Page 22 of The Beach Shack Legacy

“You made all of these,” Stella said.

“We sold all of these.” Margo turned the walnut bread card over, and there on the back was the note she knew would be there—R says double it. R was right. “The walnut bread went to the church crowd. The almond croissants went to the ladies who said they were just walking. Everything went, Stella. There was never anything left by ten. Saturday mornings, off that counter, before the grill was even hot. You could smell the butter from the corner. People came down the hill in their work clothes and took things away in paper and ate them walking. The whole street knew what morning it was.”

Stella had gone very still, the way she went still behind her camera. “There are menus in the trunk,” she said. “Hand-drawn ones. His writing and—yours. All over each other’s. I thought you were checking his numbers.”

Margo laughed again, once. “I was writing the menu, Stella. He drew them—he’d have drawn the napkins if I’d let him. He did the pictures and the prices and the optimism, and I wrote the food. We built those pages at the kitchen table with the radio on.”

“He did draw a napkin.”

Margo looked up.

“There’s one in the trunk. In a folder by itself, like it mattered.” Stella said it carefully, the way you put something down on a table you’re not sure about. “Two buildings and a road. And it says that one’s yours.”

“Oh, that.” Margo went back to the cards, and there was a smile somewhere under it. “That’s from the track. Those two went down there as young men and lost money and came home with plans.” She laid the apricot slice beside the walnut bread. “He built Bernard that stand with his own hands and never once let him forget it. He’d have built the whole street if anybody had given him the lumber.”

“Then why did it stop?”

The question arrived the way the young ask questions, straight through the middle. Anna’s knife slowed at the grill. Joey had gone quiet at his tables.

“Richard died, and grilled cheese and a pickle was what I could manage with two small children.”

She said it and took the next card, and her hands kept working, one card and then another, laying all of them out in rows on a dish towel, and that was that. The apricot slice went beside the walnut bread. Anna’s spatula picked back up at the grill.

“The tarts,” Stella said, quietly, taking the lemon card up again.

“Yes. That’s why we planted the tree.”

Margo looked at the card in Stella’s hand. Her grandmother’s sugar, her own lemons.

She looked up, then, because the booth had been quiet too long. Bernie had the pen down and the crossword folded over. He had money on this and no intention of pretending otherwise.

“Don’t,” Margo said.

“I haven’t said a word.”

“You’re about to.” She slid the next card out of the box. “Drink your coffee, Bernard.”

At ten Anna flipped the sign and the regulars came in on schedule. The cards stayed out. Margo went on emptying the box with the day starting around her, and when Joey materialized at her elbow with the look and the label maker, she said, “You may not laminate my grandmother,” and he wrote something in his notebook and turned around.

Near the bottom of the box she came to the almond croissants and held the card a moment.

“A woman came up to me in a bakery the other week,” she said. “Told me she still thinks about these. Her husband used to drive over for them, she said.”

“What did you say?”

“I said it was a long time ago.” Margo put the card down on the towel with the others, face up, in the light.

She chose a card from the middle of the row—the shortbread, plain, her grandmother’s—and held it out to Stella between two fingers.

“If you want to try any of them, start with this one. It’s forgiving, and she’d like knowing an Australian was making it.”

Stella took the card with both hands, the way she’d carried the box, and put it gently in her backpack.

Margo picked her knife back up and went through a tomato, and then stood a moment looking down the counter at the towel laid out flat with the whole of it face up in the morning sun.

The box stayed open on the counter all through the lunch rush. Nobody put it away. She checked once in the afternoon, and then she stopped checking.

CHAPTER NINE