Page 52 of The Beach Shack Legacy

It was the others.

A man came to the register after one o’clock and asked for the date loaf. Gone. “There’ll be more tomorrow,” Anna said, and heard herself say it, but also knew that those would sell out fast too. There would not be enough tomorrow. There was never enough now.

“That’s what I got told yesterday.” He wasn’t nasty about it, but he wasn’t warm either. “You advertise something and then you don’t have it. Pick one.” He looked at the board with the empty spaces where the morning’s list had been. “You might make more of it, is all I’m saying.”

“You’re right,” Anna said, because he was. He ordered a grilled cheese, because he was already there, and took it to a table without saying more.

Joey materialized at her elbow with the notebook out.

“That’s the fourth today.”

“Fourth what.”

“Came for a specific item. Item unavailable. Declined a substitution. Departed.” He checked the page. “Two shortbread, one date loaf, one apricot.”

“You’re keeping a count?”

“I keep counts.” He put the notebook away. “I don’t do anything with them. I just don’t like not knowing a number that’s knowable.” He went to seat a party of three by whatever private math he ran the room on, and Anna stood at the register with her hand flat on the counter and did not wipe it, because wiping it would have been doing something, and there was nothing to do.

Mrs. Feldstein came to the counter at her usual hour with her handbag over her arm and her glasses up in her hair.

“Two of the shortbread today,” she said. “I’m having company.” She said it like she’d been saving it up since the parking lot.

“Oh, Mrs. Feldstein.” Anna’s hand found the register. “It’s gone. It went early. I’m so sorry.”

Mrs. Feldstein took that in the way she took everything in—a small settling of the face, no fuss, because fuss was for people who’d had it easier.

“Well,” she said. “Tomorrow, then.” Then she reached across and patted the back of Anna’s hand, once. “It’s a lovely problem to have, dear.” She ordered her coffee and took table two and did her crossword over the one cup.

It’s a lovely problem to have, dear.

If Mrs. Feldstein had sighed, or said something with an edge, Anna could have set it down somewhere. But the woman had come in glad and gone home without the thing she wanted and had comforted Anna about it, and there was nowhere in Anna that took that.

Tyler was at the door with a couple who’d come up the path. Anna caught the end of it—his towel over his shoulder, the line he’d taken to saying, grill’s on, baking’s done for the day. The couple conferred, thanked him, went back toward town unhurried, the way people go when they’d had a nice idea and would have to have a different one now. Tyler came back to the grill and didn’t say anything, and Anna didn’t either. Saying it would have made it a thing.

She’d turned people away at this counter before. A woman had called three times about the weekend brunch waitlist once, and that had sat fine—a full room, a ticket, a number you could run out the way you can run out of anything you’d counted in advance.

This wasn’t that. The counter had never had a number on it. The counter was Richard’s whole promise—a menu a child could always afford, something you came for and it was there. The Shack had never once been a place a person walked out of because what they wanted wasn’t there.

It was now. Four times today. One of them had been short about it and had every right to be—the rest hadn’t complained at all. Anna couldn’t forget either kind.

Through the pass she could see Stella at the mixer, head down, already into tomorrow’s batch. She didn’t look at the door once.

The bell went behind her, and Anna turned to see who it was, and whether the Shack was going to have the thing they came for.`

CHAPTER TWENTY

There were eighty of them and there was nowhere left to put them.

They had run out of counter an hour ago and moved to the kitchen table, and then out of table and onto the sideboard, and the last two trays were cooling on a bath towel Margo had folded over the top of the piano because the piano was flat and nobody had played it since Anna was in school. Lemon tarts. Eighty of them, in their little pleated shells, the curd set and gone glossy the way it did when it was right.

“That’s eighty,” Stella said. “I counted twice.”

“Count it again when they’re in the boxes. They travel worse than you’d think.”

Stella counted them again into the boxes, which took a while, because Joey had sent forty of the pink ones over in the back of Tyler’s truck with a note on top of the stack that said FOR THE TARTS. DO NOT USE FOR ANYTHING ELSE.

The kitchen was a wreck and Margo was pleased about it. Flour on the floor by the mixer. Two bowls in the sink she’d given up on. The zester in the drainer with a lemon still stuck in the teeth of it. Out the window over the sink the tree stood in the last of the light looking robbed—she’d taken everything off the low branches and then made Stella get the ladder for more, and there was not one lemon left on it under six feet.