Page 66 of The Beach Shack Legacy

“Bernard. No.” But she was smiling. She got as far as the step, and the tote over her arm, and then she turned around and came back the one stair and put her hand flat on his chest and kissed him. It was not a long kiss. It was the kiss of two people who’d known each other more years than most people got, unhurried, familiar, and brand new, because they’d only just started doing this.

She stepped back and looked at him, pleased with herself.

“Wanted to get that in,” she said, “while I was thinking of it.” And she went down the walk before he could answer, the only way to leave a man after something like that, and he stood in the doorway and watched her go until the dark and the hill took her.

He didn’t turn the light on right away.

He went instead to the wall by the window, where the photographs were, the ones he never made a production of and looked at every day—and the one he wanted, the one of Richard behind the first grill, sleeves up, laughing at whoever held the camera, young, already himself.

Bernie took his wallet out. From the fold behind the license, where it had ridden for more years than seemed possible, he slid the ticket—soft as the flamingo cards now, the print of it nearly gone, the name of a horse still faintly readable to a man who knew where to look. He held it a moment. He looked at Richard looking at him out of the picture.

Then he put the ticket back in the fold, and put the wallet in his pocket, and stood there in the last of the light with his oldest friend, not saying anything, the way you don’t have to, with the people who already know.

“Well, okay then,” Bernie said, to the photograph, to the room, to nobody.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Bernie had the key on a loop of green kite string, and it took him a while to work the lock, because the lock probably hadn’t been asked to do anything in a long while and neither had the door. Stella stood behind him with Joey on the little concrete step not knowing why they were there.

He’d asked them to come by before open. That was all he’d said—come by before open, the two of you, I want to show you something—and Margo was there too, standing off to the side in her cardigan with her hands clasped in front of her.

The lock gave. Bernie put his shoulder to the door and it came open with a soft complaint, the sound of a door that hadn’t been opened in years. The smell came out at them—dust and old newsprint and the ghost of the cold drinks that used to sweat in a cooler by the register.

It was small. Stella had walked past it a thousand times without once wondering what it was like inside, and inside it was one room, longer than it was wide, with a counter running most of the length of it and shelving up both walls, the old racks where the papers had gone, tilted wooden things worn pale where decades of hands had pulled the top copy. There was a window at the front, the little pass-window where Bernie had handed papers out to the street, its shutter down now, a seam of daylight under it. Dust hung in the air they’d stirred.

“It’s bigger inside than it looks,” Joey said. It was the first thing either of them had managed.

“It is.” Bernie moved down the length of it, touching the counter as he went, not looking at them. “Richard and I put this up over one summer. That wall’s not square and never has been—we ran out of light one night and I cut the top plate wrong and we both decided we liked it crooked. You can see it if you look. Nobody’s ever noticed but me and now you.”

They looked. The wall definitely leaned. Once you saw it you couldn’t stop seeing it.

“There’s room here,” Bernie said. He’d reached the back, where the room opened up. “For an oven. A real one, not the countertop business you’ve been fighting over at the Shack. You’d have room for a proper oven back here and a bench along that wall and your cold storage where the cooler used to sit. It’s plumbed for a sink already, the water’s still on, I kept it on.” He’d kept the water on. For years. On an empty building.

Stella’s breath came faster and she walked further in.

“And there.” Bernie pointed at the wall that ran alongside the Shack, the shared wall, the one that had the Shack’s whole life going on behind it, the grill and the counter and the family, close enough to hear if you put your ear to it. “You knock a door through there and you’re joined right up. You use their bathroom, their water heater, their walk-in when you need it. You’re not a separate thing sitting out here on your own. You’re the Shack, with a door between.” He turned around and looked at them for the first time since they’d come in. “That’s how Richard would have drawn it. Not a stand on its own. A room off the main one, so they could talk to each other.”

Nobody said anything. Out under the front shutter a car went by on the street, and somewhere behind the shared wall a chair scraped, the Shack waking up for the day, three feet and a world away.

“Bernie,” Stella said, and stopped, because she didn’t have the rest of the sentence. “I don’t—what is this. What are you saying.”

“I’m saying it’s yours if you want it.” He said it plainly, the way you’d tell someone the time. “The two of you. This building, for the baking. I’m too old to do anything with it but keep the water on, and it’s just sitting here being a place I used to be, and you two need a kitchen that isn’t somebody else’s kitchen.” He put his hands in his pockets. “So. It’s here. It’s yours if you want it.”

Stella looked at Margo. Margo hadn’t moved from her spot by the door, and she didn’t now, she just tipped her head a fraction. Yes, he means it. And—this isn’t my part. And something else Stella couldn’t read at all.

“We don’t have any money,” Joey said. He said it fast, the way he said the true hard thing before he could stop himself, the systems part of him already running the numbers and finding them empty. “Bernie, we’re eighteen. We can’t—an oven, the buildout, we don’t have⁠—”

“You have more than you think,” Margo said, from the door.

It was the first thing she’d said since they came in.

“Stella’s been on the Shack’s books a year. Earning. Not spending much, unless you’ve been hiding a habit from me.” A dry look. “That’s not nothing. That’s a year of real work and real wages, and it’s sitting there.” She let that settle. “And Joey. The scholarship fund that sent you to that program. That’s yours, not the school’s. If you decided that money wanted to go somewhere else—somewhere you’d actually use it—I wouldn’t stand in the way of that. It was always meant to help you make a life, not to hold you inside one you don’t want.”

Joey went very still. Stella watched him open the door she knew he’d thought was locked, the money he’d thought only bought the one thing, being handed to him sideways as his to spend on the thing he actually wanted—and she watched him not be able to pick it up yet, because it was too much and too fast and the too-good-to-be-true of it had him by the throat.

“You’d—” he started. “You would let me⁠—”

“I’m not letting you do anything. I’m telling you what’s already yours.” Margo’s voice stayed level. “What you do with it is your business. That’s the whole point of it being yours.”