Page 16 of The Beach Shack Legacy

The last thing in the trunk was in the corner, under everything, and it was wrapped.

That was what she registered first—not what it was, but that it was different. Everything else in the trunk had been stored. Stacked, folded, rubber-banded. This was wrapped, in a dish towel with a faded red stripe, the ends folded under the way you’d wrap a package to mail, and it had been tucked into the corner where the paperwork would cover it.

Stella lifted it out with both hands and sat down properly on the floor, cross-legged, and gently removed the towel.

A recipe box. Wooden, plain, the finish worn through at the latch.

The cards inside were in Margo’s hand. LEMON TARTS. ALMOND CROISSANT with a note about apricot glaze. Recipes she half-recognized, cousins of things she’d eaten in that dining room her whole time in Laguna, and recipes she had never heard of at the Shack or anywhere else. And scattered through them, older cards—older paper, older ink, a slanted spidery handwriting that measured in teacups and called for butter the size of an egg. Somebody’s grandmother, behind the grandmother she knew.

The house was very quiet. The refrigerator cycled on in the kitchen and cycled off again. Outside a car went by slow and its headlights crossed the ceiling.

Stella sat on the floor with the box in her lap for a long time.

This wasn’t for the project. She didn’t know yet what it was for.

She didn’t call her dad. She started a text to Bea three times and deleted it twice and the third time never sent it.

Then she got up, because there was another box in this house and she wanted to look at it. Nana’s had been on the kitchen counter since the afternoon it came, still in its padded mailer behind the fruit bowl, the customs form taped to the front. Her mother’s handwriting in the little box marked CONTENTS. Recipes. No commercial value.

She’d forgotten all about it.

She brought it back to the towel and sat down with one on either side of her, and that was when she saw it.

They were the same box. Not the same—Margo’s was darker and the latch was different—but the same idea, the same size, the same wood worn pale at the corner where a thumb had gone a thousand times.

She opened Nana’s.

Cards, upright in their rows, smudged at the corners. And every one of them in the same small handwriting, the old ones and the new ones both. The old ones should have been older. She turned four or five of them over looking for a different handwriting and didn’t find one, and then she stopped, because it was late and there was already a dead woman’s handwriting spread out on the floor and she had reached the end of what she could take in.

She did the math she’d been doing her whole life, and called her mother.

Fiona picked up on the third ring with something going on behind her—a radio, a tap running.

“Hi, Mum,” Stella said.

The tap went off. “Hi.”

Stella lay back on the floor with the phone against her ear. “It came. The box.”

“Oh, fantastic.”

“It was under the supply boxes by the back door. It’s been at the Shack for who knows how long.” Stella pulled the padded mailer toward her across the towel and picked at the customs form.

“I sent that in—” Her mother stopped. “I sent that a while ago.”

“I know. The customs form’s got a date on it.”

“Have you opened it?”

“Just now.” Somewhere behind her mother the radio changed to a voice, low, and changed back.

“And?”

“It’s all one handwriting, Mum. The old ones too. I thought some of them would be older.”

“That’s Mum.” Fiona said it the way you say something you’ve explained before. “Her mother had a box and half of it was falling apart, so she sat down and copied the whole lot out fair in her own hand so none of it would go. Took her a year. She used to do it at the table with the cricket on.”

Stella looked at the ceiling.