The garage door wheels squeal in their tracks as one panel after another rounds the edge.  Light pours through the growing gap.  Juice sloshes inside the Ziploc bag I slap onto the barbecue tray.  I lift the opposite tray, lugging the monster towards the light.  My head pivots from the barbecue to the drive outside, and the girl standing three feet away on the other side.  My heart flips, calming with recognition.  Just the neighbor girl.  Her eyes are wide, her face long and serious.

“The ice cream man fell out of his van,” she blurts.  “His head hit the road and something yellow came out.”

My brows draw together.  I pat my left pocket.  My phone is still there.  I hear sirens.  Are they headed here?

“Has anyone called…?”

Her eyes relax.  “Yeah, my dad’s with him.”

I relax too, relieved that a man’s life isn’t dependent on my lack of emergency medicine.  “Is he moving?”

“I don’t know,” she says with a nonchalant turn down the drive, no doubt in search of another ignorant ear to fill.

I’d heard the ice cream truck music earlier,  the plinkety, plunk of children’s tunes.  Even groaned, hoping Cadence wouldn’t hear it.  How long ago had that been?  Twenty minutes?  A half hour?  I follow the direction of the street’s staring eyes.  The van is two houses up.  The man is on his back, in the road.  A neighbor kneels on the far side of him.

I join a huddle of my neighbors, their mouths filling in some of the holes of the story.  Seizure is a theory.  Heart attack another.

I can’t remember his face, but the light shining through his halo of gray hair reminds me.

My finger fans over the pictures on the side of the ice cream van.

“Okay, Cadence, pick one.”

She ponders over the pictures, her eyes fixing on one in a snow cone cup.

“That one.”

I glance at the coins in my palm.  They’re all there.  “Can we get the ‘Two Ball Screw Ball?’”

The ice cream man has gray hair, punctuated with persistent strands of his youth.  His nose is prominent, his frame scrawny.

“What a name, huh?”  He hands me the blue paper cone, heavy with its frozen reward.

I smile with half my mouth.  “Yeah.”

I pour the change into his hand, uttering a thank you, and making a quick retreat.

His head is moving, his right hand grabbing just below his left shoulder.  The neighbor presses him gently down.  The sirens are near.  An ambulance turns onto the street.  Those who were in their houses earlier, have filtered onto the street, like me.  I feel guilty for staring, for turning the man who sells our children ice cream into a spectacle.  But we have to know that the ice cream van won’t stay here, its door gaping open where the children play, and no one to sell them ice cream.

The paramedics take over for my neighbor.  I turn away, back to the abandoned barbecue, and then inside with tonight’s dinner.  The meal finished, a faint strain of Pop Goes the Weasel brings me back outside.  I walk to the end of the driveway.  The street is empty.  The van is gone.