Page 36 of The Beach Shack Legacy

“How many does the recipe make?”

Stella slid off the counter. “Sixteen. Eighteen if you cut them smaller, but they break.”

“Sixteen.” He wrote a small number in the corner of his own napkin. “What’s in it?”

“Butter, sugar, flour. That’s it.”

“How much butter?” he asked.

“Two blocks.” Joey shifted half a step closer to the napkin, watching the numbers get written.

“How long does it take?” He was writing nothing down yet.

“Twenty minutes to make. An hour in the oven and cooling.”

“Whose hour?”

Stella opened her eyes wider. Joey looked up.

“Mine,” Stella said. “And Joey’s.”

Michael wrote for about four seconds. Then he put the pen down beside the other pen, aligned, and said, “Four dollars.”

The kitchen went quiet.

“Four,” Anna said.

“Four. Three if you want the number to be friendly, but it should be four.” He picked up his water. “You’re not selling flour and butter. There’s nothing else like it in town and people will walk for it, and if you price it like a cookie they’ll treat it like a cookie.”

Anna had not moved. She looked at the place on the napkin where Michael had written the small number, and she stayed looking at it after he put the pen down.

“That’s what I said,” Joey said, with feeling.

“You said three,” Anna said.

“I was building to four.”

Anna looked at Michael for a moment longer. She had priced everything in this kitchen by standing in the room until the number came to her, and Stella had never seen it take less than a day.

“Well,” she said. “Look at you.”

“It’s math.”

“It’s showing off.”

“It’s math,” Michael said again, but he smiled a little and ate his soup.

Joey wrote $4 on the board in blue, spaced it correctly on the first attempt, and hung the board back on its nail with an air of enormous personal restraint.

The first one sold right away.

It was a man Stella had never seen before, in a windbreaker, who was already paying for a grilled cheese when he stopped and looked at the board and asked, “What’s the shortbread?”

“It’s shortbread,” Stella said.

“Homemade?”

“This morning.”