Page 47 of The Beach Shack Legacy

“Completely uninteresting,” he said. “Move on.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the answer you’re getting.”

“Margo, make him.”

“Nobody makes Bernard do anything,” Margo said. “It has been attempted.”

And she looked at him one second longer than the joke required, and he did not look up from his plate, and the table went on around the two of them the way water goes around a rock.

Then Bea turned the other way, which Margo should have seen coming and did not.

“Margo. Same question.”

“I’m an old woman, Beatrice.”

“So you’ve had ages to think about it.”

Somebody laughed. Margo put down her fork.

The room did not go quiet all at once. It went quiet the way a room does when four people notice at different speeds—Anna first, then Meg at the counter with the serving spoon still in the dish, then Tyler, and then Michael, who had been listening the whole time.

“I fell into mine,” Margo said.

“Into the Shack?”

“Into all of it. I was going to teach. That was the plan, and it was a perfectly good plan, and I met a man who had drawn a picture of a building on a paper napkin and after that there was no plan at all, there was just Richard.” She said his name and it came out ordinary, which she was glad about. “And then there was a restaurant, and two children, then grandchildren, and then there wasn’t a Richard, and by the time I looked up half my life had gone by and I had a grill and a menu with one thing on it.”

“Grilled cheese,” Bea said.

“Grilled cheese and a pickle.”

“But you wanted to bake,” Bea said. “That’s what you did before. Stella found the whole box.”

“I did want to bake.”

“So why didn’t you keep⁠—”

“Because I couldn’t.” She put no weight on it. It was the only way it would come out. “That’s the answer, and it’s not a good story. Two children and a business and the man gone. Baking is four in the morning. Baking is something you do when there is somebody else in the house who can hear the children.”

Nobody said anything.

“So I made the sandwich. It took eleven minutes and it made money and every single person in this town could afford it.” She picked her fork up again and put it back down.

Bea’s face had done something she was clearly working to undo.

“If you’d had a choice,” she said. “If somebody had handed you one. Would you have done something else?”

And there it was, and Stella had no idea what she’d asked, and that was the only reason it could be asked at all.

Margo looked down the table at all of them. Anna, who had been terrified of exactly the right thing. Michael, who had lost a register. Tyler with his ears going. Meg standing at the counter of a kitchen she had cooked in all afternoon for no money. Two caps on the sideboard. Bernie by the window, not eating, not looking at her.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“You don’t know?”

She turned her glass a quarter turn on the cloth. “You can’t miss something you didn’t get to try. You can only miss the idea of it. And the idea gets very good, given long enough. The idea never burns the crust.”