Page 79 of The Beach Shack Legacy

“Structurally impossible. You’ve got a cone.”

He laughed, and they sat on the tailgate a minute longer while he finished it, the fog coming in off the water.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Anna knew something was up when Stella asked if they could use the house.

Not the Shack. The house. For a dinner, she said, a family dinner, everybody, and she’d said everybody with a weight on it that Anna felt but couldn’t place, and then Stella and Joey had shown up in the middle of the afternoon and taken over the kitchen and told Anna, with great and suspicious politeness, that she was not allowed in it.

So Anna sat on her own patio with a glass of wine she hadn’t planned to have yet and watched her family arrive one confused carload at a time.

“Do you know what this is about?” Meg asked, coming through the side gate with Luke behind her carrying a folding chair nobody’d asked him to bring. “Because Stella texted me are you free this week it’s important don’t worry and those last two words have been ruining my week.”

“I don’t know anything.” Which was true, and which was starting to bother Anna, because she was a person who knew things, and there was a whole operation going on in her kitchen that she’d been locked out of.

“Margo?” Meg turned. “Do you know?”

“I know a great many things,” Margo said, settling into the good chair with Bernie lowering himself into the one beside her, the two of them a unit now, settled into each other, “and I’ve found that saying so in advance mostly spoils the evening.” She accepted a glass from Tyler. “Sit down, Meg. Let the children have their night.”

Which told Anna that Margo knew exactly what this was, and had known for a while, and wasn’t going to say a word, and Anna looked at her grandmother’s serene face and thought, You’re in on it.

They came out with the pizza first.

Anna had braced for the kids to have cooked—she’d smelled ambition on them when they arrived, seen the cookbook open on the counter before she was banished—and instead here came Joey with a stack of pizza boxes and the particular pride of a person who has made a wise executive decision.

“We were going to cook,” Stella said, setting down plates. “We had a whole plan. There was going to be a chicken thing.”

“There was going to be a chicken thing,” Joey said, “and then we did a realistic assessment of our skills and the time available and we pivoted.” He started opening boxes, and here was the part Anna didn’t expect. “Meg, yours is the jalapeño and tomato, extra tomato, no onion. Luke, Hawaiian, which is a crime, but you’re consistent about it. Anna, the white one with the arugula you pretend is a salad. Tyler, meat, all of it, the one that voids the warranty. Margo⁠—”

“Margo doesn’t eat pizza,” Meg said.

“Margo eats one slice of plain cheese and complains about it,” Joey said, sliding a small separate box in front of her, “so we got you your own so nobody’s grease touches yours.” He straightened. “Bernie, sausage and peppers, and I got the peppers on the side because last time you said they slide off and you’re not a child.”

There was a small silence at the table, the silence of eight people realizing they’d each just been handed, without discussion, the exact thing they’d have ordered for themselves.

“He remembered everyone’s—” Luke started.

“Just. Eat. Please. We’ll talk after,” Stella said, glancing at Joey.

So they ate, and it was a good dinner even though nobody had cooked it.

Then Stella and Joey went back inside, and came out again carrying a tart between them like it was made of glass, and set it in the middle of the table, and Anna’s whole chest went still.

She knew it before anyone said it. Quince—the deep amber of it, the lattice, the smell of it coming across the table—the exact thing the grandmother from Greece had asked for and never gotten, the thing that had sunk the party, the failure Meg had carried out to a patio and apologized for while a lovely old woman patted Meg’s hand and said it was no trouble.

Here it was. Made right.

“We owed you this one,” Stella said. Quiet. Not a speech. She was looking at Anna and Meg, the two who’d put their heads down on the table that day, and Joey stood beside her with his hands folded and his chin down. “We couldn’t make it for her. We looked—Meg, we actually tracked down the woman’s daughter, she moved to Arizona, we sent her one, it’s a whole thing. But we couldn’t fix that day. So we made it for you. Because we’re the reason it went wrong and we never—we never actually said we were sorry. Out loud. To you. So.” She swallowed. “We’re sorry. It should never have happened, and it happened because of us, and we know it.”

Nobody said anything for a moment. Meg had her hand over her mouth.

“Cut the tart, Stella,” Margo said, handing somebody a task. Stella cut the tart, and it was, Anna would think later, one of the best things she had ever eaten, tart and honeyed and exactly what that grandmother should have had, and the eating of it did something to the table that no amount of talking could have done.

Which, Anna understood a beat too late, was the point.

“Okay,” Tyler said, when the plates were pushed back. “You’ve fed us our favorites and apologized with pastry and you’ve got Michael sitting here in a collared shirt on a weeknight. Somebody tell us what this is.”

So they told them.