Gift

A baby strapped to my chest, a basement I wasn't supposed to be in, and an irate landlord who had every right to be angry—this is the story of the worst Father's Day gift I ever tried to give...

For the last eight years, Nick has celebrated Father’s Day in the peak of our summer season as a father of three. If you know him, you know that he is pretty quiet. He does not readily signal his likes and dislikes. If you ask him what he wants for his birthday or Christmas, the answer is usually a shrug. This usually results in me giving him some food experience and my mother sending him a year’s worth of Costco socks, undershirts, and pants. Father’s Day is no different — what to get Nick, a man who expresses his desires very little, results in an all-you-can-eat Thai BBQ and hotpot feast.

Image: Father’s Day 2026—Everyone is excited about the feast. Ila was missing because of a track meet.

We went to one of my restaurant friends’ places in Queens; it’s called Boon De Moo Ka Ta. There, we devoured lots of grilled meats and veggies. Historically, my Father’s Day present to Nick has been the attempt to give him a day off work. He, among other things, has always been responsible for picking up supplies (food and dry goods), organizing them in our commissary, and then disbursing them to the stores. Generally, this happens on Sunday morning. In recent years, the person in our delivery driver role has taken on these responsibilities, but we did not start that way.

I remember the first Father’s Day he spent as a father of three, in 2018. I tried to give him the gift of peace, relaxation, and doing nothing. Nico was around six months old. You should already know by this fact alone that my intention did not pan out as planned. There was only one store, so purchasing items and disbursing them to other locations wasn’t a thing yet. We hadn’t figured out the pars for our dry goods either; pars are the minimums of items that you need in stock at any given time. And yes, I realize we had been in business about a year, so not having these things in place might sound strange. The first store is 90 feet from our apartment, so our go-to system was to react instead of having a proactive plan for inventory. The day-to-day application was “call Nick if you’re out of something.”

Image: Father’s Day 2019. We were in our minivan I’m sure running store errands but I can’t remember what they were.

On this particular Father’s Day in 2018, which has historically been one of our busiest days of the year, I decided to give Nick a break by working at the store. Before he was schlepping things between stores, he clocked many hours behind the counter while I steadied the homefront. So off I went with Nico in his Ergo baby carrier, ringing up customers on this busy day. The store was hot. This was the only year we did not have scaffolding in front of the store, so the sun microwaved every square inch of our 500-square-foot space. We had to draw the gates down because when we planned out the store, we did not account for the sun that would heat it during the spring and summer. I was even hotter because I had a nursing toddler dangling from me over the course of an eight-hour shift.

Image: Father’s Day 2021. The text speaks for itself. 🫠

At some point during my time at the store, the scoopers-on-duty shared that they needed spoons and napkins. At this stage in the business, we were really starved for storage (we kind of still are, but in a different way). Nick had made a deal with who we thought was the owner of a building across the street to rent space in his basement, since the store had no additional storage beyond what we were able to create behind the counter. All of the space that you see when you walk in is all there is.

When we first opened, a lot of supplies — boxes of ice cream cups, spoons, and bottles of sprinkles — lived inside one of the rooms in our apartment. Eventually, we moved them to the basement common space of the bakery next door. When the condo owners of that building complained about strangers walking in and out of their basement, the bakery owner asked us to leave. We desperately asked everyone on Lenox Ave with access to property if we could store our metro shelves in their space. Nick asked a man who presented himself as the owner of a building across the street whether he had any available space. Apparently, he did. He said he would rent what he had to us for a couple of hundred bucks a month. So we moved our metro shelving and boxes there.

Image: Father’s Day 2022 — We were all at the store on Broadway trying to collect and distribute the items for each store.

She demanded we remove our things immediately. My Father’s Day gift was over at this point. I called Nick in a panic. He was the one who had made the deal with the owner-turned-super. When he came downstairs from the apartment, I introduced him and he explained the arrangement he had made. She clarified that we had all been hustled and demanded that we promptly remove our things.

Off I went to fetch the items the scoopers requested. I crossed Lenox Avenue with Nico still connected to me, baby legs and feet swaying back and forth with my stride, and entered the garden level of a four-floor walkup to then descend into its basement to grab the cups and napkins.

Since it was Father’s Day and Harlem knows how to celebrate, residents of that building were hanging outside having a good time. I greeted them with a smile and a nod before entering the building and they returned the greeting. With my first entrance into the building, they thought I was visiting someone. I walked out shortly after with items in a bag. They didn’t think much of this until I returned not too long after and left the building almost as soon as I walked in, with new items in my bag.

Image: Father’s Day 2024—We were through StuyTown to help train a team member on how to navigate the ice cream truck there, as this was our first season serving that community.

My second visit sounded an alarm. Who was this stranger walking in and out of the building? They could see that I kept coming back to the store. Maybe it was a couple of hours later that an irate woman walked in and demanded to speak to someone. She was the real owner of the building and had no idea we were storing our supplies in her basement. It turned out that the man who presented himself as the owner was the super, and he was taking advantage of this woman who really owned the property. Her sister and father had just died. Her father had owned many properties in Harlem and left them to her to manage. Through her grief, she did not yet have a handle on everything.

We were both spiraling. I remember Nick feeling especially defeated — and on his day of rest, no less. As we stood on the corner of Lenox Ave and 119th St in front of the bodega, I gave us both a pep talk: if starting a business were easy, everyone would do it. We just had to keep going, even though we didn’t know how this business was going to work without access to more storage in our foreseeable future. We went back to her to beg her to continue the arrangement we had made with the super. Of course she refused, but she let us keep our things there for the night as long as we moved out the next day.

We did. And later we learned her story — her father and sister’s passing, and the super who was clearly taking advantage of her situation. I learned the backstory because one of her childhood friends turned out to be one of our first delivery drivers. When he introduced us, he shared that she owned a building across the street from the Lenox Ave store, and I connected the dots. We ended up laughing about that day when we met a few years later, but it really wasn’t funny when it was happening. We were just trying to make things work as we operated a business we had no idea how to run.

Image:Father’s Day 2025—We went to dinner with Nick’s family that evening. I’m pretty sure he worked earlier in the day.

Today, we have gotten much better at running the business, but we’re still learning — every day. We’ve solved our storage needs from eight years ago, but we have new storage needs now. We need more walk-in freezers and one more batch freezer; this is the machine we use to spin the ice cream. There’s more staff, so there are more management needs. But on this Father’s Day, Nick was finally able to enjoy a peaceful morning eating donuts and drinking an iced coffee from Super Nice before heading to his all-you-can-eat meat lunch.

Save for a couple of very short phone conversations with some team members earlier in the day, he did pretty much no work today. This was his gift.

I’ve been waiting to give him this gift for eight years. I’m not great at giving material gifts, but I’d argue that applied effort toward a goal over eight years is a pretty good one. And followed by a good meal and a day off, these are the ultimate offerings.

I hope the Father’s in your loves got what they wanted!

Petrushka

Your Local Ice Cream Lady & Life/Business Coach