Page 63 of The Beach Shack Legacy

“I’ve been meaning to ask you something. Mrs. Feldstein says yours are better than mine now.” She turned her cup a quarter. “I’ve made that tart ten thousand times. What are you two doing to it that I’m not.”

And there it was.

Stella’s whole face changed. The apology went off it like weather clearing, and she sat up, and the words came faster, and Margo watched a girl who’d climbed a hill loaded down with shame forget every ounce of it inside four seconds, because somebody had asked her about the baking.

“Okay, so—it’s the resting. Joey worked it out. Most people use the curd straight off, once it’s cooled, right, but Joey read this—he read about nine things—and now we let it rest first. Not in the fridge. On the counter, covered, forty minutes, and Joey times it, he actually stands there and times it, and something happens in that forty minutes—it goes silkier, it sets different, the flavor kind of rounds out—” She caught herself, and flushed. “It might be nothing. Joey ran it both ways to check and honestly the two were pretty close, so it might be completely in our heads. But we swear we can taste it. So now we won’t skip it. It’s kind of a—” she went pinker—”we’re a little superstitious about it now.”

“Forty minutes on the counter,” Margo said.

“On the counter. Covered. Forty exactly.”

“I’ve been resting curd on that counter my whole life and never once timed it.”

“Well,” Stella said, with total seriousness, “that’s the difference,” and then laughed.

Margo did not tell her that forty timed minutes was very probably nothing—that curd was curd, and a warm afternoon and a girl who loves what she’s doing will beat a bored expert every day of the week, and the clock has nothing to do with it. She didn’t say it. Stella’s whole face had already told her everything she needed to know.

“Bernard likes yours better than mine, too,” Margo said. “He’s never said so and he never will—he’d sooner eat glass. But I’ve watched which plate he reaches for when he thinks I’ve gone back to the kitchen, and it stopped being mine a while ago. A lifetime feeding that man, and he throws me over for you. I’ve made my peace with it. Barely.”

Stella laughed—a short wet one, surprised out of her—and wiped her wrist across her eyes, and finally, without seeming to decide to, ate a bite of the tart.

“There’s something else,” Stella said, after a while, and it came out sideways, the way the real ones did. “Joey was really upset too. We talked about it and he told me something that I probably shouldn’t share.” She stopped, tangled. “He doesn’t want the program. The marine one. He hates it, he wants out, he’s wanted out. And I keep thinking—if what I want can ruin an entire party and be that much trouble, then what’s he supposed to do with a whole life pointed at something he doesn’t want?”

Margo’s eyebrows rose a bit, then she paused.

“He’ll find his way to saying it,” Margo said. “Out loud, to the right person, when it costs him something. That’s the only way any of them ever get said.” She picked up the crossword and set it back down—as much as she was going to give that subject—and Stella let it close.

Stella finished the tart. She set the plate on the tray, and squared it, which she’d got from Joey.

“I still feel bad,” she said. “About the week.”

“Good. A bit of bad is respect—it means you saw what it cost.” Margo stood, slower than she used to, one hand finding the arm of the chair. “But you carry the whole hill of it back down with you and I’ll come take it off you myself. You didn’t wreck anything that a good idea won’t fix. And there are good ideas coming. That’s all I’ll say about that.”

Stella looked up. “What does that mean?”

“It means go home. I need my afternoon back.” But she put her hand on Stella’s head for a second going past, the way you’d steady something, and left it there a beat longer than steadying took, and then took it away.

Stella went down the hill lighter than she’d come up it. Not fixed. Margo could see that from the porch, the set of her shoulders still carrying some of it. But lighter, and eating the last of a tart she’d made with her own hands and finally letting herself think it was good.

Margo picked the crossword back up. She did not do any of it. She sat with the cold tea and the empty plate and the tree going gold at the edges, and thought that Stella was going to be all right, eventually.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Bea had been looking forward to the art festival since before it opened, and she was not going to let the two lumps she’d brought with her ruin it.

That was how she’d started thinking of them by the second hour—the lumps—because that was what they were being. She’d planned the whole day. Down early before the heat got mean, park by the good lot her mother always used, work the booths in order, top to bottom, so you didn’t miss anything and didn’t double back. She had cash in her back pocket for the ceramics woman she visited every year and a mental list of the mediums she wanted to look at up close before she started at CalArts in the fall, because you could look at art online all you wanted but you couldn’t see how thick somebody laid the paint on until you were standing in front of it with your nose eight inches away. Bea liked to get her nose eight inches away, and nobody stopped you here. That was the whole point of the place.

The festival smelled like kettle corn and hot canvas and the eucalyptus that hung over the grounds, and everywhere Bea looked somebody had made something and was standing next to it hoping you’d like it, and that was her favorite sight in the world. She loved them. She loved every booth. She stopped at a man doing plein-air oils of the coves and got her nose in close and he didn’t mind, and she came away happy, and turned around to say something about the palette knife to Stella⁠—

—and Stella wasn’t there. Neither of them was. They were twenty feet back, in the shade by a jewelry booth, not looking at the jewelry. Joey was reading the little card that listed the prices, all the way down, like a menu he was going to be quizzed on. Stella had her hands jammed in her pockets and was looking at the grounds the way you look at a room you’re waiting to leave.

“You have to actually come into the booths,” Bea said, walking back to them. “That’s the flow of a festival. You go in.”

“We’re coming,” Stella said, and didn’t move.

Bea let it go. It was too nice a day to manage other people’s feet.

They worked down the rows, or Bea did, and the lumps trailed. She noticed things because she couldn’t help noticing things—that was her whole deal, she noticed—and what she noticed was that Stella hadn’t taken a single picture. Stella, who photographed the inside of the refrigerator if the light was doing something interesting. They were standing in the most photographable place in the entire county, beautiful light and old eucalyptus and a thousand handmade things, and Stella’s hands were empty and stayed empty.