Page 64 of The Beach Shack Legacy

“Where’s your camera?” Bea asked.

“Left it home.”

“You never leave it home.”

“I left it home today.” Stella said it flat, end of sentence, and Bea looked at her a second and decided not to poke it, because Stella had a look on her face that meant the poking wouldn’t be fun for anybody.

They got ice cream. That helped for about four minutes—everything helped Joey for about four minutes, you could watch the relief arrive and then watch it wear off—and then his was melting faster than he was dealing with it and running over his knuckles and he kept turning the cone a precise quarter-turn to manage the drip, engineering it, and not eating it, and Bea wanted to scream.

Instead she found her ceramics woman, who remembered her—the best thing that had happened all summer—and they talked glazes, and Bea bought a small bowl the color of the inside of a shell and had it wrapped, and when she turned around this time she was ready for the lumps to be lumping and they didn’t disappoint.

Then a woman near the pottery booth said, “Oh—you’re the Beach Shack kids.”

She was maybe sixty, sun hat, a tote from a different festival.

“My neighbor brought me one of your date loaves last week,” the woman said. “I finished the whole thing myself over two days, didn’t tell my husband. It was wonderful.” She tilted her head. “Is that a family recipe? Yours?”

“Not ours, exactly,” she said, and there was a beat where Bea could see her deciding how much to say, and deciding on all of it, because Stella never could help herself once she started. “It was a woman named Ruth’s grandmother’s. People started bringing us their own after that—recipe cards, family ones, the ones that only exist in somebody’s handwriting. We’ve got a whole wall of them now. Names and everything.”

“That’s the loveliest thing I’ve ever heard.” The woman had a hand at her collarbone. “My mother made pizzelle. I’ve still got her iron in a cupboard I never open, and the recipe’s on the back of an envelope in her own hand—the only thing I have in her writing, actually, now that I think of it.” She looked between them, hopeful in a way that hadn’t been there thirty seconds ago. “Do you take them still? At the counter?”

And Bea watched the strangest thing happen to both of their faces at once. A kind of flinch. Stella got there first.

“We’re not—” Stella started, and stopped, and started over, gentler, which somehow made it worse. “We’re kind of scaled back right now. On the extra stuff. It’s really just the regular menu for a while.”

“Oh.” The woman’s smile faltered and reset. “Of course. Well. It was lovely, the loaf.” And she moved off toward the pottery, and Bea did not understand what she had just seen, only that she’d seen it—two people saying no to a nice woman’s dead mother’s recipe like it cost them a tooth.

“That was weird,” Bea said. “You love that stuff. You’d normally have her whole family history and the recipe photographed before she got the sentence out.”

“We’re just not doing it right now,” Joey said.

“Doing what? Being nice to a lady?”

“Drop it, Bea.” Stella said it low.

They ran into Tyler near the photography pavilion, which Bea should have expected, because Tyler shot the festival every year and had a lanyard and everything, two cameras crossed over his chest, taking the eucalyptus very seriously. He lit up when he saw them.

“There they are.” He hugged Bea, one-armed, camera-conscious. “You buying up the whole festival?”

“One bowl. I have discipline.” Bea held up the wrapped thing.

“That’s a lie, but okay.” He turned to Stella, and Bea saw him clock it in about half the time it had taken her—the empty hands—because Tyler noticed the same things Bea noticed, they were alike that way. “Where’s your camera, kid? The light’s unbelievable back by the sycamores. There’s an old guy doing scrimshaw, the whole booth’s lit like a painting. You’d lose your mind.”

“Didn’t bring it,” Stella said.

Something went across Tyler’s face, quick, there and gone. “Well,” he said. “Next time. Come find me before you go, I want a picture of the three of you by the fountain.” And he was pulled back toward the pavilion by somebody with a question.

They made it another hour. Bea got everything she’d come for and more, and it should have been one of the best days of the summer, and the whole time, at the edge of it, the two of them dragged like something caught on the bottom of the boat. By the time they were sitting on the low wall near the entrance, waiting for nothing, Stella picking the label off a water bottle and Joey lining the pieces up on his knee, Bea had finally had enough.

“Okay.” She set her bowl down beside her. “What is wrong with you two?”

“Nothing,” they said, at the same time, the least convincing thing two people had ever said.

“No, seriously. We have a day off. In the summer. At the festival. This is the good part. This is the thing you look forward to. There are a thousand beautiful things here and free samples and Tyler’s going to take our picture at the fountain, and you”—she pointed at Stella—”haven’t taken one photograph, and you”—at Joey—“have read the price of every object in this festival and purchased nothing, and you’re both acting like we’re at the DMV.” She looked between them. “This is fun. People would kill for this. What is the matter with you?”

And there was a silence then that Bea couldn’t read—the two of them not looking at each other—and Stella opened her mouth, and Bea waited, ready finally for the answer.

“We’re just tired,” Stella said.