Page 82 of The Beach Shack Legacy

He picked it back up, and put it down again.

“Every year?” he asked.

“He literally said every year. First day of that class, from now on, starts with your kid’s name on a screen.”

Tyler looked for the joke. For once it was right there where he kept them.

“I barely passed that class,” he said. “Reeves’ class. I skipped it to surf. He’d mark me present and then find me in the parking lot at lunch covered in sand and never say a word about it.” He turned his wine glass as he thought. “He spent a whole year trying to get me to take the thing seriously. Gave up. And now he wants to open it with my kid. Every fall. Forever.”

Lindsey laughed, the way only somebody who’d spent twenty years in schools could laugh at that poetic flavor of justice.

“She’s the curriculum,” Tyler said. “I’m the guy he uses as the before picture.”

“He does not use you as a before picture.”

“He should. It’s a good arc.”

She was still smiling when he went quiet, and she let the moment stay that way, which was one of the things he loved most about her.

“A year ago I ate standing over the sink and thought I had it figured out,” he said, finally. “Work I liked. Waves in the morning. I wasn’t unhappy.” He leaned forward with his elbows on the table. “I was just stopped all the way down.” He held up a thumb and finger, a hair apart. “Letting in about that much light. Calling it a life.”

“And then she got off a plane.”

“We got off together, before I knew what together would even mean for either of us.” He looked at the plate, the lemon, the whole small ceremony of it. “And now there’s a stand with a door coming, and a professor with a file, and she doesn’t need me for much of any of it. Which is the point. You work yourself out of the job—that’s the whole job.” He stopped. Started again, shorter. “I keep waiting to feel like I’m losing something. It won’t come. And I finally figured out why.” His ears went warm, and he said it anyway. “Not everything I built this year was for her. Some of it I built so I’d have somewhere to stand when she didn’t need me. You’re a big part of that. Is what I’m saying. You have been for a while.”

Lindsey looked at him for a long moment.

“That is the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me in structural-engineering terms.”

“I have a limited range.”

“It’s a good, targeted limit,” she said—and then she set her wine down, leaned across the corner of the small table, and kissed him, one hand flat against his jaw, unhurried, while the food they’d both stopped pretending to eat went cold. It was not a first kiss. It had the ease of the hundredth. But it was the first one he let land without reaching for a joke to put in front of it.

When she sat back she looked pleased with herself, which he was learning was a look she wore well.

They did the dishes at her small sink, hip to hip. He washed. She dried, and rearranged everything he’d said into worse and worse summaries of it, and he defended none of it. The spare jar of capers went into her cabinet, third shelf, where he could find it next time.

The phone stayed face-down by the salt, dark, in no hurry. The answer would come when it came. Tyler dried his hands on a towel with somebody else’s flowers on it and didn’t check the time even once, because everything he’d been waiting for at that moment was already in the room.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Stella had called her mother the night before the pitch—late in Laguna, lunchtime in Sydney—and her mother had cried the good way and sworn secrecy without being asked. Now all that was left was for Rick to give his blessing.

He came after close, which they knew meant it was official, because Rick did birthdays and holidays like a normal person but he did business after close, with the doors locked and the chairs still down.

He had the briefcase.

Stella had never once cared about a briefcase in her life and now she watched this one come across the Shack floor like it had her whole future zipped inside it, which, more or less, it did.

“Evening,” Rick said. To all of them, to none of them. He set the briefcase on the counter and looked at Margo. “Back patio?”

“Back patio,” Margo said.

And the adults got up—all of them, Margo and Bernie and Tyler and Anna and Meg and Luke and Michael, the whole grown wall of them—and went out through the back, and the door clicked, and Stella and Joey and Bea were left standing in the closed restaurant with nothing to do but not die.

They lasted about as long as you’d expect.

“I can see them,” Bea said, already at the side window, the one that looked onto the corner of the patio through the gap in the bougainvillea. “I can see part of them. I can see Michael’s shoulder and half of Uncle Rick.”