. The Barn proudly offered 32 flavors of ice cream, plus soft serve. Lynn paid eight dollars an hour in cash, and you could make a decent amount off tips alone, so working for her was one of the most coveted jobs in town.
There were five of us there that summer, and we worked six days a week from seven-thirty until sundown, scooping. By the end of that summer, I developed carpal tunnel syndrome in my right hand. Trisha was a life-long friend of Lynn’s, although the two were constantly squabbling like jealous sisters. Trisha was sixty-eight, round and wrinkled with a bulbous tuft of grey hair and a chin that sagged and hung down like a turkey’s wattle. It was mid June, I had only been working for a couple of weeks, when Trisha let herself into the shop one humid Sunday afternoon. The Barn was always closed on Sundays because most of the town attended morning services, so Trisha was surprised when she stuck her key into the door and found it unlocked. Later, she claimed she had been searching for a lost turquoise earring. Throwing open the door to the back room, she found Lynn and Trenton, the owner of DooLittle Farms, spreadeagle right next to the pasteurizer. The news spread awfully fast– Trisha was a loose-lipped kind of woman –and by Monday morning, it seemed the whole town had heard about the affair. When I clocked in for work, Lynn was smoking a cigarette on the patio, ashing into the potted daisies at her feet, and the first thing she did was swear to me that none of it was true. “I would never fuck that dirty ass farmer. He looks like an aged John Malkovich if John was missing a front tooth.” But it was too late. Lynn’s husband, Bob, had already heard the news from the man who sold him his lottery tickets at the local gas station. Bob was a timid man with a comb over and watery blue eyes whom I’d chatted with on more than one occasion. I liked his soft voice and the way he only spoke when he had something to say, otherwise he would make animated facial expressions to show he was following the conversation. I wish now that I’d reached out to him somehow, or at least told him I hadn’t known about the affair. People assumed the five of us working at the Barn that summer had insider information, but really, we relied on the gossip mill just as much as the rest of them. And I never did talk to Bob. At the time, I was dealing with my own shit. That was the summer I met Tori.
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Tori and I didn’t go home together that night. I walked down to the river's edge and wandered along the Hudson, past the old lighthouse, my sneakers heavy with mud. I walked until the sun set and I had to find my way back to the main road in near complete darkness. I saw Tori for the last time a week later. We went to the old theater and saw some horrible roller skating flick. I hadn’t intended to end it, but as we sat out on the curb finishing our cherry sodas, I got so nauseous I could barely breath. I had the feeling that to get that thing out of my throat, I had to leave.
The Barn closed down for good at the end of August. Several businesses have moved in and out in the time since, but nowadays it’s a Best Buy. I drive past the big blue building when I pick up my daughter from soccer practice. Sometimes I get the smallest tingle down my back and I am thrown back into that summer, the summer the five of us were the talk of the town, and I feel something that I pray isn’t bitterness. From what I gather, Tori moved back to California after college, and a few years ago, I found her on Facebook. She travels a lot: Paris, Bangkok, Puerto Rico. She always posts pictures with her girl friends, the group of them holding cocktails or sitting on some white sand beach. She doesn’t have a guy. In the late hours of the night, when my wife is asleep beside me, I’ll feel the urge to scroll through her photos, to study her face which has aged, freckles sitting deeper into a now narrow face, long hair shining with greys. Sometimes I restrain myself and sometimes I don’t. But when I resist, I fall asleep dreaming of the Fourth of July. We were all working that night, and when the first firework went off over the Hudson, Lynn hollered and we ran out into the front parking lot. Birdie grabbed towels from her trunk, I brought two tubs of french fries and relish, and we laid down across the warm cement. George bellowed the national anthem at the top of his lungs and Tori laughed and laughed. I looked over at her and saw red white and blue reflected in those eyes.