Page 33 of The Beach Shack Legacy

And there it was, laid on the table between them in that mild way he had, the way he’d asked her about the storm and the newsstand and every other thing since they were young—one question, no push behind it, and no way out of it either.

Margo didn’t answer.

The refrigerator came on. Out the window the lemon tree moved a little in whatever wind was coming up the hill, and somewhere down the street a car door shut.

Bernie stood up and closed the box and squared it on the table.

“Come down to the house,” he said. “The game’s at five. There’s fudge.”

“There’s always fudge.”

“That’s the point of it.”

Margo looked at the box a moment longer. Then she went and got her cardigan off the back of the chair. They went out through the front, and she locked the door with the deadbolt that stuck, two tries, the way it always did.

They walked down the hill. Neither of them said anything about the box she’d left on the table or the question.

It was a good evening, clear and warming up. The jasmine was going somewhere along the fence line and the ocean was flat and metallic past the rooftops and a man neither of them knew waved at them from a driveway, and Bernie’s house came up behind its low hedge with the porch light already on because he’d left it on that morning.

The jar was on the counter where it lived now. It had spent one whole winter in the back of his freezer behind the ice trays, being saved, and it had come out to the counter in the spring and never gone back.

Margo got the bowls down without being told where they were.

Later, on the couch, with the game on and the good spoons and the fudge going soft in its jar between them, she took out her phone and held it a moment. Then she typed four words, and read them over, and sent them, and put the phone face down on the arm of the couch.

“Anything?” Bernie asked, not looking away from the television.

“Nothing,” Margo said. “Pass the fudge.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Stella was standing in the kitchen at Tyler’s with a piece of toast in her hand when she saw the text Margo had sent.

Put it on the board.

That was all of it. She read it twice and then a third time, looking for the rest, and there wasn’t any rest. Margo did not use punctuation the way other people did and she did not explain herself, but she also did not send four words at night about a biscuit.

Did I get it right, Stella had asked her yesterday, with flour to her elbows and the pink box on the counter between them.

It looks lovely, Margo had said.

And now this.

Stella put the toast down and typed three different replies and sent none of them, and then got her bag and went.

Joey read the text over her shoulder before she had the door all the way shut behind her. He did that. Nobody had ever been able to stop him doing that.

“Four words.”

“I know.”

“There’s no punctuation.” He said it like a diagnosis.

“I know, Joey.”

He came around the end of the counter with her and he was already up on the balls of his feet, which he did when a he got excited about something. “The board has room. The board has had room since we took the gazpacho off since it wasn’t a special anymore. Only regular menu.I have a note about it.” He was walking backward now. “How many can you make in a morning?”

“I’ve made it once.”