SIX YEARS AGO
“All it does is rain here,” she says gloomily. She kicks at the leg of a wicker chaise lounge and it collapses, flipping onto its side. “This entire house is falling apart. It’s crap.”
“What’s got you in such a foul mood?” Whit asks through a mouthful of cereal.
“That’s repulsive, Whit,” she says. He’s just poured himself a bowl of Honey Bunches of Oats and doused it with a stream of heavy cream until the cereal almost disappeared. “You might as well eat a stick of butter for breakfast.”
(This is typical of Whit, who was infamous in family lore for being willing to eat absolutely anything. He once, on a dare from their cousin James during a family trip to Beaver Creek, made a tower from the hotel buffet of six whipped cream-covered Belgian waffles alternating with layers of hot sauce-laced hash browns and strips of bacon, then ate the entire thing and promptly threw up while walking to go snow tubing after brunch. She, on the other hand, had been a deeply picky eater up until her eighth birthday when her parents claimed she just…became easy-going. Before that she had a litany of rules: mushrooms chopped up but not whole, peanut butter alone on toast but never with jelly, no pasta longer than penne unless it was angel hair and coated liberally in Parmesan, ice cream could be vanilla or chocolate but not vanilla with chocolate and absolutely no sprinkles because they were too crunchy.)
“Again, why are you being such a downer?” he replies, taking another bite and slurping loudly, smirking at her as he does.
“It’s only our second day, and it’s supposed to be beautiful all week sweetheart,” her mother says cheerfully, waltzing into the kitchen in a navy striped cover-up and flip-flops. She picks up an orange from the fruit bowl and cuts into it, humming to herself. “We’re thinking of doing drinks at the Pederson’s and then dinner up at the club.”
Yes, she is in a mood. The trouble is her awful phone and the awful internet, she thinks to herself. The trouble is that she is in Florida and Henry is spending the week at Teddy Pierson’s parents’ sprawling villa on the east end of Anguilla. The trouble is that she has to stare at the aforementioned awful phone, willing it to ping with an “I miss you,” but instead hearing nothing from him and knowing she won’t. The trouble is that at any minute she could reach down and—with the tap of a button—watch his happy, carefree exploits.
The Pierson villa is legendary: Every year a group of the soccer guys, and select few of the women’s team too, fly down to spend the last week of winter break. The debauchery is much talked about, as is the nine-bedroom house with an infinity pool, cool white marble floors, private chef, and glassed-in ten-person steam shower that overlooks the waters of Sile Bay. Teddy’s three older brothers all played varsity, so the Pierson vacation tradition is now stretching into its eighth year.
She didn’t keep track of who’s going this year, except for Henry and Abbey Stone.
Abbey Stone is a gorgeous junior on the women’s varsity soccer team. She’s tall and lean with absolutely perfect breasts and a delicately upturned nose, eyes so blue you really have no choice but to call them sapphire, and thick lashes. She has long shiny blond hair that falls neatly into a sleek ponytail, even when she’s red-faced and sweaty after practice.
Abbey is a complete tomboy who possesses the striking combination of entirely unfeminine mannerisms—she flips her chair around and straddles it to eat at the dining hall, lives in workout clothes, and high fives with a toothy grin when she sees friends—and stunningly pretty looks. Abbey doesn’t care about her appearance, which makes her attractiveness even more infuriating. Boys love her: She does things like hang out and eat nachos while watching Game of Thrones with the quad of sophomore guys down the hall, and is entirely unself-conscious about reaching for another beer, burping loudly, and being seen unshowered and in a pair of her dad’s old Patagonia baggies.
Henry, like every other boy she knows, almost certainly is both intimidated and a little bit obsessed with Abbey Stone. The men’s soccer team all call her Stoner in the same loud, fraternal tone they use for all the nicknames for the other guys: Stoooooner, they yell, when she comes off the field during a game.
The worst part is that she knows Abbey Stone is not remotely interested in Henry, even if the situation were to present itself to her (if, say, Henry and Abbey were the last two people left in the hot tub one night), but it doesn’t quell the searing red-hot jealousy that courses through her veins.
Abbey is dating a guy named Reid McNamera who graduated four years ago and works for Bain in San Francisco. Reid is tall and muscled; he swam in college and spends his weekends sailing and surfing. From what she can tell, Reid and Abbey spend their weekends together hiking and camping and drinking beautiful cocktails in sleek, hipster-looking restaurants—they’re like a walking Marine Layer ad.
Never before has she been this jealous, or jealous at all. It’s gnawing at her, like a mosquito that keeps buzzing and humming around your ear, biting you just before you can slap it. Henry gets to her like that. Years later, she’ll look back and realize this was one of many signs that they weren’t very good for each other. She’ll meet someone new and she’ll slowly begin to understand that being in love should elicit and tease out the parts of yourself that you’re most proud of, not the other way around. That you’d want to offer the good, compelling, strong, funny bits of yourself up. That you wouldn’t be forever worried that they would leave you, or wake up to find you uninteresting. That your fervor over them wouldn’t translate half the time to fury or drama.
Ordinarily she loves their trips to Florida. Her grandparents own a sprawling Spanish-style house with white stucco walls and a low-pitched, red-tiled roof and a long, narrow swimming pool flanked by palm trees and Southern magnolias.
Her grandfather always takes her to Joan’s on Third before anyone else wakes up to pick up fried egg BLTs and the freshly squeezed strawberry orange juice that tastes like December to her. Sometimes instead of heading for the takeout window, he’ll wink at her and motion at a table, and they’ll sit at a two-top outside under a red umbrella and share the famous crab, lobster, and shrimp omelet while he reads the paper.
When she was little, he’d give her the comic strips, always calling them the funnies—his favorite was Dilbert and hers is Cathy, although years later that preference will strike her as particularly comical for an eight-year-old, once she’s able to grasp the gist of the middle-aged-woman humor. When she gets older, he hands her the arts section instead.
They spend their days at her grandparents’ beach club: Her mother hidden beneath a floppy brimmed sun hat so wide you can barely see her chin. She always brings a novel—she favors the sort of book beloved by women’s book clubs: serious but not heavy, well-written enough to feel proud to display the cover but popular enough that everyone else is also reading it. She reads Colm Toiben and Ta-Nehisi Coates and Sue Monk Kidd. When everyone else on the beach had Michelle Obama’s Becoming and Wild by Cheryl Strayed on their beach towel, she did too.
Her father body surfs with Whit and plays paddle ball and generally prefers not to sit still for too long. Lunch never changes, year after year: peanut butter and fluff sandwiches, bags of Sun-Chips, thermoses of iced Arnold Palmers with sprigs of mint from her grandmother’s garden, oyster crackers tossed in melted butter and ranch seasoning, and Tupperware containers of cold pesto chicken salad.
In the afternoon, everyone jockeys for time in the outdoor shower, and after a languid hour spent getting dressed, they all emerge–dewy and flushed, her father’s wet hair combed back, her mother in a pink printed Lilly Pulitzer dress, smelling like Elizabeth Arden Red Door and Jergens lotion.
They sit on the couches in the living room. The adults drink vodka martinis and everyone else gets a Shirley Temple, except for Whit who always says they’re “too pink” and gets a glass of Schwepp’s ginger ale instead with a maraschino cherry and twist of lemon. Flanking the glass coffee table are two armchairs so stiff you barely leave an indent when you sit, upholstered in a shiny sateen with fat ticking stripes in peacock blue and emerald green. When she was younger and forced to wear tights under her smocked dresses, she’d have to concentrate hard on not sliding off while she clutched her drink and a small glass dish of the warm spiced nuts, which left her fingertips sticky with oil and salt.
Dinner is either at the club or out in town, usually Swan River Seafood where her grandmother orders platters of peel-and-eat shrimp with ramekins of cocktail sauce, and her parents always split the seafood enchiladas. She won’t touch the shrimp, but she and her sister fight over the deviled eggs, which are sprinkled with tiny slivers of candied bacon. Dessert is always the Southern pecan pie, served warm with a scoop of vanilla ice cream—their secret is a ribbon of fudge running through the center of the pie.
During college, she visits her roommate in New York City for a long weekend in October—Sarah grew up in a multicolored dream of a townhouse in Cobble Hill (her parents are both graphic designers with a serious sense of style), and she takes her on a grand tour of her favorite spots, culminating in a late-night stop at Petee’s Pie Co. on the Lower East Side for bowls of pie ice cream, a dessert Sarah talks about with the enthusiasm of a Boston sports fanatic discussing the Red Sox. Sarah orders, brooking no refusal about what to get: a scoop each of salty chocolate chess pie and bourbon brown butter honey pecan pie ice creams.
The combination reminds her so much of the Swan River Seafood pie, and as she scrapes the bowl with her spoon she tells Sarah about Florida: the smell of sweet almond and gardenia that trail through the evening air, the orange tree that droops heavily with fruit outside her bedroom window, the soft weight of her grandparents’ old basset hound, Murphy, who likes to heave himself onto whichever feet dangle down from the kitchen stools.
Years later, she’ll move into her first apartment and get an ice cream maker as a graduation present from her aunt Susannah—she and Susannah have always bonded over a mutual love of cooking shows (Barefoot Contessa; old Julia Child; Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat). Susannah used to send her recipes with her annotations in curly, pert cursive: added 1 teaspoon cinnamon or butter the pan first or best cherry pie I’ve ever had! David likes this with whipped cream.
Along with the ice cream maker, Susannah writes out a recipe for sweet corn ice cream and a recipe for blueberry pound cake, the two paperclipped together along with a note in her comforting handwriting saying, “Serve these together! Perfect summer meal. I love you sweet pea.”
She makes both and loves them, and falls into a months-long fascination with homemade ice cream. She tries eggless Philadelphia-style, both with and without cream cheese, and airy Italian gelato, and French ice cream (which she loves best for its eggy richness). She goes all out: She makes ice cream with roasted strawberries folded into the custard and gelato with rum and lime and demerara sugar that tastes like a creamy, frozen mojito and spends two weeks in a cereal-infused phase: Lucky Charms ice cream and Cinnamon Toast Crunch ice cream and the classic New England Grape-Nut flavor. She makes sorbet from ripe Sun Gold cherry tomatoes (this received deeply mixed reviews from her friends) and burns two saucepans stirring together salted caramel sauce for a batch of butterscotch ripple, and even creates her own recipes, like a triple chocolate flavor with candied cacao nibs and chunks of Ina Garten’s famous outrageous brownies.
She eventually runs out of steam, making less and less as summer turns to early fall, then stopping altogether as autumn gives way to the first truly cold days of winter. She stashes the ice cream maker in the highest cabinet above the oven to make space for a trio of glass jars holding flour, sugar, and the olive oil pumpkin seed granola she eats religiously for breakfast. The ice cream maker is forgotten entirely until she moves into the apartment with Hadley and pulls it triumphantly out of the cardboard box sloppily labeled kitchen stuff during their weekend of unpacking.
“Ice cream! Let’s make ice cream!” she yells down the hall.
“What?” Hadley calls back, stepping out of her room in nothing but a pair of boxers and a bra, a toothbrush clenched in her teeth, her words muffled through the mouthful of toothpaste.
“I said let’s make ice cream! I found my ice cream maker and I think we have everything. Maybe not enough cream? I can run out quickly.”
Hadley turns back to the bathroom; she can hear her spitting into the sink and running the water before she returns.
“I can’t. I mean, you can, and please do because I ate the rest of that pint of Toscanini’s and we’re totally out. But Mack’s taking me to dinner at Celeste and then we’re going to that birthday party at Shojo, which means I’ll probably drink too many of those whiskey cola things we had last time and I’ll really want ice cream.”
She remembers now—Hadley has been talking about this party for weeks, which is for Mack’s best childhood friend who’s visiting from Australia, and she’s deeply fixated on making a good impression. It’s off-putting to witness her anxiety: Hadley is fiercely confident and never cares enough about a relationship to worry what someone else thinks, especially the friend of a boyfriend. She seems jittery, as if the night is a particularly intimidating and very important exam, the sort where you survive on Red Bull and yogurt-covered pretzels in your library carrel for days beforehand.
“Right, yeah, I forgot.”
Hadley had invited her to come—had, in fact, begged her to come and offer moral support. But he’s visiting this weekend and she hasn’t seen him in two weeks. He’s been in Scotland on a fishing trip of all things. His flight from Glasgow lands at Logan at 7 PM and he’ll be exhausted and adorably bleary-eyed and rumpled.
If he’s up for it, she’s going to take him for a burger at Black Lamb (theirs is the most underrated burger in Boston, in her opinion, and always overlooked in favor of Charlie’s and Alden & Harlow, although admittedly the cheddar cheese crisp topping the Alden burger is hard to beat). If he only wants a hot shower and her couch, she’ll order in from Coppa: the roasted artichoke pizza and the celery Caesar salad, because anyone stepping off a transatlantic flight wants both vegetables and comfort food simultaneously.
No part of this plan involved frog-marching him into a crowded bar to make small talk with people neither of them knew, so she declined the invitation, knowing Hadley would abandon her the instant she walked into the party anyway, lighting up the way she always did in a social situation, turning on her shine and forgetting that she’d ever been nervous to begin with. (Sitting on Hadley’s bed now, watching her get dressed, confirms this suspicion: Hadley is wearing a navy silk Azeeza mini dress that plunges halfway to her waist and a pair of four-inch Proenza Schouler strappy sandals that make her legs look twice as long. This is the outfit she wears when she means business: She will not be hanging out in the corner like a wallflower.)
She decides she’ll make the ice cream anyway—she has enough time before he gets here. Hadley is standing in front of the mirror now, applying mascara intently with the tip of her tongue pointed against the corner of her lips. Watching that tiny motion, which is both so specific and so reliably familiar, she’s awash in an overwhelming sense of comfort.
It turns out that they do have cream, and plenty of it. She walks over to the shelf where to keep the cookbooks and reaches up for her worn, spattered copy of Gourmet when she suddenly remembers the Petee’s ice cream night. She could recreate it, she’s pretty sure, as long as she starts with a good vanilla base.
She sets about scanning the kitchen for ingredients. They have a bag of pecans, sent to Hadley from her cousin Charlotte who lives in Charleston, and in the freezer she finds three bars of dark chocolate from L.A. Burdick, one half eaten, and best of all: a disk of pie crust wrapped in plastic. This is left over from a Greek-themed dinner party they’d thrown a month ago. For dessert she’d made a baklava pie with a honey whipped cream, and had doubled the crust recipe for insurance.
Baking is an ideal distraction for her nerves, which aren’t as jangled as Hadley’s in anticipation of tonight, but are on edge nonetheless: His arrival makes her feel lit up and happily nervous. It wasn’t until she met him that she understood properly why people use the phrase butterflies to describe that feeling in your stomach.
She lets the pie dough thaw slightly while she makes the vanilla base for the ice cream. After rolling out the pie dough and popping it into the oven on a sheet pan, she whisks together the pecan filling which is sticky with brown sugar and lashed with a spoonful of brandy.
As the ice cream churns, she pulls the crust from the oven and breaks it into quarter-sized chunks (he once told her that the only acceptable mix-ins for ice cream are sizable ones and she thought that opinion alone was reason enough to love him).
Just before the ice cream is ready, when it’s thick but still soft, she pours in the pecan filling, crumbled pie crust, and a few fistfuls of the chopped dark chocolate bars.
It is quite possibly the perfect pie flavor, and it tastes precisely like that Florida dessert she remembers so well: gooey with sugary ribbons of the brandied pecan mixture and studded with chunks of pie crust and dark chocolate. She scoops it into a plastic container and sticks a piece of masking tape on top with the words chocolate pecan pie ice cream scrawled across it.
She hasn’t yet said out loud that she loves him, and for now, this is the only way she can tell him: By homemade ice cream after an 11-hour flight, by her hand in the thick curl of his hair at the base of his neck, by her visible attention, by her invisible heart, piece by tiny piece by tiny piece.
Chocolate Pecan Pie Ice Cream
Makes one quart
For the ice cream
2 cups heavy cream, very cold
1 cup whole milk, very cold
3/4 cup sugar
3 teaspoons vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
For the mix-ins
1 1/4 cups (150g) all-purpose flour
1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon salt, divided
1/2 cup (113g) unsalted butter, cold
3 tablespoons ice water
1/2 cup chopped pecans, toasted lightly
1/2 cup dark corn syrup
1 tablespoon brandy
2 eggs
1/4 cup (57g or 1/2 stick) unsalted butter
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup chopped dark chocolate
First, make the pie crust. Preheat the oven to 350°F. In a food processor, combine the flour, 2 tablespoons of sugar, 1/2 teaspoon of salt, and the cold butter. Pulse until the butter is in small dime-sized chunks (you can also cut in the butter by hand).
Transfer the dough mixture to a large bowl and drizzle the ice water in, stirring until the dough starts to moisten all over. Using your hands, gently and quickly fold the dough over and over, pressing until it comes together. It's fine to have dry and wet spots. Turn it out onto a lightly floured surface and roll it to 1/4" thickness, folding it over onto itself if it isn't sticking together enough. If it's too sticky, chill the dough for 15 minutes before trying to roll it out.
Transfer the dough (it doesn't matter what shape it is as long as it's the right thickness!) to a parchment-lined baking sheet, prick it all over with a fork, and bake for about 20 minutes or until golden brown.
Remove the crust from the oven and let it cool while you make the ice cream and filling.
In a medium saucepan, whisk together all the remaining mix-in ingredients except for the toasted nuts and chopped chocolate. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until thick and shiny, about 5 minutes. Remove from the heat and stir in the pecans.
Make the ice cream: Whisk together all the ice cream ingredients, then transfer to your ice cream maker and freeze according to the instructions.
While the ice cream is freezing, crumble the baked pie crust up into quarter-sized chunks.
When the ice cream is starting to firm up and harden, and has about 5 minutes left, add the pecan filling, chopped chocolate, and crumbled pie crust. Finish churning the ice cream, then transfer to a freezer-safe container and freeze until firm before scooping and serving.