Page 83 of The Beach Shack Legacy

“What are they doing?” Joey was behind her. “What’s the body language?”

“Michael’s got the folder open. Rick’s—okay, Rick’s nodding, that’s good, nodding’s good⁠—”

“Nodding could be I understand the concern,” Joey said. “Nodding is not a yes. Nodding is data intake. Don’t score the nod.”

“Now he’s not nodding.”

“That’s worse.”

Stella made herself sit down on a stool and not look, which lasted until Bea said “oh,” in a low voice, and then Stella was at the window too, all three of them stacked at the eight-inch gap in the bougainvillea like the world’s worst detectives.

Rick was talking. You couldn’t hear it. He had one hand flat on the table and he was saying something to the whole group, unhurried, and Margo was listening with her chin up, and Tyler had his arms crossed, and you could not read a single thing on any of them because they were a family that had spent a lifetime learning to keep their faces still behind a counter.

“Meg just put her hand over her mouth,” Bea reported.

“Good or bad hand over the mouth.”

“There’s a good one?”

“There’s a surprised one and there’s a bad news one and I can’t—Bea, move your head.”

They watched Meg’s hand over her mouth mean nothing decipherable for what felt like a year. They watched Luke look at the ground. They watched Michael turn a page. Joey had gone quiet in a way Stella didn’t like, the way he went right before he talked himself into the worst version of something, and she reached over without looking and put her hand on his arm, and he let it stay.

“Whatever it is,” Stella said, low, “we did it right. Bernie said. We asked. Even if it’s⁠—”

“Don’t,” Joey said. “Don’t do the speech where you get us ready for no. I’ll cry and I categorically do not cry.”

“That’s your uncle’s line.”

“It’s a family line.”

The patio door opened.

They scattered from the window so fast Bea knocked a menu off the stand, and by the time the adults came back through they were arranged around the counter in poses of tremendous casualness, three teenagers who had absolutely not been pressed against the glass, and Rick came first with the briefcase, and he stopped in front of Stella and Joey.

He looked at them for a second.

He nodded. Once. To each of them.

And then he picked up his briefcase and said “goodnight, all” to the room and walked out the front, and the bell over the door did its small ordinary sound, and he was gone.

Nobody had said anything.

“That’s it?” Bea asked, to the room. “That’s—what was that. What does the nod mean. Uncle Rick. Come back and use words.”

“He’s gone.” Joey’s voice had gone thin. “He nodded and he left. What does the nod—Stella, was that a yes nod or a ‘nice try’ nod, I can’t, I don’t have enough data on his nods⁠—”

“Come out to the patio,” Margo said.

She said it from the back door. She’d waited a beat before she said it, let the nod sit there a moment longer. The three of them went out to the patio where the whole family was standing around the long table in the blue end of the light, and there was, in the middle of the table, a small potted tree.

A lemon tree. Young. A few hard green lemons on it and one gone yellow.

“Sit,” Margo said, and they sat, and Margo did not sit, Margo stood at the head with her hand resting on the pot of the little tree.

“Rick says the numbers are clean,” she said. “He says the redirect is legal, the window solves the license, and the plan is sound. He says—and I’m quoting my son, who does not hand out compliments—that it’s a better plan than most grown adults bring him.” A pause. “So there’s nothing standing in the way of it. Legally. On paper. Nothing.”

Stella’s ears were ringing.