Page 75 of The Beach Shack Legacy

“Ow.”

“You’re doing it again.”

“Doing what?”

“You told the focaccia woman the Shack has a destiny. She came in for a soup and bread, Joey. She doesn’t need to know about its destiny.” Stella refilled two waters that weren’t totally empty, for cover. “You have to act like a normal person who isn’t sitting on anything.”

“I am acting normal.”

“You told a man his grilled cheese was historic.”

“It might be.” Joey looked troubled by the possibility that it wasn’t. “We don’t know yet.”

She sent him to the far station to cut lemons, the job furthest from customers, and he went, wounded, and cut lemons very precisely, to show he’d been misunderstood.

The only other person in the room who knew—the only one besides the three of them—was Bernie, in his booth, crossword folded, coffee gone cold again, more interested in the room than in the puzzle. He’d gotten the front-row seat by simple geography. His booth looked straight down the floor, and for two hours he’d tracked three teenagers fail to contain themselves, settled and unhurried, like he was enjoying a very slow, very good movie.

He caught Stella’s eye once, over the top of the paper, right as she steered Joey away from a family of four he’d nearly said something ominous to. Bernie didn’t smile, exactly—something happened around his eyes that was close to one. He tipped his head a bit toward Joey, then back to her—him, that one, he’s going to give you away—and Stella had to bite the inside of her cheek and look at the floor.

It was the wink that nearly did it. He aimed it at his own crossword, private, careful never to look right at her—a man enjoying a joke alone. Stella wouldn’t have thought twice about it, except Meg had drifted to the next table to clear plates, and she caught it. Her eyes went from Bernie, to the crossword, to the general vicinity of the three of them, and narrowed, half a degree.

Stella’s stomach dropped. Meg had caught it. She’d caught Bernie knowing something.

But Meg just straightened, stacked her plates, and said, “Bernie, you want a warm-up on that coffee?”

“I want a great many things, young lady,” Bernie said, and Meg went to the kitchen. Whatever she’d filed, she’d filed it under Bernie, not under them.

The suspicion, such as it was, had landed on the one person who could carry it and give nothing away. They’d sweated the whole shift, and the only leak in the room was a man who’d been keeping this exact kind of secret since before any of them were born.

And they kept feeding the jar.

That was the part Stella couldn’t have explained to anybody. Ruth’s jar sat by the register—the one Joey had tried to refuse, weeks ago, on the grounds that it collected for something that didn’t exist. Now, every time one of them got a tip, they crossed the whole floor to put it in that jar specifically, with a ceremony wildly out of proportion to the coins. A dollar went in like a coronation. Joey fed it a handful of change once, holding eye contact with Stella the entire time—the two of them grinning at a jar, at a piece of glass, because they couldn’t say what the jar was actually for. So they said it to the jar instead.

“What is with you kids and that jar today,” Anna said, going past with an armload.

The three of them froze. It was the closest anyone had come all day.

“We like Ruth,” Stella said.

Anna looked at her for a second—one full second, in which Stella died several times—and then said, “Well, we all like Ruth,” and kept walking. She had eleven tables and a fryer acting up, and precisely zero curiosity about why three teenagers were being weird about a tip jar. Three teenagers being weird was the baseline condition of the Shack, and had always been.

They’d gotten away with it. Again. They kept getting away with it, all afternoon, for the simple reason that nobody was chasing them.

By the time the rush thinned, Stella had said when this is ours in her head so many times it had stopped being if. She caught Joey at the window between orders. He had that look again—the one from the empty building, where he stood still inside the plan instead of taking it apart.

“When it’s ours,” he said, quietly, just to her, “I’m still putting in a real lock. On Bernie’s door.”

“You’ve said.”

“I want it on the record that I’ve been consistent.” He wiped the window down. “It’s the only thing I’ve been sure about the whole time. The lock.” He almost smiled. “And now the whole rest of it, too. But the lock first.”

That was as close as Joey got to saying he wanted it. The lock first. Stella filed it next to everything else she kept.

Her phone buzzed in her apron.

She almost didn’t check it—hands full, Anna somewhere behind her. Then the name on the screen registered and her whole stomach dropped through the floor. It was Michael. Michael didn’t call to chat—never once.

She got Joey with two fingers on his sleeve and pulled him into the dead space by the walk-in, where the family couldn’t see. Bea caught them going and abandoned her stakeout table so fast the iced tea rocked. The three of them crowded into three square feet of cold air by the cooler. Stella turned the phone so all three of them could watch it buzz—MICHAEL, lit up, insistent.