Page 29 of The Beach Shack Legacy

“I left my sketchbook,” she said. “What is that?”

“Pavlova.”

“Is it supposed to⁠—”

“No.”

Bea came over, took a stool, and settled in the way she settled in at the movies. “Historic,” she said.

“Get your sketchbook.”

“In a minute.” Bea leaned over the ruin, chin nearly on the counter. “Did it make a noise when it fell? Like a little sigh?”

“Goodbye, Bea.”

“Because I feel like it would’ve made a noise.”

Stella got the camera and photographed the ruin from three angles, straight down and level and close-up on the weeping edge. “Evidence,” she said, and Bea said somebody should notify the embassy, and Joey asked whether Australia had an embassy or a consulate in Los Angeles, and wrote down the answer when Bea made one up.

They started again.

This time, nobody discussed the bowls. Stella cracked, Joey inspected, the whisk whisked, the sugar went in until the squeak was gone—Joey checked twice, by his ear, and ruled it smooth. The circle went onto fresh parchment. The oven came back to the card’s number. Stella slid it in and shut the door, and then she took the towel off her shoulder and hung it over the oven’s door handle, over the window.

“That’s obstruction,” Joey said.

“That’s the protocol. Walk away.”

Walking away took planning. They did the dishes and wiped the counters for a second time. Bea found her sketchbook and stayed anyway, drawing the ruin of the first attempt before Joey was allowed to throw it out, because, she said, somebody in this family documents and somebody memorializes. Bella was readmitted on the ruling that the meringue was now sealed inside an appliance. Joey’s bag sat by the back door with the textbook in it, where it had been since he came in that morning.

The afternoon went long and gold through the front windows, and the haze finally let go of the water, and the oven ticked, and nobody looked at it.

When the timer went, Stella turned the oven off, cracked the door the width of the wooden spoon handle, and stepped back.

“Now?” Joey asked.

“Now we walk away. It cools in there. All the way.”

“How long?”

“Till it’s cool, Joey.”

He stood a moment with that. Then he walked to the far side of the dining room and sat at the window table, facing the ocean, where the oven wasn’t. He had once trashed an entire tray of muffins for what he called calibration drift, and that had gone easier.

The smell got out through the propped back door while they waited. It went out over the patio and down the path, warm sugar on damp salt air, and a woman coming along the beach path with a gray terrier slowed, and stopped, and stood at the edge of the patio with her hand up against the light.

Stella went out.

“I’m sorry,” the woman said. “What is that smell?”

“Pavlova.” Stella wiped her hands on the apron. “We’re closed, sorry.”

“I know. I know the hours.” The woman stayed where she was, at the rail, not coming any farther in. The dog sat down on the path to wait. “My grandmother baked. The whole street knew what day it was.” She looked up past Stella at the eaves, at the roofline, at nothing in particular, until the dog got up again. “That’s a shame, closed. Well. Good luck with it.”

She clicked to the dog and went on up the path, and then the cream needed whipping, and Stella forgot her.

The shell, when the oven had gone cold and the towel came off and the door swung wide, was whole. Pale, dry, high at the sides, crazed with fine cracks that held. Joey lifted it to the counter on its parchment with both hands, elbows in, walking heel to toe. They whipped the cream. They halved the strawberries from the walk-in. Bea was given the job of arranging them and took it seriously for once in her life, and the three of them stood back and looked at it, and it looked like Christmas in the wrong hemisphere.

“For celebrations only,” Stella said.