Page 20 of The Beach Shack Legacy

He didn’t touch it. After a while he turned it a quarter turn with one finger so it faced him, the way you’d turn a photograph.

“Where was this?”

“The bottom, under the menus. In a folder with nothing else in it.”

“He kept it.” Bernie looked at it for a long moment. “Well.”

“What is it?”

“It’s a plan.” He put a finger down beside the pencil without touching the paper. “That’s this building. That’s the stand next to it. He drew that when we were young men, before there was anything on this bluff but ice plant and a road nobody used.”

Stella leaned over the table. Now that somebody had told her what it was, it was obvious—two boxes, one bigger than the other, and a line under them that had to be Coast Highway.

“There’s writing.”

“There is.” He didn’t read it out. “It says that one’s yours.”

The coffee machine came on behind the counter. Joey said something to Tyler about the second shelf and Tyler said something back.

“He drew it before he met her?” Stella asked.

“He drew it before he met anybody, really. Just me.”

She looked at the napkin, thin and worn, folded and unfolded more times than one piece of paper should survive.

Bernie slid the napkin back across the table and it stopped square in front of her.

“Keep that flat,” he said.

Stella slid it back into the folder and put the folder in her bag.

“There was a recipe box in there too,” she said. “Under everything. Wrapped in a tea towel.”

Bernie looked up.

“Hers?”

“Hers. And her grandmother’s, some of them.” Stella got her camera bag onto her shoulder. “I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t know if she wants it back or if she put it in there on purpose.”

“Both, probably.” He picked the pen up and then didn’t use it. “Take it to her yourself. Don’t send it. Don’t soften it. Hand it to her.”

“And say what?”

“Nothing.”

Stella looked at her legal pad. Eleven questions, and she’d written them all the wrong size—dates and menus and what year did the big machine arrive, little questions for a man who had been three feet from all of it since the day the doors opened. The history of the Shack drank coffee in the corner booth and did the crossword in pen.

“He used to bring sandwiches over,” Bernie said. “From here. We’d eat them sitting on the step of the stand and argue about baseball, and then he’d go back to his grill and I’d go back to my papers.”

“That seems like the whole story of the two of you.”

Bernie nodded. “Put that in your project.”

The door chimed. Margo came through the front—no apron, canvas tote over her arm, paint on the side of one hand—and crossed the room to the booth, where she stopped and looked at Stella with her head tilted.

“You’re in my seat.”

Stella slid out and stood, legal pad against her chest. Margo settled across from Bernie, and he slid the folded newspaper over to her side of the table without looking up from the crossword, and she took her reading glasses out of the tote and took the crossword without saying thank you, because some things had stopped needing either.