Chapter 28
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Bea was in the kitchen when Anna came down.
That was the first surprise. Bea on school mornings operated on a fixed schedule—alarm at six-forty-five, shower, dressed, out the door with a granola bar and her backpack by seven-twenty.
She did not sit at the kitchen table at six-fifteen with a bowl of cereal and her phone face-down beside it and the look of someone who’d been awake for a while.
Anna stopped in the doorway. The kitchen smelled like coffee. Bea had made coffee. Bea didn’t drink coffee.
“I made coffee,” Bea said. “For you.”
“Thank you.”
Anna crossed to the counter and poured a cup. The pot was full—Bea had made the whole thing, the way Anna made it, with the scoop-and-a-half that Joey had once called “structurally sound.” Anna carried her cup to the table and sat across from her daughter.
The November light was thin through the kitchen window. Early. Grey. The kind of morning that hadn’t decided what it was going to be yet.
Bea ate a spoonful of cereal. Anna drank her coffee. The quiet between them was different from last night’s quiet — last night’s had been the silence of a door closing. This was the silence of two people sitting on either side of something, figuring out how to start.
“I should have told you,” Anna said.
“Yeah.”
“I was scared. Which is a terrible reason.”
“It’s an honest reason.” Bea stirred her cereal. “Scared of what?”
Anna wrapped her hands around the cup. The coffee was good. Bea had made it right.
“Scared that you’d look at me the way you looked at me last night.”
Bea’s spoon stopped.
“I’m not mad,” Bea said. “I was mad last night. This morning I’m—” She looked at her cereal like it might have the word she needed. “I don’t know what I am this morning.”
“That’s okay.”
“It doesn’t feel okay.”
“I know.”
The fridge hummed. A car passed on the street outside. The house held them the way it always did.
“I like him, Bea.”
Straight and clear. She’d softened and avoided and timed and planned and hoped Bea wouldn’t find out instead of saying the true thing for far too long.
Bea looked at her.
“I know,” Bea said.
“You know?”
“Mom. The olive oil. The humming. The focaccia you started making every Thursday even though we had plenty.” Bea almost smiled. Almost. “Stella told me about the Florence laugh.”
“The Florence laugh.”
“Apparently you have a different laugh when something matters to you. Stella noticed. She notices everything.” Bea set her spoon down. “I’ve known for weeks. I just didn’t want to know it out loud.”
Anna sat with that. Her daughter had been watching her fall for someone and holding it alone, being mature, being fine, and Anna hadn’t seen it because she’d been too busy hiding the same thing.
“I’m not going to make it hard for you,” Bea said. “I told Stella that last night. And Tyler.”
“You went to Tyler’s.”
“He made terrible tea. Then we got ice cream.”
“Ice cream.”
Bea picked up her spoon again. “Salted caramel. It helped.”
Anna wanted to reach across the table and hold her daughter’s hand. She didn’t. Bea wasn’t ready for that yet. The coffee and the cereal and the conversation were already more than Anna had expected this morning.
“Are we okay?” Anna asked.
Bea looked at her. Sixteen years old. Sam’s eyes, Anna’s jaw, a face that was learning to hold complicated things without dropping them.
“We’re not not okay,” Bea said. “That’s the best I’ve got right now.”
“I’ll take it.”
“And next time you want to invite someone to dinner, tell me first. Like a normal person.”
“Like a normal person.”
Bea finished her cereal, rinsed the bowl, and picked up her backpack from the chair by the door. The routine. The schedule. The steady forward motion of a sixteen-year-old who had school in forty minutes and a life that was rearranging itself around her.
She stopped in the doorway.
“The pasta was good, by the way.”
“What?”
“I tried it. Last night. When I got home. There was some left in the pot.” She shifted her backpack. “It was really good.”
She left. The front door closed. Anna sat at the kitchen table with her coffee and the November light coming in stronger now, the grey turning to something warmer. The house was quiet again — but a different quiet than yesterday. Yesterday’s quiet had weight. This one had room in it.
Not fixed. But honest. She’d take honest.
The Shack opened at ten. Anna had the grill heating and the cheese unwrapped and the coffee going when her phone buzzed on the counter. Meg.
“The caterer canceled,” Meg said. No hello. No preamble. Meg in crisis started mid-sentence. “The caterer Luke found—they double-booked our date and they just now told me, like that’s an acceptable timeline for—”
“Meg. Breathe.”
“I’m breathing. I’m breathing and panicking.
I can do both.” More typing in the background.
Meg was always typing. “So now I have no caterer, no venue, the chair rental people want a decision by Friday, and if we push this past November the sunset’s at four-thirty and nobody’s having a sunset wedding in the dark, Anna. ”
“So don’t push it past November.”
“That’s two weeks. You can’t plan a wedding in two weeks.”
“You can if you stop planning and just do it.” Anna leaned against the counter and looked at the patio through the kitchen window.
Morning light. The ocean flat and bright.
The chairs stacked from last night’s art event, the string lights still up because Anna had been too tired to take them down. “Have it at the Shack, Meg.”
Silence on the line. The typing stopped.
“The wedding.”
“The wedding. The patio. Your family’s food. You don’t need a caterer because we ARE the caterer. You don’t need a venue because you’re standing in it.”
“Anna, we’ve been over this —”
“You’ve been over this. I’ve been saying the same thing since Luke first mentioned it. The patio at sunset. Grilled cheese trays. Tyler’s eggs. Rosa’s salsa. Meg, it’s right there.”
“It’s a grilled cheese restaurant.”
“It’s our grilled cheese restaurant.”
More silence. Anna could hear Meg thinking. Meg’s thinking had a sound—not typing, not breathing, just the hum of a brain running through every objection and finding them thinner than expected.
“I’ll think about it,” Meg said.
“You’ve been thinking about it since the art night. I saw your face.”
“My face was painting.”
“Your face was looking at the patio at sunset and imagining yourself in a white dress. I know you, Meg.”
“I was not—”
“Luke said ‘our grilled cheese restaurant.’ You didn’t say no.”
Meg was quiet for a long time. The line hummed.
“I’ll think about it,” she said again, softer. “I have to go. Work is calling.”
“The patio is available. The sunset’s still at five. You have two weeks, Meg.”
“Goodbye, Anna.”
Anna hung up and stood in the kitchen with her phone and her coffee and the grill heating behind her.
Through the window, the patio sat in the morning light—empty, quiet, the string lights catching the sun.
The same patio where people had painted the sunset two nights ago.
The same patio where Luke had said “weddings” and looked at Meg and Meg had pressed her fingers against her eyes.
Meg was going to say yes. Not today. Not because Anna told her to. But the caterer had canceled and the days were getting shorter and the patio was right there and sometimes the universe just keeps pointing you toward the obvious answer until you stop arguing with it.
Tyler came through the back door with eggs and his camera bag over his shoulder.
“Morning,” he said, setting the flat on the counter. “How’s Bea?”
“She made me coffee.”
Tyler stopped. Looked at her.
“She made you coffee?”
“The whole pot. The way I make it.”
Tyler set the eggs down and leaned against the counter. He didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he nodded.
“That’s good,” he said. “That’s really good.”
“It’s not fixed.”
“No. But she made you coffee.” He picked up the eggs and headed for the walk-in. “That’s Bea for ‘I love you and I’m still mad.’ Give her time.”
He disappeared into the walk-in. Anna stood at the counter and looked at the morning.
The grill ticking as it heated. The ocean through the windows.
The Shack waking up the way it always did—slowly, piece by piece, coffee and clean surfaces and the smell of fifty years of grilled cheese baked into the walls.
The days were getting shorter. She could feel it in the light—the way it came in lower through the front windows, the way the afternoons ended sooner, the way November was already starting to feel like a door closing toward winter.
And somewhere in there, Anna would have to figure out what Michael was.
Not to the Shack. Not to the numbers. To her.
But not today. Today the grill was hot and the cheese was out and the Shack was opening in an hour.
She tied her apron and went to work.