Little Bird of Heaven by Joyce Carol Oates

as a caress, or it was harsh.
    Anything that passed between Zoe Kruller and Eddy Diehl, in Honeystone’s Dairy, was soft-sounding as a caress, and not harsh.
    Daddy never bought ice-cream cones or sundaes for himself. Not ever. Daddy hadn’t much taste for sweet things, preferred salty things like pretzels, peanuts, potato chips however stale, eating them by the mouthful as he drank beer, Sundays. And Daddy liked coffee, Daddy was “hooked” on black coffee, so pungent-smelling it made my nostrils shut up, tight. Especially Daddy liked coffee you could get at Honeystone’s which smelled like a different kind of coffee than at home.
    Zoe made a show of pouring the steaming liquid into a tall Styrofoam cup. “There you go, Eddy. Hope it’s what you like.”
    “Yes. It’s what I like.”
    One day, Zoe Kruller would be vanished from Honeystone’s. One day soon and it would be a shock to me, a cruel surprise—my mother was the one to drive Ben and me to the dairy and eagerly we’d run inside looking for Zoe Kruller but there was just old Mrs. Honeystone and fat scowling Audrey and another girl who was a stranger to us and we asked Mrs. Honeystone where was Zoe? Where was Zoe? and Mrs. Honeystone said only that she’d quit, Mrs. Honeystone did not utter the name Zoe but only just she. You could see how Mrs. Honeystone would not smile and did not care to say anything further about Zoe Kruller nor would our mother inquire.
    Where is she, she’s gone. Gave notice, and gone.
     
    T HAT DAY, that Sunday I am thinking of. When I was eight years old and going into third grade in the fall. And Daddy and Zoe Kruller talked together in their swift Ping-Pong banter as Zoe scooped out ice cream for Ben and me and poured coffee for Daddy, rang up the order and made change and Daddy said in a lowered voice taking the change from Zoe’s slender fingers with the startling crimson nails that Zoe should say hello to Del for him—someone named “Del”—and Zoe laughed and said, “Sure! When I see him.” Which was an answer that possibly took Daddy by surprise, he fumbled the change, dropped a quarter that rolled acrossthe marble-tile floor and Ben swooped to snatch it up; and Zoe said, still with that laugh in her voice like nothing could hurt her, airy and light as any little bird fluttering overhead, “And you say hi to Lucy, will you?”
    Outside in the parking lot, in muggy-hot air, oppressive after the milky cool of the dairy, as we approached Daddy’s car parked imprudently in the glaring sun, discovered that the tip of my ice-cream cone was caved in, broken—and then I discovered, horribly, that something was inside the tip of the cone: squirmy black weevils.
    I screamed. I dropped the cone onto the ground.
    Daddy heard, and came to investigate.
    “What the hell, Krissie? What’s wrong?”
    Two scoops of ice cream—strawberry, chocolate—on the hot gravel, melting. Looking so silly, there on the ground. Something that was meant to be a treat—something special, delicious—on the ground like garbage. I told Daddy that there were weevils inside the cone, I couldn’t eat it. I was gagging, close to vomiting. Daddy cursed under his breath poking at the cone with the tip of his shoe, as if he could see from his height the half-dozen black insects squirming inside the tip; his manner was skeptical, impatient; he didn’t seem very sympathetic, as if the defiled cone was my fault. Or maybe, a clumsy child, I’d simply dropped it, and was trying to pass on the blame to someone else.
    “Well. You’re not getting another one, we’re late and we’re leaving.”
    Not another cone? When this wasn’t my fault? I drew breath to protest, to cry, stricken with a child’s sense of injustice, and with the loss of something I’d so craved, but Daddy was heedless, Daddy had made up his mind he wasn’t going back inside the dairy, he wasn’t going to complain to Zoe Kruller or to anyone about his daughter’s ice-cream