ice cream sandwiches

Coffee ice cream and round chocolate wafers. Mine have chocolate chips mashed into the ice cream and are messily shaped completely by hand. Which makes them look, truthfully, as though someone has yakked them up into the Pyrex container that rests on the freezer's lowest shelf, below bags of frozen corn, bread, and blueberries. Alceste neatly scoops out a hemisphere of ice cream, centers it exactly on the bottom cookie, pushes on the top cookie, and then uses a knife to trim off all the ice cream that squooshes out the sides. Alceste's go into a Ziploc bag on the top shelf.

A day later, the Pyrex is in the sink, filled with a slurry of ice cream and water. The Ziploc is still in the freezer, filled with orderly-looking frozen treats. Did you like the ice cream cookies? we ask Alceste's brother. He looks puzzled. The container is in the sink; did you eat all the cookies?

Were those on the bottom shelf? he responds, looking only slightly guilty. I was cleaning out the freezer. Were they on the bottom shelf?

Mind you, the evidence is right there in the sink.

I thought those were weeks old, he answers when pressed. I thought they'd gone bad.

I sit at the counter, trying to remember how to pout without looking like a ninny.

What are the chances, he says to Alceste, that I should clean out the freezer at the same time you've actually made something?