#13 · Triskaideka-Froyo
October 8, 2026
Episode 13 — Triskaideka-Froyo
Before dawn, in the dark behind his own cottage, Alfonz stood back and admired his handiwork with the particular pride of a man who has just made an excellent decision.
The frozen yogurt attachment had cost him three long nights of tinkering and a great deal of secretive pleasure — a compact, gleaming unit bolted in beside the soft-serve tank, drawing its power off the truck's own ancient wiring, ready to dispense a rotating cast of tart, cheerful flavors no ice cream truck on the East Side had ever offered. He had already decided what he would call it. Le Frozen Yogurt Supreme. He said it aloud once, to the dark, just to hear how it sounded.
It sounded wonderful. He went to bed a happy frog.
The truck did not share his enthusiasm. When he turned the key at half past six, the old engine gave a long, unconvinced groan and did not catch. He tried again. It coughed, considered its options, and declined a second time.
"We have a big day," Alfonz told it, not unkindly. "Today of all days, please."
It started on the third try, reluctantly, the way an old friend agrees to one more favor. Alfonz did not think much of it. Sixty years is sixty years. Machines have moods.
He would think of it a great deal more, later.
He was, for the first time since the truck had been his, late.
Not dramatically late — eleven minutes, if anyone were counting, which Emma Rodriguez most certainly was, standing at the empty curb outside Riverside Elementary with her arms crossed and an expression of profound betrayal.
"You were supposed to be here at ten," she informed him, the moment the window slid open.
"I know, chérie. The truck was feeling contrary this morning."
"Trucks don't feel things."
"This one," Alfonz said, "has opinions." He built her cone — two scoops of mint chip, and in his rush the wobble came out crooked, tilting hard to the left before he caught it. Emma studied it with deep suspicion.
"That's not how you do it."
"No," Alfonz agreed. "It is not."
The trouble compounded itself before he'd even finished his second stop. His usual curb by the ball field — a wide, shaded strip he'd parked on every clear afternoon for years — had sprouted an orange-vested crew and a cherry-picker replacing a streetlamp, and no amount of patient idling changed their minds about sharing it. He ended up a full block over, wedged against the low fence at the edge of the Little League diamond, in a spot he had never once used and did not like the sightlines of.
He was still deciding what he thought of the new spot when something struck his side mirror with a sound like a small, final punctuation mark, and the glass he had tied his bow tie in every morning for as long as he could remember went from a mirror to a spiderweb.
The baseball rolled to a stop against his front tire. Someone had written a fat, cheerful 13 on it in marker — a jersey number, probably, some enthusiastic ballplayer's lucky digit — and Alfonz picked it up and looked at the ruined mirror and had, for one uncharitable moment, an extremely unkind thought about the number thirteen.
He tied the bow tie by feel after that, using the chrome trim of the freezer hatch as a dim and unhelpful substitute, and got it only a little bit crooked, which under the circumstances he considered a personal triumph.
Mrs. Fenwick found him at his new spot an hour later, and her face did the thing it did when she had already decided something was terribly wrong.
"Mr. Alfonz! You're all the way over here! And what," she said, peering past him at the gleaming new attachment beside the soft-serve tank, "is that?"
"Frozen yogurt, Mrs. Fenwick. A small experiment."
"It doesn't look inspected."
"It is very new."
"Mm." She had the look of a woman already composing the story she would tell next. "You're late, you're in a strange spot, your mirror's smashed, and you've got some unlicensed contraption bolted to the side of your truck. I don't like it. I'm going to mention it to Officer Reyes, just so somebody official knows where to look if something happens to you."
"Nothing is going to happen to me, Mrs. Fenwick."
"That," she said, already walking away, "is exactly what a man in trouble would say."
He did not think much of this either, at the time. He had, by then, other problems.
The freezer had been humming wrong since eight o'clock — a low, laboring note under the usual cheerful whir — and by eleven it had progressed from a note to a genuine complaint. Alfonz cracked the service panel and found the little dial reading a full ten degrees warmer than it should have, the needle sagging as though it, too, had had a long morning.
He suspected, correctly, exactly what was to blame. Le Frozen Yogurt Supreme drew more power than he'd accounted for, and the truck's tired old wiring was rationing what was left between the two units like an overworked parent with too few cookies to go around.
He spent the next several hours running a small, dignified war against physics. He bought a bag of ice from the gas station on the corner and packed it around the vanilla. He called in a favor from the florist two doors down for a block of dry ice she kept for her roses and did not entirely want to give up. He rearranged, consolidated, and prayed over his inventory with the seriousness of a man moving pieces on a chessboard, and by early afternoon he had bought himself, by his own estimate, perhaps two more hours before everything soft in that truck surrendered to the day.
At half past one the dial read exactly 13°F, one last small joke at his expense, and he decided not to look at it again.
Emma reappeared at two, holding her jaw with one hand and, in the other, a small object wrapped with great ceremony in a paper napkin.
"Mr. Alfonz." Her voice had the particular tremor of someone who wanted very much to be brave about something. "It came out."
He set down the ice pick he had, until that moment, been using on the florist's dry ice, and gave her his full and undivided attention, because some emergencies outrank a freezer.
"May I see?"
She unwrapped the napkin with the solemnity of a diplomat presenting credentials. A small white tooth sat in the center of it, faintly pink at the root.
"It doesn't hurt," she reported, "but it feels very strange. There's a hole."
"There will always be a hole for a little while," Alfonz said gravely, "and then something better grows in to fill it. This is true of teeth, and I am reliably informed it is true of almost everything else as well." He found her a small paper cup to keep it in, ceremonially, and gave her a scoop of butter pecan on the house, "for bravery," and watched some of the fear go out of her shoulders and something like pride come in behind it.
He had, once, defused a live nuclear device with eleven minutes on the clock and both hands steady. He noted, with some interest, that a gap-toothed eight-year-old holding a napkin had very nearly undone him faster.
By four o'clock the day had gathered itself for one final, comprehensive effort.
The freezer chose that hour to die completely, with a long electrical sigh and no drama at all, precisely as a county car pulled up at the curb and a tired-looking man in a short-sleeved shirt got out holding a clipboard.
"Afternoon," he said. "Health Department. Got a call about an uninspected refrigeration modification." He glanced at his paperwork. "Inspection Form Number 13, if you're curious. Mind if I take a look?"
"Not at all," Alfonz said, with the calm of a man who has, in fact, run out of anything left to lose. "Though I should warn you, it is currently keeping nothing cold whatsoever, which may save us both some time."
Behind the inspector's shoulder, Mrs. Fenwick had already arrived to narrate. "I told him it looked unlicensed," she informed the inspector, and several interested passersby, and a dog. "I said to Officer Reyes, I said, something's not right over there —"
"Mr. Alfonz?" Emma had returned, tooth-cup in hand, and inserted herself directly between the inspector's clipboard and Alfonz's knee. "Can I have a cone? A regular one. Not a weird yogurt one."
For one full second, Alfonz stood at the exact center of it — a dead freezer, an inspector with a form and a stopwatch expression, Mrs. Fenwick's narration rising in volume and confidence, and a small determined girl demanding dessert as though none of the rest of it were happening at all — and felt, absurdly, something close to peace. There was, he reflected, nowhere left for the day to escalate to. It had already done its worst.
So he did the only sensible thing, which was to tell the whole truth.
"It's a frozen yogurt machine," he told the inspector, crouching to pull the unit's paperwork from the glove box while Emma waited with theatrical patience. "Installed three nights ago by an enthusiastic amateur — myself — who did not consult an electrician, an inspector, or, frankly, common sense. It has been drawing power meant for the freezer all day, which is why the freezer in question is currently the same temperature as the sidewalk, and why my mirror is broken, and why I am parked somewhere I have never parked before, and why that good woman there believes I am running some manner of criminal enterprise out of an ice cream truck."
The inspector looked at him for a long moment, then at the sagging vanilla, then at the small hopeful girl with a tooth in a cup, then back at Alfonz.
"That," he said, "is the most honest answer I've gotten all week." He made a note, unhooked the froyo unit's power line with the practiced ease of a man who has unhooked a great many bad ideas, and handed Alfonz a slip of paper. "Get it inspected properly before you run it again. Today, you're clear. For what it's worth, most guys in your position spend twenty minutes lying to me first."
"I did not have twenty minutes to spare," Alfonz said. "I had already used them all elsewhere."
Mrs. Fenwick, denied her scandal, made a small disappointed noise and departed to find someone else's afternoon to worry about. Emma got her cone — a regular one, two ordinary scoops, wobble restored to its usual working order now that both his hands were finally, gratefully, his own again.
He unbolted Le Frozen Yogurt Supreme himself, at dusk, in the quiet of his own driveway, and set it carefully on a shelf in the garage next to a box labeled, in his own hand from some earlier optimistic season, WAFFLE CONE EXPERIMENT — DO NOT REPEAT.
"Another day," he told it, without much rancor. It had, after all, only wanted to make people happy. So had he. The day had simply disagreed with both of them at once.
He counted the till before he went in, mostly out of habit, and stood for a moment in the dark garage looking at the total.
Thirteen dollars and thirteen cents.
Alfonz laughed — a real one, the first of the day — and put the drawer away, and thought that a man who had spent the morning fighting a dead freezer, a broken mirror, an inspector, and a rumor, and had ended it laughing in his own garage over a number, had probably come out of the day rather better than he had any right to.
He had once talked a bomb down with eleven seconds left on the clock. He had never once, in eleven years, wanted quite so badly to talk a Tuesday down.
Tomorrow, he suspected, would simply have to be an ordinary one. He thought, on the whole, he had earned it.
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