It’s a homecoming for Cash.

Last year, the spotted pup — he’s probably a mixture of Catahoula leopard dog and pit bull — was adopted from the SPCA of the Triad and taken home to Sanford to live with his new owner, Alicia Ferreira, and her parents.

In a nod to his origin, 16-month-old Cash and his family have returned to Greensboro, appropriately enough on Mother’s Day, to support an SPCA adoption event at State Street’s Bull City Ciderworks.

The scene includes a truck that serves frozen confections made specifically for dogs. Alicia steps up to the window and orders a scoop for Cash, who waits patiently, even though he appears to be hungry. He sniffs then picks up a piece of gravel in the parking lot. Someone fishes it out of his mouth.

“He loves a rock,” Alicia says with a sigh.

A minute later, she offers him something more enticing: a taste of maple-bacon-flavored ice cream. With eyes riveted on the cardboard cup, Cash waits for Alicia to spoon feed him. He licks with gusto. And manners.

“He’s very respectful when it comes to treats,” Alicia says.

She offers him the garnish, a twig of a chicken crisp, and it disappears in one chomp.

“He’s very into it,” says Alicia, who’s wearing laser-cut dog earrings.

She’s smiling.

Her dad is smiling.

Her mom is smiling.

And the truck’s owner, Shelli Craig, is smiling. This is the response that she and her family have been getting ever since last summer, when they rolled out North Carolina’s only franchise of Salty Paws, a Delaware-based business founded on the notion that there are plenty of dog owners who want their charges to know the joys of lapping ice cream until they get brain freeze.

Yip-yip-yip. A little waggish humor, there. No one has reported seeing a pup pause mid-lick, shudder, howl and bury its head in its paws until the throb passes. Although, just for the record, Google AI says it’s possible for dogs to get ice cream headaches.

The point is, when Shelli, a professional photographer and longtime dog lover (“Puppy breath is my drug of choice”) heard about Salty Paws from her friend, Kathie Lukens, the owner of Doggos Dog Park & Pub in Greensboro, she thought a franchise would be the perfect business for her family.

With eight children in her family — some biological, some adopted, several with disabilities — perhaps it seems like a wild notion. But then, when her youngest, who lives with cerebral palsy and migraine headaches, graduated from high school, she had a question: “What am I going to do for a job?”

Shelli’s answer: We’ll create jobs by starting a business that everyone in the family enjoys. Her husband, Daniel, part-owner of another family enterprise, R.H. Barringer Distributing Co., a wholesale beer business, enthusiastically endorsed the plan.

Shelli was unleashed. She bought a slightly used cargo van in Florida and had it transported to Virginia, where it was wrapped in franchise decals featuring a puppy with an ice cream-dappled nose, licking a frosty scoop of Salty Paws’ finest.

She ordered the powders used to make the canine ice cream — basically dried lactose-free milk with a little sugar and some flavorings.

She and the kids mixed the powders with water, poured them into cartons and froze them at home. Because the product is not intended for human consumption, no health department inspections were required. The process was pretty easy.

On fair-weather weekends, the family rolled out in the van, which is technically considered a feed truck, not a food truck.

Usually, Daniel drove.

To dog parks.

And pet adoption fairs.

And fundraisers for animal rescues.

And to dog-friendly events, like some outdoor car shows. Rovers mingling with Land Rovers? Who knew?

Dog-friendly bars such as Doggos were a staple.

The brightly painted truck drew a lot of attention with its drool-inducing flavors, including pumpkin, vanilla, peanut butter, maple bacon, straight-up bacon, birthday cake, carob and prime rib, which appealed to all sorts of meat lovers.

Once, a man came to the window and explained that he wanted to try a scoop of prime rib in the same way one might want to try a Harry Potter earthworm-flavored jelly bean.

Shelli explained that Salty Paws products were not intended for humans, but also, if he bought a scoop and a spoon, she could not control what happened next.

The human verdict after licking? OK.

Another time, a woman and her two children came to the window and bought a scoop of vanilla and a scoop of peanut butter.

As they walked away, Shelli wondered if the woman had mistakenly bought the ice cream for her girls.

A few minutes later, a man came to the window asking if they sold smoothies, too. Shelli explained that they sold ice cream for dogs.

“Dogs?! Oh, crap,” the man said before muttering about whether his kids would start barking soon.

Shelli and Daniel, who was known for his dad jokes, shared more than a few laughs over the stories that spun out of Salty Paws. Underlying their bond, Shelli says, was a shared commitment to beings in need.

“He had a very, very tender heart,” Shelli says of Daniel.

Tears well in her clear, blue eyes.

In April, Daniel died unexpectedly, of a heart attack, at age 59.

Shelli parked the Salty Paws truck for about a month as she grappled with Daniel’s absence.

“We built a big life with a lot of moving parts,” she says. One of the moving parts was Salty Paws.

It took a lot of resolve for Shelli to set aside her grief, load the truck on Mother’s Day, of all days, today, drive it to the cidery with two of her sons and start scooping ice cream.

“I’ve had to compartmentalize somewhat. Children and animals can bring me out of it,” she says. No surprise coming from a woman who wears a T-shirt emblazoned with “Tell Your Dog I Said Hi.”

She looks around. An SPCA volunteer walks by, cradling a weeks-old puppy. Nearby, an older, adoptable dog gnaws happily on a bully stick, a freebie from Shelli and family.

Cash savors his maple-bacon treat, totally absorbed.

His owner, Alicia, captions the moment aloud: “Best. Day. Ever.”

Quick as a lick, Shelli laughs, suspended for a moment in another place.