Page 39 of The Beach Shack Legacy

In the lull, Anna took Ruth’s card out and read it properly. Date loaf. Butter, brown sugar, tea in it, of all things. And now the card was on Anna’s counter in a plastic sleeve with a volume number.

She wedged the sleeve upright against the sugar canister, facing the room, where it could not be missed. They’d do it this week.

It could go up on the board next to the shortbread. There was room on the board.

Late afternoon, wiping down, Anna looked up at the ceiling the way the woman had. The shells went back into the corners, hundreds of them, every one carried in by somebody’s hand because this was the place for it.

People used to bring shells. Now they brought their grandmothers.

Nobody had decided anything. It had just started.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The tea was the part nobody believed.

“Tea,” Joey said, for the third time, standing over the pot with the card held at reading distance. “In the loaf.”

“In the loaf.”

“Not with the loaf.” He added a line to the Post-it column running down the shelf.

“Joey, it’s written down. It’s the second line.” Stella had the dates chopped and sitting in a bowl, and the bowl was waiting on the tea, and the tea was waiting on Joey to accept the premise. “You pour it over the dates and you leave it.”

“For how long?”

She checked the card, though she knew. “Till it’s cool.”

Joey wrote something on a Post-it. He had started a Post-it for each new instruction that did not contain a number, and the Post-its were accumulating in a column down the side of the shelf like a second recipe running alongside the first.

The kitchen at that hour was the best part of the day and Stella had stopped pretending otherwise. The grill was cold. The dining room chairs were still up. The light came in low and long across the floor and the room had that held-breath quality it got before anybody else arrived, and it belonged to her and Joey and the oven and nobody else.

She poured the tea over the dates. The smell came up—black tea and dried fruit, sweet and dark—and Joey leaned in over it and made a note about that too.

“That’s not what I expected,” he said.

“It’s good, though.”

“I didn’t say it wasn’t good.” He capped the pen. “I said it wasn’t what I expected. Those are separate findings.”

Anna came in at her usual hour, hung her bag on the hook, looked at the bowl of dates steeping in tea on her prep counter, and said nothing at all about it on her way to the grill, which from Anna was permission.

Margo arrived mid-morning with her tote and paint on the side of one hand, and she started for her stool, and then she stopped at the counter instead, because the card was still propped against the sugar canister in its sleeve where Anna had wedged it.

She read it through the plastic without picking it up.

“Who’s Ruth?”

“The woman with the gray terrier,” Stella said. “She left it.”

“Left it?”

“Brought it in and put it on the counter and told us her name and went.”

Margo read the card again. Her reading glasses were up on her head and she did not put them down. She read it at arm’s length.

“Her grandmother’s,” Margo said.

“That’s what she said.”