Page 14 of The Beach Shack Legacy

“We are not old married people,” Margo said.

“You have matching remotes.”

“The remotes do not match. That is precisely the problem.”

Tyler grinned and crossed to the coffee table. “How’s the soundbar working?”

“Beautifully,” Bernie said. “I can hear every sneaker squeak. It’s like being courtside.”

“Better than courtside. Courtside doesn’t have lemon meringue pie.” Tyler got a plate from the kitchen and cut himself a slice without being invited—a move only a grandson could survive in Margo’s house. He ate it standing up. “This is incredible. Is this from the tree?”

“Where else would it be from?”

“You could buy lemons like a normal person.”

“Normal people don’t have a Meyer lemon tree, Tyler.”

“Good point.” He finished the slice in four bites. “Garage?”

“Behind the painting supplies. Green tarp.”

Tyler and Stella went through the kitchen to the side door that led to the garage. Tyler pulled the chain on the bulb and the room came up yellow.

No car had been in here in a long time. Canvases stood along the far wall, stacked four and five deep, face-in, so what you got was a row of wooden stretcher bars and staples and somebody’s handwriting on the backs in pencil. Dates, mostly. A few had words. Heisler, wrong. One said only no.

The bench under the window held the paint—tubes flattened from the bottom up the way a person does it when she’s been doing it her whole life, cadmium yellow, burnt sienna, raw umber, a titanium white gone to concrete around the cap. A jam jar of blue sat apart from the rest with a strip of masking tape on it and nothing written on the tape. Coffee cans of brushes. A palette that was a dinner plate, and under the smears Stella could still see the thin blue rim of the good ones.

There was a bicycle with no chain. A box of Christmas things. A folded stroller.

Stella stood in the middle of it with her hands in her back pockets.

She’d been in this house what seemed like a million times. Ate at the table, sat on that couch, learned the trick of the deadbolt. And ten feet off the kitchen was a room that had been filling up since before her father was born, and nobody had ever thought to mention it, because to everyone else it was just the garage.

“She painted all these?”

“That’s not even most of them.” Tyler was already at the back corner. “The good ones are in the house. These are the ones she doesn’t like.”

“There’s a hundred paintings in here.”

“Yeah, maybe more.” He put his hand on the green tarp. “Here it is.”

The trunk sat under it in the corner, exactly where Margo said it would be—a wooden chest, not large, with brass hinges now dark with age.

Tyler pulled back the tarp. Dust came up off it and Stella waved it away.

“Heavy?” Stella asked.

Tyler lifted one end. “Not bad. Get the other side.”

They carried it through the kitchen, through the living room—“Don’t hit the coffee table,” Margo said without looking up—and out the front door to Tyler’s truck. Tyler slid it into the bed and closed the tailgate.

“That’s everything?” Tyler asked, leaning back into the house.

“That’s everything. Drive safe.”

“Yes ma’am.” Tyler stopped with one hand on the doorframe. “You mind if I take the rest of that pie to Meg and Luke?”

“Take it. There’s foil in the drawer by the stove.” Margo did not look away from the television. “The tin comes back clean.”