Page 45 of The Beach Shack Legacy

“You’ve seen me in a dress.”

“I’ve seen you in a dress at a wedding, under protest, for ninety minutes.” He pointed the crust at her. “Tomorrow you’re in one voluntarily, in front of the whole town, with a hat.”

“It’s a cap.”

“It’s a hat with a tassel, Stella. There’s a tassel.” He was enjoying himself now. “I’m getting the wide lens for the tassel.”

“I hate you so much.”

“You’re going to move it from one side to the other. In public. There’s a ceremony for the tassel. Or so I’ve been told.”

Stella threw a paper towel at him and it did what paper towels do, which is nothing, and drifted onto the coffee table between them.

“Wide lens,” she said. “Don’t shoot into the gym lights.”

“Now you’re just doing me.”

“I’m doing you badly. You’d have said it slower.”

He picked up the paper towel and set it back on the pile. “I’ll get you a good one.”

“You’ll get me forty and three will be good.”

“That’s the job.”

The game went to a commercial. Stella got up and got water and stood at the sink drinking it and looking down the hall at the door with the gown on it, and Tyler let her do that without saying anything, and then she came back and sat down and put her feet up on the coffee table next to the box.

“Hey,” she said. “The pickles were good.”

“The pickles were inspired.”

“I said good.”

“You said good the first time. It’s gone up since.” He found the remote under a cushion. “It’ll be capers with Lindsey, though.”

“Coward.”

“Strategy,” Tyler said.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Meg had brought her own knives.

Margo had been standing at her own counter for most of her life and she had never once seen anybody arrive at it with a roll of knives under one arm, and she had decided somewhere around the second course of prep that she was going to allow it without comment. The girl could cook. That was the thing nobody in this family had properly absorbed.

“You can sit down,” Meg said, without turning around.

“That’s a form of sitting down at my age.” Margo folded her towel and put it on the rail and went and sat at her own table, which Meg had already laid.

The house was full, and it had not been full in a long while, and every person in it had brought something nobody needed—chairs, ice, a socket wrench, four hundred photographs on a camera card.

And two caps sat on the mantel on top of two folded gowns, navy blue, tassels hanging.

It had been at the school and Margo had been in the fourth row in the good dress, and it had been long, and both girls’ names had been called and both girls had walked, and Margo had clapped for both of them and had not thought about the last time she sat in a gymnasium and clapped for nobody. That had been a whole different thing, and it had happened, and it was over.

Bea had already changed out of everything and was in shorts and somebody’s flannel and was telling the room that a boy in her row had thrown his cap during the D’s and hit a grandmother, who had kept it and refused to give it back.

“That’s the best thing that happened all day,” Bea said.