Page 84 of The Beach Shack Legacy

“Which means it’s just us now,” Margo said. “The family. Deciding. And we decided out there in about ninety seconds, which I’ll admit we stretched to fifteen minutes so your Uncle Rick could feel thorough.” She looked at them. “It’s yes. It was always going to be yes. You have your bakery.”

Stella didn’t hear the next part right away because Bea screamed and Joey made a sound she’d never heard him make and the family came in around them all at once, loud, Tyler’s hand on the back of her neck, Meg crying, Luke shaking Joey’s hand and then giving up and hugging him, and it was a while before the noise came down enough for Margo to knock her ring against the table for quiet.

“One more thing,” Margo said. “Then you can go back to falling apart.”

She put her hand on the little tree.

“This is yours. Not the Shack’s—yours, the two of you, for the new place. It’s a Meyer, same as mine.” She turned a hard green lemon between her fingers without picking it. “I told Stella something on my porch a while back about a tree that makes lemons whether anybody bakes or not. I stand by it. But I’ve been thinking you shouldn’t have to keep coming up my hill to borrow mine.” She paused for a moment. “Plant your own. That’s the whole of what I know. You plant your own, and you tend it, and it does the rest.

A year ago she’d come off a plane with a bag she wouldn’t unpack and then filled her camera with other people’s plans. The tree was small and the lemons were mostly green and she wanted it more than anything she had ever photographed.

Stella couldn’t say anything. She put her hand on the pot next to her great-grandmother’s and left it there.

Later—after the noise, after Meg’s second round of crying, after Tyler took approximately four hundred pictures and Bea planned the entire mural twice—it was full dark and the family had drifted into the loose end of a good night, and Bea came and sat on the table by the lemon tree with a fork and the last of somebody’s pie.

“So,” she said. “I still can’t paint the sign.”

“Bea, no.” Stella already knew where this was going.

“I’m serious, I have the whole thing, I have the peach color and the lettering and the little painting in the corner and I still cannot paint it because you two still have not—” she pointed the fork at them—”named your baby. I have been so patient. I have kept a secret, which nearly killed me. Name it. Right now. Tonight. While everyone we love is here and slightly emotional and won’t argue.”

Stella looked at Joey. Joey looked at the little tree.

“It’s attached to the Shack,” Joey said. “That’s the whole thing, right, that’s why it works. It’s not its own separate thing out on its own. It’s—” he moved his hand, the door through the wall, the two buildings leaning. “It’s the Shack. Just. The sweet part.”

“The sweet part of the Shack,” Bea said.

“The Sugar Shack,” Stella said.

She hadn’t planned to say it. It had just been there, sitting under everything since Bernie’s dusty room and the day he asked her if she wanted it, and now it was out on the table, and nobody moved for a second.

“The Sugar Shack,” Joey said, trying it.

Bea had gone still, which never happened. “Say it again.”

“The Sugar Shack.”

“That’s it.” Bea was already somewhere else, already seeing it in her peach color over the little window. “That’s the sign. That’s been the sign this whole time and you were sitting on it.” She looked furious about it and completely happy at the same time. “The Sugar Shack.”

Across the patio Margo had gone quiet by the tree. Stella caught a look on her great-grandmother’s face that Stella had never once managed to catch with a camera.

Margo just reached over and picked the one yellow lemon off the little tree, the only ripe one, and held it in her hand, and looked at the three of them arguing already about the lettering, and put it in her cardigan pocket to take home.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Joey had ironed the sheet.

Margo watched him and Tyler hang it across the front windows with a level and a difference of opinion, and did not ask why a bedsheet needed ironing to have pictures put on it, because Joey would have told her, at length, and the evening was young. The chairs had come down off the tables and been arranged into rows that weren’t quite rows. Anna moved through the room with a tray of shortbread ends, and Bea came through with tissue boxes and set one on the booth table on her way past. “Just in case,” she said, to nobody in particular.

Margo had the good seat without asking for it—her side of the booth, Bernie on his, the whole room laid out in front of her. Meg and Luke took the window table. Michael sat on the wobbly stool with something dairy-free Joey had pressed on him at the door. Lindsey came in last with her bag still on her shoulder, waved at everyone with a smile and sat down next to Tyler.

Stella stood at the back with her laptop and a projector with a speaker built in, and she did not make a speech. She said, “Okay,” and turned off the lights, and the shells went dark overhead, and the sheet lit up, and the music started—the soundtrack, the one Bea had been promising the family since the graduation dinner.

“Told you,” Bea whispered, to everyone.

The sand dollar came up first, filling the whole sheet, the cracked plaster around it like rays. Then the Shack went by the way Stella had turned it in—the hand-drawn menus, the bicentennial bunting, Richard at the grill mid-laugh and Margo coming down the counter with plates up both arms, younger than her own grandchildren were now. Small captions sat under each in Stella’s plain hand. Some of it the family had already held in their hands at a dinner table. Most of the rest they’d walked past a thousand times without seeing—and none of them had seen it like this, whole, in order, with music under it.

Bernie’s newsstand came up, and Bernie in his booth with the pen hovering, and Bernie raised his coffee to himself. The Klein’s photograph came up, wet paint and two young men squinting, and he looked at it the whole time it was on the sheet. The menu came up with the tall hand and the small hand arguing across it. Her hand found his on the seat between them, the slide changed, and neither of them gave it back.