Page 27 of The Beach Shack Legacy

The oven ticked. The fog sat right against the windows and the kitchen filled up slowly with oats and butter and warm syrup.

Somewhere in there the stress had gone quiet. Baking did that—the only thing that did—and the quiet in his head was a relief so complete he had not noticed it arriving.

“I haven’t opened it,” Joey said.

Stella was wiping the counter that did not need wiping. “The plan?”

“It’s in my apron. I take it out and I put it back.” He kept his back to her. “The plan is sound. I’ve checked it. There’s nothing wrong with the plan.”

Stella did not say anything for a moment. Then she said, “Okay,” and kept wiping.

The comparison, when it came out and had cooled enough to constitute data, was not close.

Joey ate one from each tray with a glass of water in between, to clear the palate. Then he did it again, because one trial is an anecdote. Then he stood with his hands flat on the counter.

The source document produced a superior outcome. It was not a close call and there was no honest way to write it up as one.

“Further trials?” Stella asked.

He had not said it out loud. He looked at her.

“You were about to.”

She picked up the card and read the margin again, and then she said, to the card more than to him, “I never really knew her. Phone calls. Birthday cards. And now her handwriting’s bossing me around a kitchen she never stood in.” She set it down where the flour couldn’t get it. “I like her.”

Joey looked at the card, and nodded once, and started the dishes.

The second batch went in. Stella ran the hot water and Bella supervised from the stool and the hill above town was gone now behind the glass.

Joey took the laminated page out of the binder and put it on the counter in front of him. It had been correct for a long time. It had been correct this morning. But now it wasn’t.

He got out the Post-it pen and wrote the amendment—syrup doubled, rest step, pending further trials—and stuck it to the plastic.

He did not make a new page. He did not laminate the Post-it.

He put the binder back on the shelf by the board, and the study plan stayed folded in his apron pocket, where it had been all day, and the oven ticked behind him, and his head stayed quiet.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

By afternoon the marine layer had burned off to a white haze, and the light came through the front windows across the empty dining room. The sign was flipped. The chairs were up.

Stella came through the back door not long after close with Nana’s box under her arm and flour already on her shirt from carrying it against the apron.

Joey stopped mopping.

“It’s in,” she said. “The whole thing. Reeves read the first two pages standing at his desk and said it was either the best senior project this year or an elaborate excuse to hang around a restaurant.”

“Those aren’t mutually exclusive.”

“That’s what I told him.” She set the box on the prep counter and took out the card she had been circling since the night she went through the box with her mother. “So. We’re doing it. The pavlova.”

Joey leaned the mop against the wall, washed his hands, and dried them with the focus he usually saved for the coffee machine. “I’ve read about pavlova. Meringue base, cream, fruit. Structurally ambitious.”

“My mum taught me at Christmas.” Stella put the card down where they could both see it. Nana’s block capitals across the top, and under the title, in the small upright hand, a margin note, For celebrations only.

Joey read the note twice. “Is turning in a senior project a celebration?”

“I don’t know. Is it?”