Page 72 of The Beach Shack Legacy

“We’ve been planning whether we could,” Joey said. “Not what to call it. Those are different work streams.”

“Those are not—okay. Okay, we’ll figure it out.” Bea started pacing the length of the counter, and Stella could see the sign taking shape behind her eyes even with the blank in the middle of it.

“You two have to decide. I can’t paint a sign with a blank on it, that’s not a sign, that’s a permit application.” She jabbed a finger at each of them. “Homework. Name. I’ll do everything else, the color, the lettering, the little painting in the corner—I already know I want a little painting in the corner—but the word is on you. I refuse to name your baby. That’s how you end up resented at holidays.”

“Noted,” Stella said.

“I mean it. I have opinions but I will not choose. It has to come from you.” She said it lightly, but she meant it, and Stella understood that Bea, who had opinions about literally everything, was giving them the one thing that had to be theirs, and doing it by pretending it was about the sign.

They spent an hour in there doing nothing that mattered and all of it mattering.

Joey paced off the back where the oven would go, heel to toe, counting under his breath, and then stood in the empty square he’d measured and just looked at it, and didn’t price it, didn’t run it, didn’t flinch—just stood in the place where the oven would be and let it be there. Stella watched him do it. She’d known him a long time now and she had never once seen him stand still inside a plan instead of taking it apart. It undid her. The old Joey would have had three columns going by now. This one was just standing in his imaginary kitchen with his hat pushed back.

Stella went and stood at the pass-window and looked out of it at the street. From here you’d hand a person a box and see their whole face when they took it. She stood there longer than the looking needed.

Bea found a cabinet under the counter that looked like it hadn’t been opened in decades and pulled out of it, in order—a curled-up girlie calendar that made her shriek and Joey turn interesting colors, a coffee can full of rusted screws, and a single petrified stick of Juicy Fruit that she threatened to chew until Stella physically took it away from her.

They argued about where the counter went. They argued about whether you needed a second sink. They argued about who was in charge, which started as a joke and got briefly real—“I’m oldest,” Bea said, and Stella said “Barely, and you’re not even in this,” and Joey said “I’m the only one who can read a P&L,” and Stella said “I’m the one whose family owns the building it’s attached to,” and there was a beat where all three of them heard how much they suddenly cared about something that didn’t exist yet, and then Bea started laughing, and it broke, and they were fine.

“We’re going to be a nightmare to work with,” Bea said, grinning, sitting up on the counter and swinging her feet. “The three of us. Can you imagine. We’re going to fight about everything.”

“Constantly,” Joey said, from the oven square.

“Every single day,” Stella said.

They locked up when the light started to go. Stella put the key back under the mat, and Joey watched her do it and physically restrained himself, she could see the restraint, the whole-body effort of a man not fixing a security flaw because it wasn’t his to fix yet.

Out on the bluff the evening was coming in off the water and the Shack was closing down behind them, the family inside doing the last of the day, none of them knowing that three feet away their whole summer had a name it hadn’t found yet and a peach-colored future Bea was already painting in her head.

That was the next part. Telling them. Standing up in front of all of them—Anna and Meg and Tyler and Margo—and saying it out loud and letting them say their piece, the way Margo had promised they’d have to. The hard part was still the hard part. It hadn’t moved.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Michael was already there when they got to the coffee place on Forest, at a table in the back with his files out and squared to the table edge, a pen in his shirt pocket and a pen behind his ear, a third one—Stella noticed, and understood that this was a serious occasion—lying across the top of the stack like a paperweight. He had a black coffee he wasn’t drinking. He half-stood when they came in, which nobody their age ever did for them, and it made Stella feel like she should have worn something with a collar.

Joey came in behind her in a hat pulled low and a pair of sunglasses, indoors, on an overcast afternoon.

Stella stopped just inside the door. “What are you doing?”

“Being discreet.” He kept his voice down and his chin tucked. “This is a sensitive meeting. If people see us together with a man in a tie going over papers, they’ll talk. We can’t have them talk.”

“You look like you’re about to rob the place.”

“I look like a person who values his privacy.”

“You look like the one single human being in this coffee shop that everyone is going to remember.” She steered him toward the table. “Nobody was going to notice two kids getting coffee. They’re going to notice a teenager wearing sunglasses inside.”

“People know my face, Stella.” He said it quietly. “I was coffee drinker number two in the Pageant last summer, remember?. I stood on that stage for the whole tableau. Somebody’s mother remembers me.”

“Nobody remembers coffee drinker number two, Joey.”

“Somebody’s mother does.”

“Hi,” Michael said, looking up from his files—at Joey particularly. “A person in sunglasses indoors is recalled by strangers at roughly three times the rate of a person not in sunglasses indoors. If you want to not be remembered, the correct move is to look like everyone else. The glasses are working against your objective.”

Joey took the glasses off.

He did not take off the hat.