Page 71 of The Beach Shack Legacy

“Look at you,” she said. “All grown up. Finally.”

“I’m a grown man.”

“I said what I said.”

Luke came over to the grill with a plate, set it down, and, apropos of not much, put a hand on Tyler’s shoulder.

“Watching you with her this year has been really something. If we’re ever lucky enough—” He didn’t finish it the way you’d expect a man to finish it, all the way out loud. He just left it there a second. “I’d take half of what you’ve figured out. That’d be plenty.”

Tyler didn’t have a joke ready. That happened rarely enough to catch his own attention.

“You’ll figure out your own version,” he said, finally. “Everybody does. Badly, first. Then not as badly.”

Luke nodded like that was exactly the answer he’d wanted, and went back to the table where Lindsey was laying out everything to go with the burgers.

Meg had gone faintly pink over the corn she was tending on the grill. Tyler said nothing, because some things you let a person have in private, even out loud, in a yard, in front of everyone. He had learned a few things in the last year, after all.

The gate opened before anyone answered anything else, and it was Stella first, then Joey, then Bea, all three of them running late in the particular way that meant they’d been doing something they weren’t ready to talk about yet.

“Sorry,” Stella said. “We got held up.”

“You’re fine,” Tyler said. “Your yard’s ready. I mean our yard. Which you built.”

Stella looked around at it, quick and satisfied, checking her own work, and lifted the camera without seeming to decide to.

Tyler didn’t know what was actually on that camera these days. Didn’t know this year’s rolls from last year’s. He just knew his daughter had shown up on a plane a year ago with nothing but a bag she wouldn’t unpack, and now she stood in a yard she’d built with her own hands, keeping a record of everybody in it. Including him. Including the terrified version of him, still hanging on that fridge.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

The key was under the mat, exactly where Bernie said it would be. Stella had never heard of anything less secure in her life, or funnier.

“He told you it’s under the mat,” Joey said, lifting the corner of it with his toe like it might be booby-trapped. “The actual key. To the actual building. Under the actual mat. The first place a person looks. The place the word for hiding a key is.”

“He ran a newsstand on this bluff most of his life and nobody ever robbed him.” Stella picked the key up. It was warm from the concrete. “I don’t think Bernie’s worried about crime.”

“That’s because his security through obscurity was so total that—” Joey caught Bea looking at him. “It’s a bad system. That’s all I’m saying. When this is ours I’m putting in a real lock.”

“When this is ours.” Bea said it back to him, delighted, and grabbed the words out of the air like she was going to keep them. “Listen to you. When.”

Joey went pink and didn’t correct it, and didn’t take it back, and that was answer enough. Stella noticed. Joey, who had spent the entire summer saying if and we’ll see and there’s a lot we don’t know, had just said when like it had always been when, with no spreadsheet under it.

She unlocked the door and they went in.

In the daylight, with the shutter cranked halfway up, the room was less of a cave than it had been the morning Bernie showed them. Dust still hung and turned in the light, but you could see the whole of it now, the honest bones of the place, the crooked wall, the long counter, the racks. It smelled like old paper and cold cement and, faintly, under everything, like the ghost of all the newsprint and gum the years had soaked into it.

Bea walked into the middle of it and turned all the way around with her arms out, once, like she was measuring it with her body.

“Okay,” she said. “It’s disgusting and I love it.” She pointed at the front. “The window’s the whole thing. That’s the face. Whatever we do, we do it around that window—that’s where people meet us, so that’s where the personality goes.” She was already somewhere else, already seeing it, her hands making frames in the air. “Warm. Not cute-warm, not gingham, I’ll die before gingham. Real color. Something that looks like the inside of a peach when the afternoon hits it. And the sign⁠—”

She stopped and looked at them.

“What do we call it?”

And there it was, dropped in the middle of the dusty floor, the question none of them had said out loud, because saying it made it something with a name, and something with a name was real in a way that a thing you were scared to want was not.

“I don’t know,” Stella said.

“You don’t—” Bea looked between them. “You’ve been planning this for weeks. In secret. And you don’t have a name?”