Page 31 of The Beach Shack Legacy

Start with this one, Margo had said. It’s forgiving.

She hadn’t known what that was worth at the time.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The box had been on the table since half past ten.

Pink, the kind bakeries used, with a flat lid and a length of white twine tied around it in a bow that had clearly taken more than one attempt. Joey had produced it from the back office with no ceremony and no explanation, and when Margo asked him where a pink bakery box had come from he said he’d ordered a case of them.

“A case.”

“Fifty. It was the smallest quantity available.” He’d squared the box against the counter edge before he handed it over. “Just in case.”

Just in case. She’d carried it home under one arm and set it down and not opened it, and then the morning had gone, and then most of the afternoon.

She’d cleaned instead. Wiped down a kitchen that was already clean. Watered the lemon tree, which did not need it in June and would tell her so in July. Stood in the front room for a while.

The house had been hers a long time. Long enough that she had stopped seeing most of it—the doorframe with the marks on it, painted over twice and still legible if you knew where to look. The good plates in the cabinet, white with the thin blue rim, the ones that came out for anything special. The couch that had been reupholstered once and should have been twice. She’d raised two children in these rooms and buried a husband out of them and had pretty much raised three more children and painted a few hundred canvases in a garage that had once held a car.

And Stella had come into it two weeks ago and carried a trunk out.

That was the thing she kept setting down and picking back up. Not that Stella had gone through it—she’d told her to, she’d meant it. But something had come loose. The house had held still for a very long time and now it wasn’t holding still, and Margo could not have said whether that was a good thing, and she was aware of being the only person in the family who had noticed it was happening at all.

At three-fifteen the screen door opened without a knock.

“It’s me.”

“I know who it is.”

Bernie came into the kitchen with the paper folded under his arm and stopped when he saw the box.

“That’s new.”

“That’s Joey.” Margo pushed it an inch toward the middle of the table. That was the closest she’d come to it all day. “He ordered fifty of them. The boxes.”

“Fifty?”

“Smallest quantity available.”

Bernie pulled out a chair and sat. He looked at the box, and then at her, and then he reached over and pulled one end of the twine.

“You could ask,” Margo said.

“I could.” He got the lid open.

Shortbread. Cut in fingers, edges gone gold, the tops fork-pricked in two rows the way her grandmother had done it because her grandmother had never in her life owned a stamp or a cutter and thought decoration was for people with time.

Margo looked at them for slightly too long.

“Stella made these,” she said. “This morning. From the recipe box.”

“Which one?”

“The shortbread. My grandmother’s.” She sat down across from him. “Joey did the timing. She did the hands.”

Bernie took one. He did not make a production of it. He ate about half, and set the other half down, and looked out the window over the sink at the lemon tree for a moment.

“These are as good as I remember,” he said.