Page 37 of The Beach Shack Legacy

He bought one. He ate it standing at the counter, in three bites, looking out the window at the water, and then he bought two more to take with him and left without saying anything else about it, and Stella stood there holding twelve dollars and did not entirely know what to say.

A stranger had walked in off the street and chosen the thing she’d made with her own hands, and bought three of them. She put the twelve dollars in the register and got the count wrong and had to do it again.

By one o’clock they’d sold nine.

By one-forty Mrs. Feldstein had come back for a second and asked, in a tone that made it a formal inquiry, whether this was going to be a regular thing.

At two-ten Stella lifted the dish towel and there were two left, and she stood staring at the empty tray underneath.

“Sold out,” Joey said, from the doorway. He had his clipboard against his chest. “At two-eighteen we will be sold out. I’d like to note that the projection was four o’clock.”

“How far off were you?”

“Extremely.” He said it the way another person would say I have won something. “I’ll need the recipe scaled. And a second sheet pan, and a decision about tomorrow, and I would like it on the record that an official takeout container does not exist for this item and I have thoughts about pink boxes.”

“Joey, go away.”

“I’ll write them up.”

He went. Stella took a picture of the empty tray, and then one of the board with the four-dollar sign and the blue letters spaced right, and then she stood at the counter with her camera in her hand and let the room go on around her—Anna calling an order, the door chiming, the light coming off the water and up the wall, Michael long gone back to wherever Michael went.

The door chimed again at half past two, and it was Margo.

Tote over her arm, paint on the side of one hand. She came in the way she always came in and she stopped, four feet inside the door, and looked at the specials board.

SHORTBREAD. $4. Blue ink, correctly spaced.

Stella watched her read it. Margo did not do anything dramatic. She looked at the board, and then past it at the empty tray on the counter with the dish towel folded next to it, and then she went to her stool and set her tote down and asked Anna for a coffee.

That was all.

She sat there and drank it and read the paper Bernie had left folded on the counter, and she did not say one word about the board, and once, when she thought nobody was looking, she looked up at it again.

Stella got that one. Through the viewfinder, from across the room, without deciding to.

She checked the frame afterward and it was blurred and badly composed and she kept it anyway.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The butter smell had moved in under the coffee, and Anna had stopped noticing when.

It was there when she unlocked in the mornings now, baked into the air the way the grilled cheese was baked into the walls, and it was there mid-shift, riding over the grill heat every time the oven door opened. A week of it. The specials board had the shortbread in the corner in Joey’s blue ink, third rewrite—he kept adjusting the letter spacing—and Margo’s lemon tarts had sold out before noon two days running, and Stella came in early now with flour on her wrists and left with her hair smelling of butter and sugar.

Anna ran the grill while it happened around her. She set a plate of the shortbread ends at Bernie’s elbow on her way past, because the ends didn’t sell and he didn’t ask, which made them his.

“Five letters,” Bernie said, not looking up. “Rises in the morning.”

“Bread,” Anna said.

“That’s five.” He wrote it in. “So is ‘Stella.’ I considered both.”

Mrs. Patterson had asked, paying for her grilled cheese, what they would make tomorrow. Not whether. What. And could there be a schedule.

The place hadn’t felt like this since the fall, when they added the weekend dinners and every week came in bigger than the one before it. Except they’d built that. Somebody had sat down with a calendar and decided it. Nobody had decided this at all. It had shown up in her kitchen the way weather shows up.

She flipped a sandwich and found she was in a good mood and had been all morning.

The morning was bright all the way down to the water, the gloom gone for now. The door was propped for the delivery. Joey moved down the counter restocking the number-card holders, and the whole room ran on its rails, orders up, plates out, coffee around.