Better Than Ice Cream
By Missy

SERIES: Better Than Ice Cream
PARTS:1 of 1
RATING: PG (Nothing much)
DISTRIBUTION: To Squeaky, LW, Kai and FG so far; any other archives are welcome to ask, but disclaimers must be included, my email left intact. send a URL, and provide full disclaimers as well as credit me fully. Please inform me if you are going to submit my work to any sort of search engine. Â Please do not submit my work to a search engine that picks out random sets of words and uses them as key words, such as "Google"
Please contact me in order for this story to be placed on an archive, or if you want know of a friend who would enjoy my works, please email me their address and I will mail them the stories, expressly for the purpose of link trading. MiSTiers are welcomed! Please do inform me that you'd like to do the MiSTing, however, and send me a copy of the finished product. I'd also love to archive any MiSTings that are made of my work!
CATEGORY: S&C.
FEEDBACK: PLEASE?!
SPOILLER/SUMMARY: Shirley awaits Carmine's return from a tour.
SPOILLERS FOR: The Mummy's Bride, nothing much.
NOTES: Whee! A futurefic with era-inappropriate lyrics! Song in this story is "Ice Cream" By Sarah McLachlan, which can be heard on "Fumbling Towards Ecstacy" or "Mirrorball".

For FG,
Whom I owed for some nice L/L
****

She hummed to herself, beneath the shrill whistle of the blue enamel coffeepot. Lost in the rapture of the music piping in from a radio, she lazily iced the cinnamon buns, not noticing that they dripped with thick white frosting until she wasted a whole bowl on two buns.

"Oh, poo," She muttered to herself, feeling drugged by happiness nonetheless as she whipped together more icing. Everything needed to be just so, because he was coming home today. This time for good.

Or so she had prayed for months. The nightclub circuit was not what she'd dreamed it would be; what had she dreamed? Herself in an elegant black cocktail dress, clapping coolly in pretty white gloves, one of the crowd as Carmine stood in the midst of a crowded room and serenaded them with standard after standard. Until the house came down around them, leaving Carmine bathed in a wreath of purified triumph.

Who would want to leave a life like that?

To tamp down her insecurity, she sang along with the radio:

Your love
Is better than ice cream
Better than anything else that I've tried
Oh, love is better than ice cream
Everyone here knows how to cry

She frowned as her round belly bumped against the table. How odd it was, that sometimes she could forget about the tiny being inside of her. It hadn't been that way with Jake. Every hour of her pregnancy with her now five-year old (a product of her marriage to Walter) had been painful in some small way. But with Carmine's baby beneath her pale flesh everything progressed smoothly.

Rubbing her hand in uneven circles over her hardening middle, she sighed, "I hope your daddy's train isn't late." Pregnancy made her mistier than usual. Often, she would speak to her unborn as though it were already in her arms and as real as its half-brother. She ruefully guessed that her behavior was what had driven Jake into playing a game of baseball with the neighborhood boys on the same night his stepfather returned.

The buns were at last iced, and cheerfully she plucked each one onto her favorite serving platter.. Through the kitchen's sole window she watched her best friend play a game of touch football game. Bordered by curtains that had been hemmed by her own two hands, Laverne frolic with her husband.

Squealing, her best friend fell to the dirt, a worn leather football clutched tight to her chest. Shirley couldn't help but laugh, even as her mothering instinct kicked into gear. She closed the drapes, just as Lenny's mouth planted itself firmly against his wife's lips.

Shirley placed her plate of buns on the table, pushing back her kitchen chair and keeping an eye on the road. Everything had fallen into place so easily, and now the pieces of her life fit together perfectly, like her house and Laverne's, so alike as to almost match.

Her dream. Shirley was living every waking inch of it as the unsullied joy it was, because she remembered how hard being married to Walter had proved. It was indeed a long way back to the place where she'd started from. They loved too deeply to be torn apart.

She'd be damned if she'd allow herself to go back.

The sound of a car door opening and shutting rang though the mostly-silent cul de sac. Without peering out the window, she stood, straightening her gingham apron over the plain black lawn of her dress. Around her ankles, a collie hopped its way to her side, tail wagging vivaciously.

"Sit, Dave," she urged softly. Carmine's shadow extended itself over her as the sun set. The lock spun in a circle, releasing itself, allowing her to smile.

Her smile was true as her aim, and she whispered to her unborn child, "Daddy's home."

The End











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