Page 35 of The Beach Shack Legacy

He wiped it and did it again.

“How much do we charge?” Joey asked, and everybody paused and looked at the shortbread.

The pricing took twenty-two minutes, which Joey mentioned because he timed it.

“Two dollars,” Anna said, from the grill.

“Two dollars is a cup of coffee.” Joey had a clipboard now. “This has butter in it.”

“Coffee has coffee in it.”

“Coffee is nine cents a cup and we charge two dollars, which is the only reason this restaurant exists.” He wrote something down. “Three dollars.”

Anna turned a sandwich over without looking at it. “Nobody’s paying three dollars for a cookie.”

“It is materially not a cookie. There’s no leavening.”

Stella sat on the prep counter with her heels against the cabinet and watched them go. Tyler came through twice and declined to have an opinion both times, on the grounds that he had once tried to price a photograph and had thought about it for six weeks.

“What did it cost to make?” Anna asked.

“That’s the correct question.” Joey turned to a clean page. “I don’t know. I know what a case of butter costs. I don’t know what one of those costs, because nobody’s ever made one of those before.” He wrote BUTTER at the top and underlined it twice. “This is going to take a minute.”

“We open in forty.”

“Then it’s going to take forty.”

They were still at it when the door chimed and the first customers came in, and they were still at it in the lull after the first rush, Joey with a page of numbers and Anna with her arms crossed and the tray of shortbread sitting under a dish towel. Waiting.

The board said SHORTBREAD and nothing else. Joey had refused to write a price he could not defend.

Michael came in at eleven-forty for lunch.

He came in the way he always came in—on time, no announcement, straight to the wobbly stool that he had somehow decided was his—and he had his phone and two pens out and lined up beside the napkin before Anna got to him.

“Soup?” Anna asked. “There’s soup.”

“Soup’s fine.” He looked at the board. “What’s the shortbread?”

Nobody said anything for a second.

“It’s new,” Anna said.

“It’s not on the board with a price.”

“We’re aware,” Joey said.

Michael looked from the board to Joey’s page of numbers, upside down, and then at Anna, and something in his face changed a very small amount.

“You’re pricing it?”

“We’ve been pricing it for a very long time,” Anna said.

“It’s eleven-forty.”

“I’m aware of that too.”

Michael turned the page toward himself with one finger. He read it. He did not comment on it, which Stella understood, watching him, was a kindness.