Page 55 of The Beach Shack Legacy

The porch was quiet again. Vivian looked at her over the top of her glass and did not say anything, which from Vivian was a diagnosis.

“I sat down,” Margo said.

“You fell asleep.”

“I sat down and then it was dark.”

Eleanor put the pen on top of the pad and left it there, and did not tear the page off, and did not put the pad away either.

“Well,” she said.

“Well.”

And that was as far as anybody took it, which Margo was grateful for, and the talk went somewhere else the way it always did—Nadine’s neighbor and the fence, and whether the Hendersons had finally done something about the pool—and Margo sat in it with her glass and let it move around her.

She walked home in the dark. Downhill this time.

The house smelled like lemons, which it would for days, and there was still a patch of flour by the mixer that she was going to have to do something about in the morning. Her hands hurt. Her neck hurt. Her back had complaints of its own.

She stood in the doorway of her own kitchen and looked at it and thought, eighty.

People had bought them all by lunch.

She did not know yet what to do about any of it, and she was not going to work it out standing up at this hour, and it had been the best day she’d had in more years than she was prepared to count.

Both of those were true, and she took them both to bed with her.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Stella had the camera up when Roberto came through the propped door, because the water had turned silver, which it did about ten minutes in the late morning and she’d been waiting on it. She got him mid-stride with a crate on each arm, and then set the camera down, because the rush was already on and Anna needed the trays run.

Roberto set the ordered things down where they went and stood one crate apart on the counter, and looked at Joey. Joey came over to it between tickets.

“Quince,” Roberto said. “It’s on the order. There’s no name on the slip, but it’s on there.”

“We don’t use quince.” Joey looked in the crate—hard yellow fruit, more of it than seemed reasonable—and then at the board, where there was no quince and there had never been quince. “There’s no card for it. Take it back with the empties, I’ll note it.”

Roberto lifted a hand that meant it was off his plate, and Joey carried the crate to the returns by the back door and squared it to the wall because it was crooked and he was passing it, and then Anna called an order and he was gone to the window and the quince was the last thing on anyone’s mind. Stella ran two plates to the patio and a coffee to Bernie, who’d folded the crossword away for a lunch he hadn’t ordered yet, and came back to find Bea at the counter, sketchbook under her arm, graphite on her cheek, talking before she was all the way in.

“—and the light on the water is—you have to shoot it, is anyone shooting it⁠—”

“I shot it. Move, I’ve got trays.”

Bea moved half a step, and the woman at the counter reached Joey first anyway, holding a card out across the pass.

“My mother made a thing with figs in it,” the woman said. “This is my copy, so you can read it. But I brought hers too.” She had both. “I hope you can make it sometime.”

Joey took the card by two corners. “Not this week. Maybe not the week after.” He turned to the shelf and reached down the binder—COMMUNITY SUBMISSIONS, RECIPES, VOL. 1, his blue capitals on the spine—and had the fig card halfway in when Bea said, “Wait. What’s that?” and took the whole thing out of his hands and opened the rings.

Then a four-top came in and Stella lost her for a while. She sat them, ran their drinks, called their order, cleared a table by the window a family had left looking like a small weather event. When she got back Bea hadn’t moved. She’d gone through the binder and stopped, and stopped talking, which for Bea was the whole announcement.

“Look at these,” Bea said.

Stella looked. She’d seen the cards come in one at a time over the weeks—she’d photographed half of them—but never all together, and together was different. A name at the top of each in a hand that was only ever that one person’s, and under it the thing the hand made, over and over, for a family, until the week it stopped. Blue ballpoint pressed so hard it went through the paper. One in pencil worn half away by a thumb.

“This one pressed so hard she went through the card.” Bea held it up. “That’s a whole arm. A woman leaning on a table with everything she’s got.” She turned it to the light and set her finger on the writing and followed it. “You can’t keep these in a binder. They go up.”

“They’re archived,” Joey said, on his way past with three plates.