Chapter 24
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The first morning back, Stella sat on the front step with her coffee and let the ocean fill the space the desert had left empty.
Salt. Eucalyptus. The faint diesel of PCH two blocks over. Home.
Tyler came out with his own coffee a few minutes later. They hadn’t talked much the night before—she’d crashed early with a promise to fill him in as soon as she could.
He sat down beside her on the porch steps.
“Hey, kid.”
“Hey.”
“You okay?”
She thought about it. Sam’s linen shirt. The rocks. The four-second honesty on a dark road. The folder of photographs she’d carried to Sedona and carried back without showing anyone.
“Yeah,” she said. “I’m glad I went.”
Tyler nodded. He didn’t push. He went to the kitchen and she followed him and they stood at the counter making breakfast the way they always did after something big—side by side, not talking about the real stuff yet, letting the bread and the mustard and the ordinary rhythm of it do the work.
Stella ate half of her eggs before she said anything.
“She’s exactly what you said she’d be,” Stella said, looking at her plate. “Brilliant. Warm. And she sees Bea like Bea’s the only person in the room.”
Tyler set his fork down. “And you?”
“She told the chef at a restaurant that I came along for the trip.” Stella took another bite. “She held my photos for about thirty seconds and then asked Bea about negative space.”
Tyler was quiet.
“I’m okay, Dad. I went because I wanted to and I saw what I needed to see and now I’m home.” She wiped her hands on a napkin. “Bea’s experience was bigger. She’s going to tell Anna everything tomorrow.”
“She should. Anna needs to hear it.”
Tyler’s phone buzzed on the counter. He looked at it.
“Margo,” he said. “She needs help installing something at her house.”
“Installing what?”
“She didn’t say. She just said bring you and come by.”
The walk to Margo’s took twelve minutes, past the houses they’d been passing since Stella had moved here—the yellow Craftsman with the bougainvillea, the Spanish on the corner, the empty lot.
The late afternoon light was warm and gold and nothing like the desert.
Stella walked with her hands in her pockets and let Laguna settle back into her.
“Thank you for coming,” Margo said, holding the door open. “I bought something and I need it put up.”
The something was on the kitchen table, still in the box. A soundbar. Margo had bought a soundbar.
Tyler looked at it. Looked at Margo. Looked at Stella.
“You bought a soundbar,” he said.
“The man at the store said it was the right one for the size of the room.”
“Which room?”
“The living room. Where the television is.” Margo crossed her arms. “Bernie and I have been watching college basketball and the sound is terrible. You can barely hear the crowd.”
Tyler opened his mouth and closed it. Stella looked at both of them.
“What’s college basketball?” Stella asked.
Margo and Tyler both turned to her.
“It’s—universities play each other,” Tyler said. “There’s a tournament this time of year. Brackets. Bernie has pools.”
“I know about the pools. I don’t know about the sport.” Stella looked at the TV in the living room. “Is it the one where they run back and forth on a wooden floor?”
“That’s the one,” Tyler said.
“For how long?”
“Forty minutes. Two halves.”
“In footy they tackle each other and it goes for two hours. This sounds polite.”
“It’s not polite,” Margo said. “There’s a lot of yelling.”
“You watch it now?” Stella looked at her grandmother. “You, Margo? You watch sports?”
“Bernie has a team. His roommate went to Michigan and apparently this is very important. There’s hot fudge involved.” Margo picked up her tea and put it down without drinking. “I’m still deciding on a team. I don’t see why you have to pick one.”
“You don’t,” Tyler said. “You can just watch.”
“That’s what I said. Bernie says that’s not how it works.”
Tyler was pressing his lips together. Stella caught it.
“You watch too?” Stella asked him.
“Only the tournament. I’m in Bernie’s pool.” He looked slightly sheepish. “It’s a loyalty thing.”
“You’re both ridiculous,” Stella said. “Can you install this or not?”
Tyler got to work. He pulled the TV away from the wall, found the studs, and started measuring.
Stella sat on Margo’s couch and watched her grandmother stand in the kitchen doorway pretending she wasn’t watching Tyler work with clear discomfort.
Stella would bet Margo had never in her life let someone else handle a project in her house.
“Margo, sit down,” Stella said. “He knows what he’s doing.”
“I’m supervising.”
“You’re hovering.”
Margo sat in the armchair. Then she got up and made tea nobody had asked for. Then she sat back down.
“So you and Bernie watch basketball and eat ice cream,” Stella said.
“His roommate from Michigan sends hot fudge you can’t get out here.” Margo picked up her tea and set it down again. “It’s nice to hear the crowd. That’s all. It’s just nicer when you can hear the applause.”
Stella looked at this woman—her grandmother, who had run a restaurant for fifty years, who watched the news and read books and hadn’t watched a movie in decades, so Stella had been told, who had now bought a soundbar so she could hear basketball crowds while eating ice cream with a man she’d been standing next to for half a century.
She thought about Sam in Sedona, who had a week with two granddaughters and spent it seeing one and not seeing the other. Who said “any time” like time had no limits. Who was maybe in a new town by now, following the light.
And here was Margo, buying a soundbar. Installing it in her living room. Making a place for someone to sit beside her and watch a game she didn’t understand yet.
Margo was watching the couch—not the TV, not Tyler behind it, not the soundbar going up on the wall.
The couch. The spot where Bernie sat when he was here.
Her face had the expression Stella had seen in her own prints, pinned to the darkroom wall—the soft, unguarded thing Margo didn't know her face was doing.
Stella didn't say anything. She filed it where she filed everything—carefully, without comment, for later.
Tyler finished the installation in twenty minutes. He turned it on and the room filled with sound—commentators talking about brackets, the squeak of sneakers on a court, the hum of a crowd waiting for tip-off.
Stella watched men run back and forth on a shiny wooden floor while a man in a suit yelled from the sideline.
“This is what all the fuss is about?” she said.
“Give it a chance,” Margo said, and she sounded like she was quoting someone.
“You’re all set,” Tyler said, wiping his hands on his jeans. “Tell Bernie the sound is better from the couch.”
Margo walked them to the door. She hugged Stella—brief, the doorway kind. But she held on for an extra second.
“Thank you,” she said. “Both of you.”
They walked home in the last of the light, the neighborhood quiet, the ocean a few blocks over doing its evening thing.
“So,” Stella said. “Margo watches basketball now.”
“Apparently, Margo watches basketball now.”
“And you bet on it.”
“I bet on brackets. It’s different.”
“It’s not different.”
Tyler laughed. “I’ll give you the tutorial. It’s actually a great sport once you understand the strategy.”
“Hard pass.” Stella put her hands back in her pockets. “I’ll stick with cricket.”
“Nobody understands cricket.”
“That’s the point. It builds character.”
They walked another block. The porch light was on at the bungalow, the same way it had been on when she’d left a week ago.
“She’s going to be okay,” Stella said.
“Yeah,” Tyler said. “She just needs to figure it out.”
“What if she doesn’t?”
Tyler put his arm around her shoulder—brief, warm, the walking-home kind.
“Then we make sure she does.”