Page 49 of The Beach Shack Legacy

“An A+,” Stella said with a shy smile, like she was admitting something she didn’t want to.

“An A+.” Lindsey smiled. “Reeves doesn’t normally do plusses. Congratulations.”

Margo leaned back in her chair. “Do you want to tell them any more about it? We talked a very long time about all this.”

Stella looked down at her napkin and nodded. “There ended up being a lot to tell.”

Bea laughed. “She found really cool stuff in Margo’s trunk. From way, way, way back.”

Margo turned to her. “One ‘way’ is sufficient, Bea.”

“Oh, sorry,” she said.

“Okay, spill,” Anna said, and leaned back and crossed her arms. “All of it. I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

“There’s a slide show,” Bea told the table. “With a soundtrack. It made me cry.”

“Everything makes you cry.” Stella pushed her plate back and got up. “The soundtrack’s for the real showing. You get the quick version.”

She came back with the trunk—the actual trunk that she’d brought in the truck, because tonight it was coming home.

She set it down on the fireplace hearth and opened the lid, and started at the beginning, the way she’d never let herself start it for anybody before.

“It all started with the shells. Richard found the first one,” she said. “The sand dollar over the door. The morning they opened—he came in with his pockets full of sand and put it up, and when Margo asked what on earth he was doing, he said the ocean should be inside too.”

“Tradition says you put up the first dollar you earn,” Bernie said, not looking up.

“We hadn’t earned one yet,” Margo said.

“So a sand dollar had to do.” Stella looked up. “That’s the first thing that ever happened here. Before the grill was even hot.”

She went into the trunk and came up with a photo.

“This one’s from right after you two painted the sign,” she said, turning it to Bernie. “Klein’s. I don’t think you’ve seen it—it was folded inside a menu, way at the bottom.”

Bernie and Richard, younger than anyone at that table had ever known them, paint still wet on the letters behind them, both of them squinting at whoever was holding the camera.

Bernie didn’t say anything, but something happened around his eyes that he didn’t try to stop.

“I thought you weren’t a crier,” Bea said, gently, and didn’t get an answer.

Tyler leaned in over Bea’s shoulder at the next one—the newsstand from the side, a crack running the top plate that hadn’t gone anywhere in decades. He didn’t say anything either, and from Tyler, at a table that full, quiet was its own kind of loud.

Stella laid the next one down where everyone could see it. Richard at the grill, caught mid-laugh, and Margo coming down the counter with plates up both arms, saying something that had the whole room turned toward her.

“He burned whatever he was cooking whenever he laughed,” Margo said. “Which tells you how the place smelled, most days.”

There was one more, further down, and Stella set it beside the others without saying anything at first.

Three kids on the patio in bathing suits, sundaes in hand, squinting the same squint, a bandage taped crooked on somebody’s chin. Margo behind them, younger than any of them had ever known her, one hand on a shoulder.

“That’s the chin one,” Tyler said, before anyone asked. “Not the toe, everybody always says toe. I split it open on the back step. Needed four stitches.” He looked at it a long moment. And these two cried. Not me—them. I’m bleeding down my shirt and it’s a two-girl funeral.”

“We were sympathetic children,” Anna said.

“You were loud children.” He looked at the picture a long moment. “Margo took me to the hospital. When we got back, she had sundaes for all three of us. Not just me.”

“Hot fudge,” Meg said, quiet. “I don’t remember the stitches at all. I remember the sundae.”