My Daughter Kept Getting Free Ice Cream From the Same Truck — Then the Driver Gave Her a Note and Told Her, "Make Sure Your Mom Reads This"
My Daughter Kept Getting Free Ice Cream From the Same Truck — Then the Driver Gave Her a Note and Told Her, "Make Sure Your Mom Reads This"
For about two weeks in June, my nine-year-old kept coming back into the house with ice cream she had not paid for.
We live in Ellsworth Green, which is about as ordinary a place as exists. The truck comes through three or four evenings a week in the summer and parks at the top of Delford Avenue for twenty minutes.
The second Winnie hears that music she is at the front door with her hand out asking for three dollars.
One evening in the middle of June she came back in with a strawberry shortcake bar.
I said, "I thought you'd run out of allowance."
"I did."
"So how have you got that?"
"The man gave it to me."
I didn't think about it for more than four seconds. There are always eight or nine kids around that truck and I assumed he'd had a spare, or she'd been polite, or something.
Then it happened again on the Thursday.
And on the Saturday.
By the fourth time I actually stopped and asked her why this man kept giving her free ice cream.
And Winnie shrugged the way nine-year-olds do, and said:
"He says strawberry was your favourite too."
I put down what I was holding.
"My favourite?"
"He said you always got that one."
Strawberry shortcake bars were my favourite. When I was a kid, exactly that one, and I have not eaten one since I was probably twenty.
But Winnie eats them constantly and I have absolutely told her that I used to as well, so I thought — fine, she's mentioned it.
I said, "Did you tell him my name?"
"No."
"Did you tell him I used to have those?"
"No."
That sat wrong with me for the rest of the evening.
So on the Tuesday, when I heard the music, I went out with her.
He was in his early sixties. Grey hair under a baseball cap, glasses, a polo shirt with the company logo on it.
An entirely unremarkable older man.
Winnie went straight up to the window and he said, "Hey, kiddo" before she'd said anything.
And then he saw me standing about eight feet behind her.
And he stopped.
Not dramatically. He didn't drop anything or go white. He just looked at me for about four seconds too long, with an expression I have seen on people in supermarkets when they are trying to work out where they know you from.
Then he said, "You're Winnie's mum?"
"Yes."
He nodded a few times. Slowly.
And then he said my first name.
"Fay?"
I had not told him my name. Winnie says she never told him and I believe her, and there is a reason I believe her that I will get to.
I said, "Do I know you?"
And he gave a small awkward laugh and said:
"Probably not anymore."
That annoyed me more than anything else that had happened.
I said, "What does that mean?"
And Gil Trevane — I did not know his name yet, but that's who it was — put both hands on the counter of that serving window and said:
"I'm going to write it down. I'm not doing this at a window with a queue behind her. Is that all right?"
And then he served the next four children and I stood there on the pavement not knowing what to do with my face, and he shut the hatch and drove off.
He came back on the Thursday.
He did not sell Winnie anything. He handed her a white envelope, folded once, with FAY written on the front, and he said — and Winnie repeated it to me about eleven times that night because she knew it was important —
"Make sure your mum reads this. All of it. And I won't be back on this street."
Then he drove off, and that truck has not been up Delford Avenue since.
I read it standing at my kitchen counter at about eight in the evening on Thursday the ninth of July.
It is two pages, typed, printed, with a handwritten line at the bottom.
I am not going to reproduce all of it, but I'll give you the shape.
The first paragraph is his name and one sentence: I was married to your mother from April 1994 until August 1998. You were five when we got married and nine when it ended. You called me Gil.
The second paragraph is an apology, and it is the only part I want to quote directly, because it is the reason I did anything he asked afterward:
I gave your daughter free ice cream for two weeks and I knew while I was doing it that it was the wrong thing to do. There is no version of a man in a truck giving free ice cream to a child that is all right, and I knew exactly how it would look to you, and I did it anyway because I could not work out what else to do. You were right to come out. If you want to make a complaint I have written my supervisor's name and number below.
The third paragraph explained how it started.
He has driven that route for four summers. He bought the truck and the round in 2021 when he retired from a plant in Corliss. He had absolutely no idea I lived here, and I believe that, and I'll explain why in a minute.
Winnie has been coming to that window since she was six.
And in the second week of June this year, she came up and asked for a strawberry shortcake bar and said:
"That's not an ice cream, that's a strawberry with a coat on."
I say that.
I say it constantly. I have said it to that child probably three hundred times since she was four.
And I have never once, in my entire adult life, known where it came from.
It is one of those things that is just in you. I assumed it was my mother, or something off the television in about 1995.
It was Gil.
He made it up in the summer of 1996, at a kitchen table, to a seven-year-old who would not eat anything, and he said it every time he handed me one for two years.
He heard a nine-year-old girl say it out of a serving window in June of 2026 and he says he had to sit down in the truck for a minute.
The fourth paragraph is why he didn't just say something.
He wrote: I did not know how to walk up to a woman's door and say that I used to be married to her mother. I have thought about how that sentence sounds for two weeks.
And then, at the bottom, in biro, in handwriting I did not recognise and now do:
Ask your mother about the box at your gran's.
My mother is Adele. She is sixty-four and she lives forty minutes away and we speak about twice a week.
She married Gil Trevane on the second of April, 1994. I was four, nearly five.
They divorced in the autumn of 1998. I was nine.
I remember him. That is the thing that has been hardest to explain to people.
I have never not remembered him. I have a set of ordinary memories with a man in them — a red car, a fishing trip where nothing was caught, being carried up a staircase, a particular way of doing bike stabilisers.
What I did not have was his face or his name in any usable form. I remembered "Gil" the way you remember a teacher from Year 2. He was a person who was there and then wasn't.
And what I was told, when I asked — twice, at nine and at about thirteen — was that he'd moved on and didn't keep in touch.
That is the exact phrase. He moved on, love. He didn't keep in touch.
I went to my mother's on Saturday the eleventh of July.
I did not ring first. I want to say honestly that this was not a strategy, it was that I could not get through a phone call.
I put the note on her kitchen table and I said, "Do you know what a box at Gran's means?"
And my mother sat down.
Not slowly. She sort of arrived in the chair.
And she said, "Oh, Fay."
The box came out of my grandmother Perse's house when she died in 2019 and it has been in my mother's loft since the eleventh of November of that year.
It is a shoebox with a rubber band round it.
There are nineteen envelopes in it.
All of them addressed to me, at my grandmother's address on Vennel Street, in the same handwriting as the line at the bottom of that note.
Nineteen. Postmarked between April of 1999 and June of 2007.
Every one of my birthdays from ten to eighteen, and a Christmas card most years.
Not one of them has been opened.
My grandmother took them in. She was not a cruel woman and I want to be very careful about her because she is dead and she was the best adult in my childhood by a distance.
What she did, every time, was give them to my mother.
And my mother put them in a drawer, and then a shoebox, and never once posted a single one back and never once told me.
I have asked her why four times now, over five months, and I have got four slightly different versions, and I think all four are partly true.
Here is the version I have settled on, which she has not disputed.
Gil drank.
Not the whole marriage. The last eighteen months or so.
There were two incidents. The second one, in February of 1998, was that he collected me from a swimming lesson and drove me home, and my mother worked out afterward that he should not have been driving.
Nothing happened. I have no memory of the journey at all.
She threw him out in the August and she moved us two hundred miles in the September, and every single one of those decisions was, in 1998, correct, and I have told her that.
What is not correct is 1999. Or 2000, or 2003, or 2007.
Because the other thing in that shoebox is two sheets of court paper, which my grandmother had also taken in, and which my mother also kept.
In March of 1999 Gil applied to a court for contact with me. He was not my legal father. He had never adopted me — they had talked about it in 1996 and never done it, for reasons that are boring and to do with money.
The application was refused in June of 1999.
He applied again in 2000 and it was refused again, and the second refusal has a line in it that I have read more times than is healthy, which notes that the applicant has attended and has provided evidence of engagement with an alcohol treatment programme.
He got sober on the eleventh of March, 1999.
That date is in the papers, and it is also — I found out in September — written in the first card in that box, the one for my tenth birthday, which I opened on the fourteenth of September this year.
He wrote it eleven weeks after he stopped drinking, to a ten-year-old, and he told her the truth about why he wasn't there, in language a ten-year-old could hold.
My mother read that card for the first time in September, sitting in my kitchen, twenty-six years after it arrived.
And what she said, and I am putting it in because she has asked me to, was:
"I thought if I opened one I'd have to do something about all of them."
I met him on the ninth of August.
A café in Corliss, on my terms, on my own, at eleven in the morning on a Sunday.
He was already there when I arrived and he'd got a table by the window because he said afterward that he wanted me to be able to see out.
He is sixty-two. He worked at the plant on Halloway Lane for twenty-six years. He is divorced again, from somebody else, since 2013. He has no children.
The first thing he said, before hello, was: "You don't owe me anything and you can leave whenever you want and I won't contact you."
We were there for two hours and forty minutes.
I asked him about the free ice cream, because I had to.
And he did not make excuses for it. He said he knew within about four days that he should have written the note straight away, and that he kept not doing it, and that giving her a strawberry shortcake bar was — his words — "the only way I could stay in it without saying anything."
He said, "I was frightened of your face when you found out. So I did the cowardly version for two weeks."
He also told me that he'd rung his supervisor on the twenty-eighth of June, before he ever gave me that note, and asked to have Ellsworth Green taken off his round, and that he'd told him exactly why. His supervisor is a man called Ovid Faraz and I have spoken to him and it is all true and it is on record.
He changed the route before he handed my daughter that envelope, so that whatever I decided, he was already gone.
That is the single thing that convinced me he was safe. Not the note. That.
I asked him whether he'd ever looked for me.
And he said, "I stopped in 2007."
He wrote the eighteenth-birthday card, in June of 2007, and he says that in that one he told me — the me who was turning eighteen — that this was the last one, and that if I ever wanted to find him he'd be findable, and that if I didn't, he understood.
I have not opened that one. It's the last one in the box and I'm keeping it for a while.
Then he said the thing that undid me, and it was not about me at all.
He said he had not recognised me on that pavement.
He'd said my name because Winnie, at some point in those two weeks, had said "my mum's called Fay" — which she absolutely did and which she now remembers doing, and which is the reason I believe her about not telling him anything else.
He said: "I've thought about you for twenty-six years and I stood four feet away from you and I didn't know your face."
And then he said, "You've got your gran's chin," and had to stop talking for a bit.
Here's where we are, seven months on.
I see him about once a month. Coffee, mostly. Once at a garden centre, which was his idea and which was as awkward as it sounds.
Winnie has met him twice, both times with me there, both times after I talked to her about it properly and after she asked. She calls him Gil.
She has been told the truth in a nine-year-old's version: that he was married to her grandmother a long time ago, that he looked after me when I was little, and that grown-ups sometimes lose each other.
She has also been told, clearly, that a person in a truck giving her free things was not right, and that she did nothing wrong, and that if it ever happens again she comes and gets me. He was in the room for that and he said, "She's right," which I did not ask him to do.
My mother and I have had the worst six months of our relationship in thirty-seven years.
We are not estranged. I still ring her. But there is a version of us that ended on the eleventh of July and I don't think it comes back.
She has apologised. Properly, in writing, twice.
The thing I cannot get past is not 1998. It is that in 2013, when I got married, she sat in a chapel and knew there was a man who had applied to a court twice to be allowed to see me, and said nothing.
And in 2017 when Winnie was born. And in 2019 when she carried a shoebox down out of her own mother's house and put it in her loft rather than in a bin, which tells you she knew exactly what it was.
She kept them. That's the part. She kept them for twenty-six years, which means some part of her always knew they were mine.
I have opened four of the nineteen.
Tenth birthday. Eleventh. Christmas 1999. And the one from 2003, which I opened in November on a bad night and probably shouldn't have.
They are not dramatic. That's what nobody expects.
They are ordinary cards, from a man who did not know anything about the child he was writing to, saying ordinary things, getting more careful every year.
By 2003 he had stopped asking questions in them, because there was never going to be an answer, and he'd started just telling me small facts about himself. What he was doing. A dog he'd got.
The eleventh birthday one has a joke in it about a strawberry with a coat on.
That's the one I keep out.
I've thought a lot about the arithmetic of that sentence.
He invented it in 1996 for a seven-year-old who wouldn't eat.
I have said it to my daughter three hundred times since 2021 without ever knowing where I got it.
She said it out of a serving window in June and a sixty-two-year-old man in a truck had to sit down.
It travelled thirty years and two generations through a person who did not know she was carrying it, and it came out of a nine-year-old's mouth at the exact moment it could do something.
None of it was on purpose. That's what gets me.
May you like
He wasn't looking for me. I wasn't looking for him. My mother had a shoebox in a loft that she was never going to open.
And a kid wanted an ice cream.
