Page 50 of The Beach Shack Legacy

“So do I,” Anna said.

Bernie, from his end of the table, didn’t look up from his plate. “Was it Sanders?”

“It was not Sanders.” Margo picked up her coffee. “I hadn’t been introduced to that particular religion yet.” She turned her cup a quarter. “The crying stopped, though. It generally did, if you fed them.”

“There’s a menu too,” Stella said. “One Margo and Richard drew up together. He wanted to add something—I can’t even read the word, his handwriting’s terrible—and he underlined it twice and wrote trust me next to it. And underneath, in a different hand, small and straight up and down. I do. Not about this.” She looked at Margo. “You wrote that. Like you were still arguing with him.”

Margo paused for a moment. “I remember that argument,” she said, finally. “I don’t remember losing it.”

“You didn’t lose it,” Bernie said, not looking up from his plate. “It never went on the menu.”

“No,” Margo said. “It didn’t.”

That was as far as either of them was going to take it, and everyone at the table let them.

“And then I found all of these,” Stella said, and started setting the recipe cards down the length of the table, until there wasn’t much room left for plates. “Margo’s. Her mother’s. Her grandmother’s. You can tell whose is whose from across the table.”

She held one up, alone.

“And then this one came after. I’d already turned the whole thing in. Ruth just walked into the Shack one day and handed it to us—her grandmother’s date loaf.” She turned it over in her fingers. “It never went in the project. It’s what the project turned into. Turns out everybody’s got a grandmother somewhere with a handwriting nobody else has. In this family, it’s all written in food.”

Bea picked Ruth’s card up first, careful, by the edges. “Look at her handwriting. It’s so pretty. Nobody writes like this anymore.”

Anna took the card from her, careful the same way, read the front of it, turned it over.

“It’s the same thing you did for school, then,” she said, setting it down in front of Stella. “Somebody’s grandmother, tracked down and kept.”

“I needed a senior project,” Stella said. “Dad told me it was right above my head. It was supposed to be about the building.” She set Ruth’s card back down on the pile. “That’s the whole project. That’s what I turned in.”

Margo reached into the trunk herself and came up with one of her own—never again on a Sunday across the top, in her own younger hand.

“I’ll keep this one out,” she said. “It’s been long enough.” She turned it over once. “And it will not be a Sunday.”

Meg picked a card off the pile before anyone told her she could—the walnut bread, R says double it, R was right—and held it a second like she was deciding whether to put it back.

“Can I keep this?” she asked. “I want to try it. Properly.”

“That’s my great-grandmother’s,” Stella said. “Technically.”

“I know whose it is.” Meg didn’t put it down.

Margo picked her coffee back up. “Everybody wants to remember somebody’s grandmother. Doesn’t much matter whose.”

“Okay, can we please talk about something that isn’t going to make Bernie cry again,” Bea said, “because I’m ready for dessert.”

“As a matter of fact, there’s dessert,” Joey said, and got up. “It’s a recipe from the box.”

He came back with a covered plate, set it down, and took the foil off himself, folding it in quarters before he sat back down.

“Michael’s is the one on the left,” Joey said. “Made it dairy-free. Different butter, same result, mostly.”

Apricot slice. Margo’s grandmother’s handwriting, dated who knew how long ago, made real in a pan Joey had found the right size for after two failed attempts nobody had been told about.

Bea had a piece in her mouth before anyone had officially said go.

“Joey, this is—this is incredible.” Her voice had gone reverent in a way that had nothing to do with manners.

“I know.”