The Guy Not Taken Read Online Free PDF

was falling apart, and all the good intentions and State of Israel bonds in the world would not be enough to save it.
    Nicki froze the frame and snatched the bowl of popcorn away from Milo’s questing nose.
    “Fake,” she said, holding the bowl against the scant curve of her hip. “Fake, fake, fake.”
    •   •   •
    It wasn’t the fake names and bad attitude that eventually spelled the end of Nicki’s tenure at Friendly’s. It was the satanic coneheads.
    Nicki never liked the coneheads to begin with. “They’re very hard to make,” she complained of the children’s dessert made of a scoop of ice cream with whipped cream and an inverted cone on top. She’d describe to anyone who would listen how painstakingly she had to squirt the whipped cream so that it looked like hair, and dig through the bin until she found two matching M&M’s to serve as eyes, and how gently the cone had to be placed on top of the whole affair to simulate a witch’s hat. “My cones always slip,” she fretted, “so they look like sloppy witches. Or else I put too much hot fudge at the bottom and it winds up looking like its face is melting.”
    But the kids of the Farmington Valley loved coneheads, so Nicki was compelled to make them by the dozen. Or at least, the kids loved coneheads until the last two weeks of August 1988.
    It started innocently enough. Temporarily out of hot fudge, Nicki decided to improvise and place the head of the conehead in a pool of cherry sauce.
    “And what shall I say this . . . item is?” asked the waitress, who was in her thirties with two kids and not much patience for the summertime help.
    Nicki thought fast on her feet. “Conehead with severed neck,” she proposed. “Maybe you could call it a be-head?”
    The waitress shrugged, ambled off to the table, and plunked the conehead down in front of a five-year-old dining with his mother.
    The mother stared at the dessert, then at the waitress. “Miss,” she said, “this dessert doesn’t look the way it did in the picture.”
    “It’s bleeding !” her son said.
    “Oh, it is not,” said the mother sharply. As if to prove the conehead’s innocence, she dug in with her long silver spoon and took a big bite of vanilla ice cream and cherry sauce. “Tastes fine!” she proclaimed with a cheerful smile. The boy began to cry . . . perhaps because, unbeknownst to both waitress and mother, Nicki had picked up the large, lethal-looking knife used to slice bananas and was capering behind the counter with a crazed grin. No one could see her but my mother and Jon and me, seated at our customary booth, and the little boy with the be-head, whose wails pierced the restaurant.
    “Cut that out,” I mouthed. Nicki shrugged and put the knife down.
    “Honey, what’s wrong?” demanded the exasperated mother.
    “Really, it’s only cherry sauce,” the waitress insisted.
    The little boy was unconvinced. “Blood!” he yelled.
    “Fine!” said his mother. “No dessert, then.”
    This suited the little customer just fine. He bolted from the booth and dashed toward the door, leaving a melting conehead and an inspired Nicki behind him.
    •   •   •
    For the two weeks that they lasted, Nicki Krystal’s creative coneheads became the talk of the town. Nicki styled herself the artiste of ice cream and, with coneheads as her canvas and a thirty-seven-flavor palette, she was wildly inventive. The specials, which she’d display on hand-lettered cardboard signs affixed to the “Flavors of the Day” list, were increasingly gruesome, which made them, of course, tremendously popular among the town’s teenagers.
    There was the Asphyxiated Conehead, made with blueberryice cream; and the Apoplectic Conehead, made with strawberry ice cream; and the Conehead with a Skin Condition, made with peppermint stick. A Conehead with Lice had white shots in its whipped-cream hair. The Bloody Conehead featured strawberry ripple ice cream and strawberry sauce; the Drooling