Page 18 of The Beach Shack Legacy

The Shack before opening belonged to the people who worked there, and apparently to Bernie.

Stella came through the back door with her camera bag and a yellow legal pad of questions she’d written the night before—eleven of them, numbered, because if you meant to interview a man for posterity, you should at least look like you knew what posterity required. Finals week had blown holes in the senior schedule and she had a little time until she had to be back. Anna was at the grill with the cheese lined up in its morning order. Tyler had the radio on low and half a rack of sourdough still to shelve. Joey stood at the espresso machine with a small screwdriver, calibrating something that had not drifted since yesterday, because the rotation said so and the rotation did not get changed.

Bernie sat in his booth with the crossword and the mug with the chip on the rim, exactly where every morning of her Laguna life had put him.

She slid in across from him and set the legal pad on the table. “I have questions. Eleven of them.”

“That’s ten more than most people bring.” He didn’t look up. “Four-letter word for stubborn.”

“Firm?”

“That’s you, in this booth.” He wrote in something that was not firm. “Go ahead.”

“It’s for my project. The history of the Shack. You’re my first official interview.” She clicked her pen and set her phone on the table between them, recording. “I’m being professional about this.”

“You’re being Joey about this.”

“I heard that, Mr. Klein,” Joey said from the espresso machine, without turning around. “I’ve decided to take it as a compliment.”

“It was one.”

Stella read from the pad. Question one had taken her an hour to write and it still looked wrong. “When did you first come to the Shack?”

“The day it opened.”

She waited. He filled in another answer, the pen scratching in the quiet.

“That’s it? Four words?”

“That was the question.”

Right. This was how it would go. She crossed out question two, useless now, and went off the pad entirely. “What was it like? Back then.”

Bernie set the pen down.

That was how she knew she’d asked a real one. The pen went down.

“Smaller,” he said. “Louder, somehow, with half the people. Most of the town thought a sandwich stand on the bluff was a bad joke. Richard stood behind a secondhand grill and learned everybody’s name before their food came up, whether they’d offered it or not. Grilled cheese and a pickle. Take it or leave it.” He turned his coffee cup a quarter turn. “That’s how it opened, anyway.”

Stella wrote fast, then gestured out the windows to the bluff. “Why here? It’s not on the way to anything.”

“The light.” He tipped his head at the front windows, where the morning came in low and turned the water to hammered metal. “Richard picked the bluff for the way the afternoon comes off the ocean. Everyone told him you choose a restaurant for the foot traffic. He said people would walk for a view. Took years, but he was right.”

“You knew him well?”

“I had the newsstand next door.”

She looked at him over the top of the pad. “That’s not what I asked.”

“It’s most of the answer.” The pen hovered over the crossword and didn’t land. “We were friends. He was the best one I had.”

She wrote it down word for word and kept her eyes on the page until her handwriting steadied.

Tyler came by with a plate and set it at Bernie’s elbow—one muffin, dark as a hiking boot. “Joey’s recipe. I leave yours in longer.”

“It’s the only correct way to make them.” Bernie broke it in half and slid the plate to the middle of the table, and Stella took her half because some questions answer themselves.

“Okay.” She turned the pad sideways to read her own handwriting. “Tell me about the newsstand.”