Page 40 of The Beach Shack Legacy

“Walnuts optional.” Margo’s mouth moved at one corner. “But she’d judge you.”

She went to her stool. She did not say anything else about the card, and she did not say anything about the loaf that was by then in the oven and filling the whole room with a smell nobody in the building had ever smelled in that building before, and Stella got on with it, and that was Margo.

The loaf came out late in the morning and it was wrong.

Not ruined. Wrong. The top had cracked along its whole length and sunk on one side, and it looked like something that had been through bad weather.

“It’s supposed to do that,” Stella said, before Joey could get a word out.

“Is it?”

“It’s a date loaf, Joey. It’s not a cake. It’s supposed to look like this.” She was fairly sure. The card said nothing about the top and Fiona had never made one and Nana’s box did not have one, and the only authority in the building was a woman with a terrier who was not there.

Joey looked at the crack for a while.

“I’d like to log it as within tolerance,” he said, “pending an authority.”

They sliced it warm, against every instinct Stella had, because Anna said a date loaf was better warm and Anna had never made one either but said it with total confidence. It went in thick slices with butter, and Joey wrote the price up himself and did not consult anybody.

Mrs. Feldstein had a slice with her coffee at table two and had a second slice and asked no questions.

Before noon the loaf was gone and Stella had another one in and was chopping dates for a third with her hip against the counter and flour on both forearms, and the whole thing had stopped feeling like an experiment somewhere in there without announcing itself.

Ruth came in around the middle of the day.

Stella saw her through the pass-through—the gray terrier tied at the rail outside.

Ruth did not come to the counter. She took the small table by the window, and she looked at the specials board, and the specials board said RUTH’S GRANDMOTHER’S DATE LOAF in Joey’s blue capitals, spaced correctly on the first attempt.

She looked at it for a while.

Anna brought her a slice without being asked and set it down and went away again. Stella would not have thought of that.

Ruth ate the whole slice. Then she sat with her hand flat on the table beside the empty plate for a moment, and then she looked up and found Stella through the pass-through and did not wave or nod or do anything at all except look.

Later, when Stella came out with a tray, Ruth was at the counter with her handbag over her arm.

“The top cracked,” Stella said.

“It’s meant to.”

“Right.” Stella put the tray down. “Good.”

“Hers cracked. Every one. She used to say the crack was where you knew it was hers and not a shop’s.” Ruth’s hand went to the edge of the counter and stopped short of the card in its sleeve. “I haven’t had that since I was a girl. I want you to know I didn’t expect you to make it.”

“We were always going to make it.”

Ruth looked at her in a way that was too much for a slice of date loaf.

“Well,” Ruth said. Her voice didn’t quite hold. She stopped, and her hand came the rest of the way to the card in its sleeve and rested there. “Thank you.”

Ruth had her wallet out, but Stella placed her hand flat on the cash register, shaking her head.

“No. It’s a thank you from us to you.”

Ruth smiled and nodded, and she waited while Joey put it in a pink box, and Joey tied the twine in a bow that took him two attempts and one visible internal negotiation, and Ruth watched him do the second attempt without saying anything.

At the door she stopped.