Page 21 of The Beach Shack Legacy

“Has he been telling you stories?” Margo asked, unfolding the paper.

“Facts,” Bernie said.

“Both, then.”

Stella backed up to the counter, and from there she raised the camera. In the viewfinder—the two of them on opposite sides of the booth, the paper passed between them. Margo said something too quiet to reach the counter, and Bernie’s mouth moved at one corner, and Stella pressed the shutter and knew before she checked the frame that she’d gotten something true.

Behind her, Joey seated the tourists at the wrong table and corrected the matter with diplomacy and a laminated chart. Anna sent out the umpteenth grilled cheese of the day. Tyler turned the radio up one notch, caught his sister’s look from the grill, and turned it back down.

Stella flipped the legal pad shut. He’d answered her first question in four words, and it had taken her the whole morning to hear all of them.

The day it opened. And he’d never really left.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Tuesdays were tomatoes.

Margo had the first flat of them on the counter early, the good knife out, the cutting board with the groove worn in it from years of exactly this. She liked Tuesdays. The work was simple and finished when it was finished, and nobody asked her opinion of anything more complicated than ripeness.

The gloom had let go overnight and the morning was clear all the way to the horizon, the light coming through the front windows clean and pale, not quite summer’s light yet. Anna had the grill. Joey moved down the tables setting out the number-card holders in an order only he could have explained. Bernie was in his booth with the crossword and the chipped mug, and the room smelled like coffee at one end and tomatoes at the other.

The knife went through the first tomato, and the door chimed.

Stella came in with her school bag on one shoulder and something wrapped under her arm, and she didn’t stop at the counter to say good morning and she didn’t put her bag down. She crossed the room, and Margo set the knife on the board, because whatever this was seemed important.

Stella put it in her hands. Nothing said. A bundle, wrapped in a dish towel, the ends folded under.

Margo knew the towel before she knew anything else. Faded red stripe down the middle, washed to almost pink, a scorch mark on one corner shaped like a thumb. Her hands went still on it, one on the top, one underneath, the weight of it sitting in her palms.

The room kept going. Anna’s spatula on the grill steel, Joey’s cards clicking into their holders.

“You went through the trunk,” Margo said.

“You said I was welcome to whatever was in there.”

“I did say that.” Margo looked at the towel. She had folded those ends under herself, at her own kitchen table, standing up, quickly, a lifetime ago. She remembered the folding. She had not remembered, until right now, that what she’d folded it around had gone into the trunk. “Well,” she said. “You’d better clear me some counter.”

Stella moved the flat of tomatoes down the counter. Margo set the bundle down, unfolded the ends, and opened the towel out flat.

The box sat in the middle of it, plain and wooden, the finish worn through at the latch. She opened the lid. The cards stood in their rows, soft-cornered, her own handwriting on the front one, upright and small.

The front card said LEMON TARTS, and under the title, in her own hand, younger—never again on a Sunday.

Margo laughed.

It came out before anything else could—one short laugh, mostly breath, at that ridiculous note and the entire lost morning it stood for. Stella’s head came up. Across the room the pen at Bernie’s booth had stopped moving.

“I’d forgotten these were in there,” Margo said. “I’d forgotten half of these existed.”

“What happened on a Sunday?”

“A double batch and a church crowd and a shortage of everything by nine.” She slid the card out and looked at it, and put it face up on the towel, and slid out the next one. “We never tried that again.”

“We?”

“Your great-grandfather and I.” The next card was in the older hand, the slanted spidery one, and Margo turned it toward the light. “And her, before either of us. Look at this. A teacup of sugar. She never measured a thing in her life—the card is a lie she wrote down for other people.”

Stella came around the counter to see. Margo set the cards out onto the towel one at a time, slow—lemon tart, the walnut bread, the apricot slice, names she hadn’t said in years.