Page 74 of The Beach Shack Legacy

“Bring me real numbers when you have them,” Michael said, “and I’ll build you a plan you can hand to the family that they can’t argue with. Not a kid’s plan. A real one.” He almost smiled. It didn’t quite arrive, but it got close enough that Stella saw where it would have been. “I believe in it. And in the two of you running it.”

Out on Forest Street the afternoon was bright and ordinary, and Stella realized halfway to the car that the thing in her chest had stopped bracing for no, because the man whose whole job was finding the reason something wouldn’t work had looked as hard as he could look, and hadn’t found one.

“He liked the cake,” Joey said, like it was the important part, and to Joey it was.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Stella carried three grilled cheeses to table four sure, the whole way there, that Anna had her in view. The back of her neck prickled with it. She set the plates down, said enjoy, and turned around ready to be caught.

Anna hadn’t so much as glanced her way. Anna was at the rail reading a ticket, glasses pushed up in her hair. “Stella, table six has been waiting on their order since forever,” she said, without looking up. That was the entire extent of Anna’s interest in Stella that afternoon.

No one in the room was paying them any attention at all. That was the part Stella couldn’t make herself believe. They had the biggest secret in the history of the bluff riding around in their chests. The lunch rush rolled right over the top of it, because to everyone else working it, it wasn’t there at all.

To the three of them it was the only thing in the room.

“Anna knows,” Joey said, low, passing her at the pickup window with a plate in each hand.

“Anna does not know.”

“She looked at me.”

“She looked at the plates. You’re holding the plates.”

“She looked at me holding the plates.” He said it like it clinched something.

They weren’t safe yet. That was what sat under the giddiness, keeping it from tipping all the way into fun. Michael had said the numbers worked and he’d get back to them with a proper plan. Bernie had left a key under a mat. But nobody had said yes yet—not the family, not the ones it actually belonged to. Until they did, the whole shining thing was a soap bubble the three of them were carrying across a crowded room. One wrong word to the wrong person before they’d pitched it right, and it was gone—popped, back to being something you were dumb enough to want out loud.

So they couldn’t say it. And not being able to say it was going to kill them.

Bea had appointed herself to a table by the window where she wasn’t working, because Bea didn’t work here. Bea was leaving for CalArts in the fall and was present strictly as a civilian. She’d ordered one iced tea two hours ago and was nursing it like a woman running a stakeout. Every time Stella or Joey came within range, she lobbed a name.

“The Rolling Pin,” Bea said, as Stella went by with a bus tub.

“That’s a bowling alley.” Stella didn’t slow down.

“The Daily Loaf.”

“That’s a department. That’s a sign that says here’s where the bread part happens.” Joey, going the other way, didn’t even slow down. “Next.”

“Butter Side Up.”

“Getting closer and also no.”

“Klein’s,” Bea tried—a bad idea Stella had floated days ago that Bea had clearly kept. “People will think we sell newspapers,” Joey said, without being asked, and Bea wrote something on a napkin and crossed it out with her whole arm.

The name was homework. It was the one thing Bea wouldn’t do for them—she’d do everything else. She’d already sketched a window and picked a color she described only as the inside of a peach, but she’d drawn a hard line on the name. I refuse to name your baby, she’d said. That’s how you end up resented at holidays. So she sat at her stakeout table and threw bad names at them all afternoon. Not to solve it, Stella understood. Just to keep the thing alive in the room—a small flame she cupped her hands around between deliveries.

The trouble was Joey.

Joey couldn’t hold it. Stella had known this about him in the abstract, and now she watched it prove out in real time—the boy had no valve. Everything in him ran straight to the surface. With the biggest thing of his life dammed up behind his face, it came out sideways, at customers, in fragments that made no sense to anyone who wasn’t him.

“Enjoy these,” he told a man receiving a grilled cheese on sourdough. “It’s a good time to be eating here. Really. Historically.”

The man said thank you, slowly.

“Big things,” Joey told a woman with a bowl of soup, setting it down with a strange reverence. “Sometimes a place is about to be more than it is. That’s all I’ll say.”

Stella got to him at the coffee station and pinched the back of his arm hard enough to make it count.