Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Schedule arrived on a Tuesday morning, hand-delivered by Eleanor Tanaka in a clear plastic sleeve with color-coded tabs.
Margo held it at arm’s length because her reading glasses were somewhere in the studio and she refused to go looking for them with an audience. The print was small. The tabs were five different colors. There was a legend at the bottom.
“We’ve been planning this for weeks,” Eleanor said, settling into Margo’s kitchen chair and helping herself to coffee the way she’d been doing for thirty years. “Vivian did the layout. Nadine did the scheduling. Letty contributed enthusiasm.”
“Letty contributed wine,” Margo said, still squinting at the page.
“Also that.” Eleanor pushed the sugar bowl toward her own cup. “Monday is book club. Tuesday is garden club. Wednesday is watercolor with Diane—you remember Diane, she did that series on pelicans—”
“I remember Diane.”
“Thursday is wine tasting at the new place on PCH, and Friday is Circle night as always.” Eleanor folded her hands on the table. “Five days. Structured. Purposeful. We discussed it and we all agreed—retirement needs a framework or it becomes a void.”
Margo set the Schedule on the counter and looked at it the way she might look at a parking ticket. “Eleanor. I’m eighty, not dead.”
“Nobody said you were dead. We said you were unstructured. You’ve been wandering around this house for two weeks painting the same corner of the same canvas and eating crackers for lunch.”
“I eat more than crackers.”
“Vivian saw you eating crackers over the sink on Saturday.”
“Vivian should mind her own kitchen.”
“Vivian’s kitchen is immaculate and she has opinions about yours.
” Eleanor took a sip of coffee. “The point is you gave the Shack to the grandchildren. Which was right, and brave, and we’re all proud of you.
But now you need something to do with your days that isn’t standing in your studio staring at a canvas you won’t finish. ”
Margo looked at the canvas through the kitchen doorway.
A half-finished landscape — the view from Heisler Park at the hour when the light went copper.
She’d started it three weeks ago. The sky was done.
The ocean was close. The foreground kept defeating her because the foreground was where the Shack would go, and every time she picked up the brush for that section her hand found an excuse to stop.
“Garden club,” she said. “Tuesday.”
“Petunias this week. Nancy Ogden is hosting. She has that yard with the stone path and the koi pond.”
“I know Nancy’s yard.”
“Then you know it’s lovely.”
Margo knew it was lovely. She also knew that Nancy Ogden could talk about soil pH for forty-five uninterrupted minutes and that the koi pond attracted raccoons that Nancy had named and spoke about as if they were tenants.
“Fine,” Margo said. “Tuesday.”
Eleanor beamed — she’d won a negotiation she’d probably expected to be harder. She finished her coffee, kissed Margo’s cheek, collected the empty plastic sleeve, and left.
Margo stood in her kitchen and looked at the Schedule on the counter. Five days a week. Color-coded. With a legend.
She poured herself more coffee and took it to the studio.
The canvas waited. The foreground waited. She picked up a brush, held it over the palette, and set it back down.
She drank her coffee instead.
Garden club was fine.
Nancy’s yard was as lovely as promised. The stone path wound between raised beds, each one labeled with hand-painted markers that Nancy had made herself during what she called her “pottery phase.” The koi pond glittered in the September afternoon.
Three women Margo didn’t know were arguing about bulb placement. One had a diagram.
Eleanor handed Margo a pair of gardening gloves and a small trowel. “We’re doing the border bed today. Petunias and marigolds.”
“I can see that.”
“Nancy says the trick is spacing. Two inches between each plant.”
“I’ve been gardening longer than Nancy’s been alive.”
“Not competitively.” Eleanor knelt at the bed and started digging. “This is collaborative gardening. Different energy.”
Margo knelt beside her. Her knees complained. She ignored them the way she’d been ignoring them for a decade — they had opinions about everything and she’d stopped consulting them.
The petunias were purple and white. They came in plastic trays, roots bound tight, waiting to be loosened and set into new ground.
Margo worked one free, turned it in her hand, pressed her thumb gently against the root ball the way she’d taught Anna to check tomatoes. Different plant. Same instinct.
She set it in the hole, packed the soil, moved to the next one.
Around her the conversation drifted — someone’s daughter was getting divorced, someone else’s grandson had gotten into Berkeley, the new restaurant on Forest Avenue was overpriced and the portions were “insulting.” Margo contributed the appropriate sounds at the appropriate moments. Mm. Oh. That’s nice. How wonderful.
The petunias went in. Row after row. Purple, white, purple, white.
Nancy brought lemonade. Eleanor told a story about Vivian’s cat that involved a plumber and a decorative gourd.
Nadine arrived late wearing a hat the size of a satellite dish and carrying a bag of fertilizer she’d brought from home because she didn’t trust Nancy’s brand.
It was fine. All of it was fine.
At two-thirty Margo stood, brushed the dirt from her knees, and told Eleanor she had a headache.
“Already? We haven’t done the marigolds.”
“The marigolds will survive without me.” Margo stripped off the gardening gloves and set them on Nancy’s stone wall. “Thank you, Nancy. Your koi look healthy.”
“Chester’s been sluggish,” Nancy said. “I’m worried about his digestion.”
“I’m sure Chester will rally.” Margo collected her bag from the porch chair and walked to the street before anyone could suggest she stay for the marigolds, which would lead to staying for more lemonade, which would lead to staying for Nancy’s guided tour of the raccoon damage behind the shed.
The raccoons had names. Margo didn’t want to learn them.
She drove home. The house was quiet. The kind of quiet that presses on your ears when you’ve spent fifty years in a kitchen where the grill ticked and the coffee maker hummed and someone was always talking.
She put her bag down and stood in the hallway. The studio was to the left. The kitchen was straight ahead. Clean counters, empty chairs, a coffee cup in the sink from this morning.
The phone rang.
She crossed to the kitchen and picked it up without checking the screen. Only four people called her landline, and three of them were trying to sell her an extended car warranty.
“It’s Bernie.”
“I know it’s you. You’re the only person who calls this number on purpose.” She pulled out a kitchen chair and sat. “What.”
“Just checking in. How were the petunias?”
“Purple and white. Alternating. Nancy has a system.”
“Nancy has a system for everything. She organized her recycling by emotional attachment.”
“I believe it.” Margo looked at the Schedule propped against the salt shaker. “Did you call to discuss Nancy’s gardening, or is there something else?”
A pause. Bernie’s pauses were different from other people’s pauses — they had weight to them, like he was choosing what to leave out rather than what to put in. “Rick sent someone to look at the books. Auditor. He’s been at the Shack all week.”
Margo’s hand tightened on the phone. Just slightly. “What kind of auditor?”
“Business consultant. Pressed khakis. Two pens. Doesn’t eat.”
“Everyone eats.”
“Not this one. Joey’s taken it personally.”
“Of course he has.” Margo looked at the hallway, toward the studio, toward the painting she couldn’t finish. “Is Anna handling it?”
“She’s handling it.”
“Is she worried?”
“Anna doesn’t look worried. She looks like Anna.” Another pause. “He asked her about the scholarship.”
Margo closed her eyes. The scholarship. Richard’s promise, kept every year for decades. The first thing she set aside, before anything else. The one thing that was never negotiable.
“What did she say?”
“I couldn’t hear everything. But I heard her say ‘it’s the reason.’ And he stopped writing.”
Margo opened her eyes. “Good.”
“Yeah.”
They sat in the quiet for a moment — Bernie in his apartment, Margo in her kitchen, the phone line holding them together the way it had a thousand times before.
“You could have come over and told me this in person,” she said.
“My knee didn’t like that idea.”
“When are you going to get it fixed?”
“When they invent a surgery that doesn’t involve sitting still for six weeks.”
“You sit still every day. Five hours in a booth.”
“That’s voluntary sitting. Medical sitting is different. Medical sitting has physical therapy and ice packs and someone telling you to do ankle circles. I’m not doing ankle circles, Margo.”
“You’re impossible.”
“I’m consistent. There’s a difference.”
“There really isn’t.”
She heard him shift in his chair—the creak of the old recliner he refused to replace, the one that listed slightly to the left and had a coffee stain on the armrest from 2011 that he considered “character.” “She’ll be fine. Anna. She’s a Walsh.”
“She’s stubborn.”
“Same thing, with your family.”
Margo smiled. She didn’t know she was going to, and then she was. “Same time tomorrow? At the Shack?”
“My booth’s not going anywhere.”
“Neither are you, apparently. Get the knee fixed, Bernard.”
“Goodnight, Margo.”
“Goodnight.”
She hung up and sat in the kitchen for a moment. The house was still quiet, but it was a different quiet now.
Her phone buzzed. Anna, texting a photo of the day’s lunch rush — three tables full, Tyler at the grill, a blurred hand that was probably Joey reaching for something. The caption read: Quiet day. All good here.
All good. The Shack was running without her. That was the whole point. She’d stepped back so they could step forward, and they had, and it was right, and she was proud.
She looked at the photo for a long time.
Then she put the phone down and went to the studio, picked up the brush, and tried the foreground again.
The place where the Shack would go. She got the roofline right this time—the angle of it, the way it sat against the cliff.
But the windows wouldn’t come. Windows needed light inside them, and she couldn’t decide what kind of light the Shack held at that hour.
She used to know. She used to know without thinking.
She set the brush down and cleaned her hands and made dinner—soup from the freezer, bread she’d bought at the market that wasn’t as good as what came out of the Shack’s oven but was perfectly adequate.
Perfectly adequate.
She ate at the kitchen table with the Schedule propped against the salt shaker. Tomorrow was Wednesday. Watercolor with Diane. Pelicans.
Margo washed her bowl, turned off the kitchen light, and went to bed.