Page 7 of The Beach Shack Legacy

Other people’s moments, perfectly framed.

CHAPTER THREE

Bernie rang the doorbell.

He had never once rung her doorbell. He had knocked, he had walked in, he had stood on the porch and called her name through the screen door. But today he rang the doorbell, and Margo stood on the other side of it in her good cardigan, holding her purse with both hands. This was new.

She opened the door. Bernie had on a collared shirt. Tucked in.

“You dressed up,” she said.

“I put on a different shirt.”

“You tucked it in. You have never tucked in a shirt in fifty years of knowing me.”

“You’re keeping track of my shirts?”

“I’m observant.” She pulled the door shut behind her and locked it, which took two tries because the deadbolt stuck and always had. “Where are we going?”

“I told you. That French place on PCH.”

“You said a bakery. You didn’t say French.”

“It’s called La Petite Something. It’s French.” Bernie held open the passenger door of his sedan. The car was approximately the same age as their friendship and drove like it. “Eleanor recommended it.”

“Eleanor recommends everything. Last month she recommended a foot cream that smelled like turpentine.”

“This is breakfast, not foot cream. Get in.”

Margo got in. The seat was adjusted too far back—Bernie’s legs were longer than hers and he hadn’t thought to change it. She reached for the lever and slid forward with a mechanical thunk that startled them both.

“I could have done that,” he said, settling in behind the wheel.

“You could have done it before I got in.”

“I didn’t think of it.”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

He pulled out of her driveway. Slowly. Bernie had never been in a hurry in his life, and he wasn’t about to start on PCH. Margo held her purse and looked out the window. Breakfast with Bernard Klein. Someone else’s restaurant.

The Shack didn’t need her—Anna had the ordering, Tyler had the prep, Joey had the systems that kept everything calibrated to within an inch of its life. They were fine without her. She knew this because she’d spent months teaching herself to believe it.

But it was something. Riding in Bernie’s car, headed away from the beach, away from the Shack, toward a place with a French name and food she hadn’t made. Like playing hooky.

“Have you been here before?” she asked.

“Once. With my dentist.”

“You went to a French bakery with your dentist?”

“He’s a very cultured dentist.” Bernie turned onto PCH, merged carefully into traffic, and drove exactly the speed limit. “The croissants were good.”

“Better than mine?”

She said it without thinking and then heard it—mine. As if she still made croissants. As if she ever had, regularly. She’d made them a handful of times. Maybe more than a handful. A long time ago. And she remembered that they weren’t easy.

La Petite Maison sat between a surf shop and a realtor’s office, about as Laguna Beach as an address gets. Small, bright, a blue-and-white awning over a glass door. Through the window, a pastry case ran the length of the counter—rows of croissants and tarts and éclairs under glass.