chapter ONE
Today I was going to touch the stars.
Lying on my back, I stared up at my bedroom ceiling. When I’d moved to my own place, the only things I’d taken from my childhood home were the star-shaped glittered cardboard cutouts my grandmother and I had made when I was seven. I hung them as a reminder of what she’d told me—always shoot for the stars.
She’d also told me on days I had to make ice cream for the store, don’t sleep past five a.m.
I sat up in bed and looked over at the red glow of my digital alarm clock.
Four thirty-nine.
Up ahead of time. Already, the day seemed promising.
A smile escaping my lips, I pulled back the covers and stood on the bed. On my toes, I reached up and felt the coarse bumps from the glue on the gold-glittered star that hung the lowest. Closing my eyes, I walked the length of the bed, socked feet sinking into the mattress, and ran my fingertips along the points. Inhaling happily, I jumped off the bed and padded down the hall into the bathroom, humming a tune.
Yes, today was the day that I was going to realize my dream.
As I brushed my teeth, I stared back at my reflection in the mirror and could almost see all the excitement oozing out of me. Running my family’s ice cream shop hadn’t always been my dream, surely not the one I’d left for college and earned a degree in marketing and an MBA for. But when my dad’s sister, Aunt Jack, had moved to North Carolina and left our little business without a manager, my grandfather had chosen me, his only granddaughter, to run it. He’d put the key to the shop in a box with a keyring that said “Manager” and a card that said “Carte Blanche” and placed it under the Christmas tree. Tearing into the red-and-gold Ho-Ho-Ho wrapping paper that holiday morning, I’d felt just like a kid—wide smile, nervous giggle and my insides squealing with delight.
That had been nearly a year ago.
I let out a long sigh as I put away my toothbrush and closed the medicine cabinet. I pulled a plastic cap over my short-cropped black hair and stepped into the shower.
Yep, today I was confident about opening the shop, but that confidence had been born out of trouble. After the baton had been passed to me and I came up with the plan to turn our little shop around, I found out the hard way just how quickly plans could go wrong.
I closed my eyes and let the hot water from my brand-new luxury spa showerhead—the only modern amenity in the old Victorian rental—fall down on me.
I had opted to revamp the store, modernizing it with what I deemed strategic, moneymaking renovations. It had a full glass wall at the back of the dining area, a 1950ish soda shop motif (complete with a black-and-white checkered floor), an open-view kitchen where customers could see their ice cream being made and a menu based on the recipes my grandparents, Aloysius Zephyr Crewse and Kaylene Brewster Crewse, had used when they opened shop in 1965.
I didn’t have my grandmother’s original recipe box—no one seemed to know what had happened to it. But I did have photocopies of some of the recipe cards she’d used, and, having worked alongside her for my entire childhood tugging at her apron strings, I was pretty sure, for the recipes I didn’t have, I could remember most of the ingredients and churn out her bestsellers, or at least be pretty close.
Known for being the methodical and analytical one, I had carefully mapped out a blueprint to restore the business to what I called its glory days—when all we sold was ice cream—but all my planning and practical graduate coursework had gone straight out of the window by week two. I learned firsthand about real-world time delays.
I’d never worried so much in my life. My plan had been to relaunch the shop at the Chagrin Falls Annual Memorial Day Blossom Festival. But between the wrong glass shipping for my partition wall, a prolonged crop of rainstorms and an overbooked contractor, it would be closer to our little village’s October Pumpkin Roll before I could flip the sign on the shop door to Open.
I say “closer” because my vision still hadn’t been actualized. The plexiglass wall needed to partition off the kitchen still hadn’t arrived. And the supplier of our fair-trade cane sugar had gotten into a ten-car pileup—no casualties, but tons of the white grains had been overturned across the highway, making me have to wait to get the first batches started until another truck could be loaded. It turned out to be only a two-day delay. Thank goodness it had arrived in time.
I reached over and flipped the showerhead to pulsating, letting the water beat down and wash away those thoughts of all the hiccups that had tried to give my ice cream dream a meltdown.
I basked in the spray for a few more minutes before I turned off the water, stepped out of the shower and wrapped a towel around me. I slid my hand across the condensation on the mirror and grabbed a bottle of face moisturizer.
Smearing the liquid under my eyes and across my forehead, I couldn’t help but grin thinking about how our little business, with me at the helm, was going to come full circle today. We were back to selling ice cream and only ice cream.
I pulled off my shower cap, ran a comb through my hair and felt the first of the butterflies flapping around in my stomach. I whispered a little prayer and headed back to my bedroom to get dressed.
My grandfather had often reminisced about how hard it had been for him and my Grandma Kay to start that little shop. Just relocating to the village of Chagrin Falls, a suburb of Cleveland, from the south, had been an ordeal. My grandma hadn’t gotten used to the snow and cold when they took on the business of digging in a frosty freezer every time she served a customer. But then she’d made it her own. Over the years, she came up with flavors that captured everyone’s fancy—smooth and lemony luscious ice box pie, sprinkle-splattered cake batter and my grandfather’s favorite, pralines and cream—folds of gooey sweet caramel and salty praline pecans swirled into her homemade vanilla bean ice cream.
But selling ice cream in a place where four seasons sometimes slid into two—either hot or cold—meant our family business had hit more bumps than the almond-filled rocky road ice cream my Grandma Kay used to whip up for her famous cakes. So, to keep up, other family members had stuffed the shop shelves with non–ice cream items in an attempt to keep it viable all year round.
Crewse Creamery had become more of a novelty shop—T-shirts, Chagrin Falls memorabilia, hot dogs, lemonade and candy. “No one wants ice cream in the wintertime, Bronwyn,” my aunt Jack had said, calling me by my full name, something no one did, while setting up an Ohio lottery machine she’d purchased. “We have to follow the money. Diversify.”
With Aunt Jack’s changes, our family business had been teetering on the point of no return, especially after she stopped making ice cream by hand. She ordered mix for soft serve and frozen tubs all the way from Arizona. Homemade ice cream had been what set us apart from all the other ice cream shops. But she said it made no economical sense to continue to make it half the year when she could get a year-long contract to supply ice cream to cover the late-spring and summer months. Luckily, she’d found love on the internet and moved to follow her man to the Tar Heel State before the first shipment arrived.