Page 30 of The Beach Shack Legacy

“Logged and satisfied,” Joey said. “The project.”

They ate it off paper plates at the counter, no ceremony. The shell cracked when Stella cut it, loud in the quiet room, and gave, and the middle was soft the way it was supposed to be.

“Mum stands right next to me the whole time when we make this,” Stella said. “Narrating. Every step.” She looked at her plate. “This one worked anyway.” It had worked an ocean from the kitchen it came from, without anybody standing next to her, and Stella didn’t know if that was a sad thing or a proud one, so she had a second piece.

Bea reached over and tapped her fork against Stella’s, once, which at that counter counted as a toast.

“So what’s next,” Joey said. He had the box open. He had had the box open for some time.

“Next?”

“You have a box of instructions and a functioning oven.” He was going through the cards from the back. That was the wrong end. She let him. “This one. Almond croissants.”

“Joey, absolutely not.”

“It says laminated dough.” He turned the card around like a man producing evidence. “Lamination. That is my word. I have used that word professionally⁠—”

“Do you know what laminated dough is?” Stella took the card from him and set it face down.

“Layers.”

“It’s butter, and you fold it and chill it and fold it and chill it and fold it, and it takes two days, and if the kitchen’s warm it just doesn’t work.” Stella took the card off him. “You’d cry.”

“I would document it.”

“You’d document it and then you’d cry.”

Bea spoke from the stool without looking up from the sketchbook.

“Didn’t Margo give you a card?”

Neither of them said anything. After four hours in that kitchen it was the first quiet either of them had managed.

“She handed it to you. Mom told me. In front of everybody, over the counter, and you took it in both hands like it was a baby.” Bea turned a page. “And then you came here and made biscuits, and then you made this twice. I’m only saying it’s been in your bag.”

Joey was already looking at Stella.

She wiped her hands and got it out of the front pocket since the morning Margo had handed it to her, the spidery hand of a woman two generations back from the woman who had handed it over.

“What’s on it?” Joey asked.

“Butter. Sugar. Flour.” Stella turned it over. The back was blank. “That’s the whole card.”

Joey looked at it for a while. Then he looked at the three paper plates and the empty parchment and the wreck of the first attempt in the bin, which Bea had memorialized.

“Mrs. Feldstein would eat four of those,” he said.

“She would.”

“Mr. Ruiz would take some home for his wife. He asks about the muffins every day and we do not have muffins every day.” Joey got the notebook out. “The tourists at the window would buy one each and photograph it.”

“You’re making a list.”

“I am making an observation with structure.”

Bea shut the sketchbook. “Make the shortbread,” she said, and went to find her shoes.

Stella stayed at the counter with the card. Three ingredients, no oven temperature, no warnings on the back about damp days or patience or walking away.