Page 17 of The Beach Shack Legacy

“Is the jam drops card in there?”

“Hang on.” She sat up and went through them. It was near the front. JAM DROPS, block capitals, and under it in the margin, smaller, let her do the thumbs.

“It’s here.”

“She let me do the thumbs,” Fiona said. “That was the whole job. I did the thumbs from about four years old and I thought I was running the operation.” Her mother laughed. “Make those first. They’re impossible to ruin and you’ll get it in one try.”

“Okay.”

Behind her mother somebody asked a question and somebody else answered it, and a door closed, and the radio got quieter.

“They’ve given us the gowns,” Stella said.

“Have they? Have you put it on?”

“It’s on the back of the door.” She rolled her head to the side and looked at it from the floor, navy in its plastic, the tag still on.

“That is not what I asked you.”

“It’s navy.” Stella put her arm over her eyes. “It zips in the front and then you’re a person who owns a gown.”

“Send me a photo of you in it or I’ll ring Bea, and Bea will send me nine.”

“She’d send more than nine.”

“Then we understand each other.” A pause, and then her mother said, with a different tone, “I’m not going to get there. For the day. I’ve looked at it every way there is.”

“I know,” Stella said. She took her arm off her eyes, peeked at the gown and put it back again.

“Somebody has to film the walking part. Tell your father, he’ll do it properly, and he’ll want a second angle.”

“He’s already talked about a second angle.”

Fiona laughed.

Stella turned the jam drops card over in her fingers. The back was blank. She had hoped to find something more.

“It’s fine, Mum,” she said. “It’s an auditorium and a stage and three hundred names.”

“It is not fine. And neither is the box. I said we’d cook the whole box together and instead I posted it to you. That’s not what I meant to do.”

Stella didn’t say it was all right, because it wasn’t, particularly, and her mother would have noticed it.

“Then tell me the next one,” she said. “After the jam drops.”

There was a sound down the line that could have been a laugh getting away from somebody.

“Get a pen,” Fiona said.

Stella got a pen, and they went through the box that way, her mother naming cards from memory on the other side of the world and Stella pulling each one and setting it on the towel.

When they hung up, the cards were out in rows on the beach towel, Nana’s on one side and Margo’s on the other, and the whole floor of the living room was covered in other people’s handwriting.

Stella wrapped Margo’s box back in its towel and folded the ends under the way she’d found them, because it had come to her wrapped.

Then she picked up the manila folder, slid the napkin out, and looked at it once more under the lamp, and put it in her camera bag by the door where she would not forget it in the morning.

CHAPTER SEVEN