FINISHING

Serving ice cream to sunburned young families was the first job that Tyson Millner lost to a machine. It was shaped like a fat, upright lobster, and had five arms. It was there one morning behind the counter, illuminated by a special track light, when he showed up for his shift. Mrs. Huggard, his boss, the shop’s owner, called it “Lenny” after a character in a book she loved. It had some remarkable abilities. It could guess people’s orders before they placed them based on what they’d ordered in the past and was programmed to tease them with corny quips. If a girl liked pecans on her sundaes, it might say, retrieving her name from its perfect memory, “You’re nuts for nuts, Luanne!” Or, if she wanted bananas, “You’ve gone bananas!” These wisecracks never failed to bring on squeals, even from children who’d heard them many times. Also thrilling to them was Lenny’s physical manner, which was that of an overburdened juggler continually on the verge of flubbing up. Simulating rising panic, its articulated, claw-tipped arms would speed up crazily, threatening disaster, as they dispensed candy sprinkles and caramel sauce, blended milk shakes and built top-heavy cones that it pretended were too tall to hold and yet, despite much mock bobbling, never dropped.

            Tyson, too, found Lenny charming—at first. They were partners, the way he saw it, a comic duo. He helped with tasks that Lenny couldn’t manage, such as clearing clogged syrup spouts, handling paper money (Lenny could only process cards), and topping off sundaes with a glossy cherry perched on a frilly squirt of canned whipped cream. This cherry business, with Tyson at the ready, suspending the piece of fruit above the bowl as fake-fumbling Lenny assembled the confection, grew into their most popular routine. Another act that delighted the little ones consisted of Tyson standing at Lenny’s “shoulder,” watching his movements and wielding a small wrench as though prepared to swoop in and readjust him, or maybe deactivate him, should he screw up. But Lenny never screwed up. In fact, he kept improving, endowed by his manufacturer with the ability to observe and refine his own behavior. Someday he might even learn to place a cherry, dimpling it into the cream so it stayed put.

            Within a few weeks of Lenny’s installation, traffic at the shop had nearly doubled, and Tyson decided to ask a