Page 41 of The Beach Shack Legacy

“I going to tell my group,” she said. “My ladies group. I hope that’s all right.”

“How many are in your group?”

“Eleven,” Ruth said, and went out, and unwound the terrier, and went off down the path.

Stella reached for the camera before she’d decided to. She got it up as far as her chest, and there was nothing to point it at. Ruth was gone down the path. The empty plate was just an empty plate. She lowered the camera. Then she slid Ruth’s card out of its sleeve, and turned it over to the blank back, and wrote in the corner in blue pen, small, the size the notes in the boxes were, Hers cracked too. It’s right. No changes. She put the card back facing out, and went to wipe down the table where the plate still sat.

The first two came that afternoon.

They came in together, a little apologetic, and stood inside the door looking at the specials board the way people look at a menu in a language they half know, and one of them said Ruth had told them, and the other said they’d walked down. Stella heard walked down and thought about Bernie saying people will walk for it, and then she was cutting the last of the second loaf into slices thinner than she meant to, because there were two of them and one loaf’s end and she was not going to tell them there wasn’t any.

There was enough. Barely.

They ate it at the counter standing up, both of them, and one of them got out her phone and took a picture of the slice, badly, at the wrong angle, and Stella did not say anything about the angle.

“Ruth said her grandmother made this,” the woman said.

“That’s whose it is.”

“And you just—made it? Because she brought it in?”

Stella opened her mouth to answer that and found that the answer was yes and that it sounded, said out loud, like a much bigger thing than it had been first thing that morning with a bowl of dates and a pot of tea.

“Yeah,” she said.

The woman nodded slowly and looked at the board again, at the name of somebody’s grandmother written up in blue capitals over the counter of a restaurant.

“That’s lovely,” she said. “You should do that with all of them.”

They shut the door and Stella stayed.

She had the third loaf out and cooling and no plan for it, and Joey had gone to get his bag and had not gone home, and the sleeve marked VOL. 1 was on the counter with one card in it and the pen sitting on top.

“Ten more of them are coming,” Joey said. “Assuming all eleven come, and assuming the group is real.”

“The group is real.”

“Then it’s eleven.” He looked at the sleeve. He looked at the card in the sleeve, single, filed under R, in a section built with room for a system that did not exist. Then he pulled the sleeve toward him and squared it against the counter’s edge, and got the pen, and did not write anything, because there was nothing yet to write.

Stella took a picture of the board before Joey wiped it. RUTH’S GRANDMOTHER’S DATE LOAF, blue capitals, correctly spaced, over a counter that had sold grilled cheese and a pickle since before anyone in the room was born.

Then she got the camera down closer, the way her father had told her, and took it again from underneath, and in that one the shells were in the frame too.

She checked it and kept it.

Somebody’s grandmother was up on the board with her name on her, over a room full of people eating lunch, and not one of them had known the woman.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Tyler had the chicken out, and the lemon, and his phone propped against the coffee maker with a recipe on it, and the recipe had a problem, and the problem was capers.

“We don’t have capers,” Stella said, on her stomach across the couch with her feet on the armrest, scrolling her own phone. “Nobody has capers.”

“Lindsey likes the lemon thing. The piccata.” He said the word with care. Piccata. A word he didn’t own yet. “The lemon thing needs capers.”

“Why are we practicing? Lindsey’s seen you eat. She knows what she’s getting.”

“She keeps saying we should cook together some night. Her place.” He turned the burner down a notch. “I can run a flat-top grill in my sleep. This has steps. I know pans. I don’t know capers.”