Page 54 of The Beach Shack Legacy

“Eighty.”

“How long did that take you?”

“A while.” Margo sat down. Sitting down was better than standing up. “They sold out in two hours. All of them. Stella texted me.”

And then they all started talking at once. That was the thing about that porch. Four women talking over one another about a girl none of them had raised, and Eleanor got up and put a glass in Margo’s hand without being asked, and Letty wanted to know whether they were doing it again tomorrow and Nadine wanted to know what was in the curd.

“That’s the whole trouble,” Margo said, when they’d got most of the way through it. “They can’t make enough. Two children and one oven, and every day they run out before lunch and turn people away.”

“So make more,” Letty said.

“That’s what I did today.”

“So do it again.”

Margo looked at her glass.

“I was going to ask you,” she said. “All of you. Whether we might—” and she did not get to the end of the sentence, because Eleanor was already reaching behind her for the pad she kept by the door for lists.

“We’d want a rotation,” Eleanor said. “Two of us a day, so nobody’s doing it back to back. Vivian’s oven is the best one but Vivian’s kitchen is the worst one⁠—”

“My kitchen is a jewel.”

“Your kitchen is a corridor with a stove in it. Nadine, could you do a Tuesday.”

“I could do a Tuesday,” Nadine said. “I couldn’t do the standing.”

It went past Margo the way something does when you have already heard it and haven’t caught up to it yet.

“You could sit for the shells,” Eleanor said, writing.

“I could sit for the shells. I couldn’t do four hours on my feet at the counter for the rest of it. I can’t do the church luncheon anymore and that’s two hours.”

“Fair enough. Letty, you’d have to be the second one, then, on the Tuesday⁠—”

“I’d love to,” Letty said. “You’d have to do the rolling. This one’s no good anymore.” She turned her right hand over on the table, wrist up, and put it back, and went straight on. “I can pipe. I can do anything sitting down with my elbows in. I just can’t roll.”

“Since when?”

“Since the winter.” Letty waved it off with the other hand. “It’s nothing.”

“It isn’t nothing if you can’t open a jar.”

“I can open a jar. I use the rubber thing.”

Eleanor was still writing, and then she wasn’t.

Nobody had said no. That was the part Margo kept turning over afterward. Not one of them had said no, or hesitated, or asked how much, or looked at anybody else the way people do when they want somebody else to be the one. They had gone straight to the rotation. And in about ninety seconds of getting to the rotation they had between them a wrist and a back and Vivian’s daughter due in August, and Margo had sat there with her glass and let it go past her and had not argued with a single word of it.

Because she had slept in a chair that afternoon. That was the thing. She had made eighty tarts, once, in her own kitchen, with Stella to carry them, and she had gone down like a felled tree at four in the afternoon and woken in the dark with flour still on her floor.

Once. And they’d want it every day.

“Margo,” Eleanor said.

Margo looked up from her glass.

“You fell asleep, didn’t you.”