Page 48 of The Beach Shack Legacy

“Margo—”

“But I’d have wanted somebody to ask me.” She heard herself say it and did not take it back. “That’s the honest part. Nobody ever asked. Everyone was very kind about it and nobody ever once asked me what I would rather have been doing, and I don’t blame a single person at this table, because I never brought it up either. You don’t. You’re busy.”

The roast was going cold on eleven plates.

“Well,” Margo said. “You asked.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. It’s the first time.” Margo picked up her fork.

Bea’s eyes had gone bright and she made no attempt to do anything about it, and Anna reached over and put a hand on her back without looking at her.

Bea blew her nose on a paper napkin, loudly, and put both hands flat on the table.

“Well, I already know what mine is,” she said.

The whole table laughed, all at once, and Bea looked around at them, bewildered.

“What? I do.”

“We know you do, sweetheart,” Anna said.

“Then why is that funny?”

“Because you’ve known since you were six,” Meg said, coming around with the dish, “and you have never once considered that anybody might not know.”

“I don’t think that’s unusual⁠—”

“It’s extremely unusual,” said four people at once.

Bea accepted this as a kind of applause, which, from that table, it was. And Margo watched her take it, this child who had never had one uncertain day about what she was for, sitting at a table with people who had not had that and had come out the other side anyway.

“Good,” Margo said. “Then don’t let anybody talk you out of it.”

“Nobody’s talking me out of it.”

“Somebody will try. Somebody always tries.” Margo picked up the water jug and filled Bernie’s glass, and he let her. “Tell them I said no.”

They were most of the way out of it and into the dessert argument when Joey spoke.

He had been quiet for the whole of it. Joey at a table with this many people ran mostly on logistics. He had been turning a spoon over between two fingers.

“It’s good that everybody found the right one,” he said.

That was all of it.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Lindsey came late, still in the dress she’d run a graduation in, and sat down with a plate while people talked at her, and said the chair situation had been resolved by an act of God and a man named Dwayne.

“So,” she said, over her fork, to Stella. “What did Reeves think of your project?”

Stella went quiet, the stillness Margo recognized from watching her behind a camera.

“I think he liked it,” Stella said.

“Oh, come on, Stella.” Bea put her fork down for this. “It was very cool. Slide show. Music. The history of the Shack. And it turned out to be a lot more than that. And you got an A.”