Page 67 of The Beach Shack Legacy

Joey didn’t answer. He turned and looked at the back of the room, the squared-off space where an oven would go, and Stella could see him putting an oven in it in his head, and taking it back out, and not trusting himself to leave it there.

“What about—” Stella’s mind was catching up, running ahead, snagging. “This is the family’s. Isn’t it? The Shack, the—Tyler, and Anna, and Meg. It’s all of theirs. We can’t just⁠—”

“The newsstand’s mine,” Bernie said. “Free and clear. Has been since before your father was born. That part’s not complicated.”

“But the rest of it. Them. What they’d think.”

Margo made a small sound that wasn’t quite a laugh.

“You’d have to sell it to them,” she said. “Not the building. The idea. If you want this, you don’t get to have it handed to you in a quiet room by two old people who love you. You’d have to stand up in front of the whole family and tell them what you mean to do and let them say their piece.” She picked an invisible something off her cardigan sleeve. “That’s the price. Not the money. That. Convincing the people it belongs to that you’re serious.” She looked at Stella, and there was something in it that went back to a porch and a tart. “If you want it. That’s the only question in this room. The rest is just work.”

And that was the thing that undid Stella, standing in the dust in a room Bernie and Richard had built crooked on purpose one summer before any of them were born—not the offer, not the oven, not even the money. It was if you want it. The question she couldn’t answer about her own life, asked about this one thing, and finding, somewhere under the fear, that she did.

She didn’t say it. It was too big to say in that room and it wasn’t only hers to say—Joey was standing right there with his own version of the same yes stuck in his own throat, and this wasn’t the moment you said it.

“Can we think about it?” Stella asked.

“No,” Bernie said, and then, when her face fell, he smiled—not something she was too familiar with. “I’m joking. Of course you can think about it. Take all the time you want. It’s been empty a long time, it’ll keep.” He looked around the little room, his room, the crooked wall, the racks. “Go on. Talk to each other. The offer doesn’t have a clock on it.”

He held the door for them, and the two of them went out past Margo into the ordinary morning—the street, the gulls, the Shack coming to life next door with no idea yet what had just been offered three feet from its wall.

Behind them Bernie didn’t come out right away. Stella glanced back once and saw him standing in the middle of the little room, in the dust and the light, looking at the crooked wall, not in a hurry, a man alone for a minute in a place he used to be.

Then Margo said something to him too low to hear, and he laughed, came out, and locked the door on its loop of green string.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

They left their shoes on the patio, side by side under the bench, and walked down onto the sand in their bare feet like the morning was a normal one, which it was not.

Neither of them had said much on the way down. There wasn’t a way to start. They’d walked out of Bernie’s little room and past the Shack coming to life, Anna’s voice already going inside and the grill ticking as it heated, and they’d kept walking, past the patio and down the steps and out onto the beach, because the beach was the only place in town big enough to hold the size of what had just happened and empty enough this early that nobody would ask them why they were sitting at the waterline at open when they were supposed to be working.

They sat where the wet sand started. Up behind them and to the left, small from here, tucked against the Shack’s flank like it had always been part of it, was the newsstand. From the beach you could see how they leaned into each other, the big building and the little one, one roof lower than the other, the crooked wall not even visible from this distance, just two shapes that had stood next to each other longer than Stella had been alive.

She couldn’t stop looking at it.

Joey couldn’t stop doing math.

He’d found a flat stretch of wet sand between his feet and he was writing in it with one finger, fast, numbers and then lines under numbers and then arrows, wiping it smooth with the side of his hand when he ran out of room and starting again. She watched him do three whole passes before she said anything.

“Joey. I can’t read that.”

“You’re not supposed to read it, I’m figuring it.” He didn’t look up. “Oven’s the big one. A real deck oven, used, if we can find one, is—okay, I don’t actually know what one costs, I’m using a number from a forum on the internet, but call it this.” He wrote a figure. Wiped it. “Then the buildout. The door through the wall, which is a permit, which is a person, which is money. Hood. Electrical, because a real oven isn’t running on what’s in there now. Then—” He stopped, stared at the sand, and wrote a bracket around the whole mess. “Then everything I haven’t thought of, which is always the number that gets you. My dad says the number that gets you is always the one you didn’t write down.”

“You don’t have any of those numbers.”

“I have some of the numbers.”

“You have numbers from a forum.” She reached over and wiped his whole equation flat with her palm, gently, the way you’d close a book somebody’d fallen asleep reading. “It’s sand, Joey. You’re doing a spreadsheet in the tide.”

He looked at the smooth wet place where his math had been, and for a second she thought he might be annoyed, and then his shoulders came down half an inch and he almost laughed, which for Joey in this state was a lot.

“I don’t know how to not do it,” he said. “It’s the only thing my hands know how to do with this. If I stop doing the numbers I have to just—” He turned his hand over, empty, the gesture of something too big to hold. “Feel it. And I don’t know how to do that one at all.”

“Yeah.” Stella looked back up at the little building. “I’m doing the other one. I don’t know how to do yours.”

The thing she was feeling, the one she didn’t have numbers for, was not the oven or the buildout or the money. It was smaller than all of that and much larger. It was that Bernie had stood in his own room and asked if you want it, and she’d been asked that question her whole life in a hundred forms—what do you want to do, what do you want to be, what do you want, Stella—and never once had an answer that didn’t feel like a coat that didn’t fit. And standing in the dust with the gold light coming through the shutter she’d had one. She’d wanted it. Under the fear, plain as anything, she had wanted it, and she still did, sitting here, looking at it. She didn’t say that part out loud. It was too new to touch.

What she said was, “If we did this. We’d be partners.”