Page 59 of The Beach Shack Legacy

“Anna’s angry,” Joey said, in his flat reporting voice, to no one, because Anna had just come in from the patio and gone straight to the grill without a word, which for Anna was a slammed door.

“Joey, not now,” Stella said.

“I’m only saying that we should⁠—”

“Not now.”

Meg had already picked up the phone. “I’m calling Roberto.”

Roberto had sold it.

Stella only heard half of it—Meg’s end, the long pauses, the “no, I understand, no, you couldn’t have known”—and then Meg set the phone down and pressed two fingers to the bridge of her nose.

“He sold it to the Montage. Their pastry kitchen took the whole case this morning, paid cash, it’s gone. He can’t get more before—” Meg looked at the clock and didn’t finish. “There’s no more quince in the county today that isn’t already spoken for. I called it in April. There’s a season.”

“We’ll make something,” Stella said. “We’ll make her a tart. We’ll make her a good one.”

“It’s not the tart. It’s that it’s not the tart she asked for.” But Meg was already thinking—Stella could see her doing the math the way Meg did, running down what was possible against what was promised and finding the gap. “Lemon. A good lemon tart, a really good one, made right, and I go out there and I tell her the truth and I apologize. That’s what we have.” She looked at Stella. “Do we have lemons?”

They did not have lemons. They’d used the lemons.

“Margo’s tree,” Stella said. “I’ll go.”

Margo’s cottage smelled like lemons before Stella reached the walk, the same as ever, and Margo was on the porch with the paper like she’d been set there for exactly this, and she took one look at Stella coming up the hill too fast with a tote bag and no explanation and put the paper down.

“I need lemons,” Stella said. “A lot of them. For the Shack. I’m sorry, I can’t—I have to get back.”

Margo looked at her for a second longer than the errand asked for. She had a way of doing that, of reading the thing you weren’t saying off the front of your face like it was printed there.

“You know where the tree is,” Margo said. She didn’t get up. “Take a bag for yourself too.”

“I only need them for⁠—”

“Take a bag for yourself, Stella.”

Stella got the ladder from the shed without being asked—the low branches were still bare from the eighty tarts—and filled the tote from the good side, not the yellow side Bernie always said was dying, and it wasn’t dying, it never had been, it just went on making lemons whether or not anybody was there to use them. She filled the bag and she did not cry in Margo’s side yard, which she was proud of, and Margo stayed on the porch and did not ask, and when Stella came back around with the tote heavy on her arm she said, “Thanks, Margo.”

Margo nodded, and picked her paper back up.

They didn’t address it. Stella got in the car with the lemons and went.

The party was fine.

That was the thing about all of it, the thing Stella would keep turning over—it looked fine. The patio filled and the light was good and Bea’s friend Hailey opened cards at a long table and forty people ate and laughed, and the lemon tart went out with the rest of the dessert and it was, she knew, a good lemon tart, made by two people who could bake, with Margo’s Meyer lemons and a crust that came out right.

Meg carried it out herself.

She crouched down next to the grandmother’s chair, the old woman small and very upright in a good dress, and said something low, and the grandmother listened with her head tilted, and then reached out and patted Meg’s hand—patted it, kindly, the way you comfort someone who’s brought you bad news and feels worse about it than you do—and said something back that made Meg nod and press her lips together and stand up.

Stella couldn’t hear it. She didn’t need to. The grandmother was being lovely about it. She was being so lovely about it, this woman who had come across the whole world for her grandchild and asked for one thing, the thing from her own mother’s kitchen, and she got a lemon tart and a nice young woman apologizing, and she patted Meg’s hand and said it was no trouble, it was lovely, thank you.

It was the pat that did it. It was such a small thing to want, and they hadn’t had it to give her at her granddaughter’s party.

Stella turned and went back inside, past the counter, into the walk-in, and stood in the cold with the door shut for a minute. Then she washed her hands and took the next tray out, because the party still needed running.

After, when the patio was folded and the last car gone, Meg and Anna sat down at the family table at the same time. And they didn’t talk. Anna put her head down on her folded arms on the table, all the way down, the way a kid does at a desk. Meg put hers back against the chair and closed her eyes and let out a long breath.

Nobody was yelling. That was the part Stella couldn’t stand. If somebody had yelled she could have argued, or apologized, or cried, or done something with her hands. But there was nothing to do with two women too tired to lift their heads, who had spent the whole afternoon covering a hole two kids had put in the middle of a promise.