Page 11 of The Beach Shack Legacy

“That’s true.” Meg got the trays onto the counter by the proofing rack and turned them so her initials faced out, which Joey would redo anyway. “Is this a problem for you?”

“It is not a problem for me.” Anna went back to counting. “I’m making an observation.”

Tyler came through with the tub. “She’s been here three times this week.”

“Four,” Margo said, to her coffee.

“San Clemente’s winding down,” Meg said. “There’s a handover and then there isn’t a San Clemente, and in the meantime I have Tuesdays, and I would like everyone to stop looking at me.”

Joey materialized at the end of the counter with the closing clipboard. “Are those going in the walk-in or are they staying out?”

“I’ll do it.” Meg picked the trays back up. “Bottom shelf, left, and nobody relabels them.”

Joey made a small notation and did not agree to anything.

Meg looked around the room at the chairs going up and the light coming in long across the floor and her family in the middle of it, and pulled out a stool and sat down on it like a woman with nowhere to be. Margo’s eyes stayed on her a beat past anything the moment required.

Anna counted the drawer while Stella drifted toward the back wall and the old photos—Richard behind the counter, the bicentennial bunting, Margo young and laughing at something outside the frame. But her chin kept coming back up toward the ceiling, and after a minute she crossed the room to the counter with the camera still in her hand.

“Margo, how did the shells start?”

Margo looked up from the coffee she’d been turning in her hands. “The shells?”

“On the ceiling. Who put the first one up? How did it become a thing?”

“Richard found the first one on the beach. The morning we opened.” Margo set the cup down. “He came in with his pockets full of sand and this sand dollar, and he put it up above the door. I asked him what on earth he was doing and he said the ocean should be inside too.”

Anna stopped counting.

Bernie looked up and squinted at the sand dollar. “He also said that the tradition was to put an actual dollar up there.”

Margo smiled and looked up. “We didn’t have one yet, so he said a sand dollar would have to do.” Margo pointed above the door. “That one’s still up there. You can see where the plaster cracked around it.”

Stella found it with the camera and held it there a long moment before the shutter went, and then she didn’t lower the camera.

“Then Mrs. Patterson brought one back from Greece,” Margo said. “She’d gone for her anniversary and she walked in with this little brown shell wrapped in a napkin and said it reminded her of the Shack. I didn’t know what to do with it, so I glued it up next to Richard’s.”

“And then everyone started bringing them,” Bernie said from his booth, without looking up.

Margo’s hand went out toward the far wall. “From the beach, from vacations, from their grandchildren’s collections. They’d drop them in the bowl by the register and tell me where they came from. Every single one had a story.” She took a sip. “I used to glue them up at night after closing. Just me and the radio and a step stool.”

She stopped.

“That’s not right,” she said. “Richard held the stool. He was the one who thought people would bring them at all—I told him nobody would.” She picked her coffee back up. “The blue one near the window is the Barton’s honeymoon in Kauai. The little conch above the grill is from a girl named Sophie who found it at Crystal Cove and told me it was magic, and she’s got children of her own now. The red one by the door is a fisherman named Aldo who came in every morning for years and then moved back to Portugal. He mailed it. Wrapped in newspaper. It took three weeks to get here and the newspaper was in Portuguese.”

Stella’s camera went—click, click, click—following Margo’s hand across the ceiling. Then it came down. She stood in the middle of the dining room with her arms at her sides, going shell to shell.

“I need a topic for my senior project,” she said. “Mr. Reeves wants my proposal soon and I haven’t got one.”

Tyler set down the bus tub. “There you go.”

Stella looked at him.

“Reeves has been after me to come talk to his class since before you were born,” Tyler said. “Maybe you can redeem the Walsh name.”

“What did you do to the Walsh name?” Anna asked.

“Graduated out of spite. Long story.” He picked the tub back up and headed for the kitchen. “But the project’s right above your head.”