Chapter 27
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
With the Shack in its afternoon quiet, Stella worked the prep station through lunch—napkins, condiments, the side work Joey had left in a laminated checklist that she followed without admitting she followed it.
Anna was in the back doing something with the register tape.
Tyler had gone home at noon. Joey was gone but his presence lingered in the form of a sugar packet chart taped to the inside of the cabinet door, organized by color, then by size within each color, with a footnote about the pink ones that read chemical taste — under review.
Stella had taken a photo of the chart. She was going to frame it for Joey’s birthday.
The dining room was empty except for Bernie.
He was in the booth with his tablet propped against the sugar dispenser. Coffee at the angle it always sat—handle at two o’clock. The cane leaned against the wall beside him. The window light fell across his hands the way it did every afternoon at this hour.
She poured herself a glass of water, carried it to the booth, and slid into the seat across from him.
He looked up from the tablet. “Shouldn’t you be working?”
“Side work’s done. Joey’s checklist is complete. I even restocked the napkins at the angle he specified, which I’m pretty sure is a war crime in some countries.”
“Joey’s angles are important to Joey.”
“Joey’s angles are important to everyone within a thirty-foot radius of Joey.”
Bernie laughed and lifted his mug. “Definitely.”
“You’ve been in a lot lately,” she said, taking a sip of water.
“I like the crowd.”
“You like the booth.”
“Same thing.” He set the cup down and looked at her. “What’s on your mind, Stella?”
She turned her water glass on the table. She hadn’t planned this. But she’d been thinking about it since the soundbar—since she’d watched Margo look at the spot on the couch where Bernie sat and seen the same expression she’d been photographing for months without understanding what it was.
“I helped Tyler install a soundbar at Margo’s last week,” she said.
“I heard. The sound is much better.”
“She bought it so you could hear basketball.”
“She bought it so the room would have better audio.”
“Bernie. She went to a store and talked to a man about speaker specifications. For a sport she didn’t know existed four months ago. Because you mentioned the crowd was hard to hear.”
He picked up his coffee and didn’t say anything.
“And while Tyler was installing it, she wasn’t watching him. She was looking at the couch. Your spot. The cushion where you sit.” Stella took a sip of water. “That’s not friendship, Bernie. You know that.”
He set his mug down slowly.
“I take a lot of pictures of this family,” Stella said. “I have hundreds of you looking at her. And last week I watched her look at an empty couch cushion the same way.”
His hand stayed near the cup.
“Does she know?” Stella asked.
“No.”
“Are you going to tell her?”
He looked at the table. His hands. The window.
“I don’t know how,” he said.
“I just spent a week watching Sam not say things.” Stella ran her finger along the edge of her glass. “Don’t do that.”
Bernie rubbed his forehead.
“She bought you a soundbar, Bernie. Just tell her.”
He was quiet for a long time. His hands flat on the table, the cold coffee between them and the afternoon light on the booth.
“Nobody ever knows what to say,” Stella said. “That’s not a reason not to say it.”
He almost smiled.
He picked up his coffee—cold now, the surface flat—and took a sip anyway. Then he reached for his cane and eased himself out of the booth, the knee going last.
“You’re a dangerous person, Stella Walsh,” he said, standing.
“I’m a photographer. I just say what I see.”
He looked at her for a second—the way he looked at things he was going to think about later. Then he put the cane down and walked toward the door, slow and steady, the afternoon light following him across the dining room.
“Bernie?”
He turned at the door.
“Don’t run out of Wednesdays.”
He stood there with his hand on the frame—the same way he’d stood there the morning he came back, five weeks after surgery, looking at the room like he was seeing it for the first time. Then he nodded once and pushed through the door and was gone.
Stella sat in the booth for a minute. His coffee cup was still on the table, handle at two o’clock. She picked it up and carried it to the kitchen and washed it and set it in the rack.
She closed up alone—wiping the counter, turning off the grill, locking the register the way Anna had shown her. She pulled her phone out on the walk home.
Margo arrived at three-fifteen. The flamingo cards were on the corner of the table where she’d left them. The tally on the fridge read MARGO 14, BERNARD 9.
She let herself in and hung her coat on the hook by the door. Made the tea — two mugs, his black, hers black, from the cabinet she’d rearranged months ago. Brought them to the table. Sat down.
Bernie was in the kitchen chair. No cane.
He hadn’t used the cane in weeks. He was cooking his own meals, walking to the Shack and back, going to the hardware store for things he didn’t need.
She knew all of this because she’d been watching it happen, carefully and without commenting on what it meant.
He wasn’t holding the cards. He wasn’t reading his tablet. He was just sitting in the chair with his tea, watching her, and he’d been watching her since she walked in.
“No cards today?” she said.
“In a minute.”
She drank her tea. He drank his. The kitchen had the four o’clock light — the rectangle on the floor had reached the table leg, which meant they had about an hour before it moved to the wall behind the stove.
“Margo,” he said.
“Bernard.”
“I need to tell you something.”
She set her mug down.
He looked at her across the table. The tea between them. The flamingo cards on the corner. The tally on the fridge behind her that she couldn’t see from this angle but knew was there.
“You don’t need to keep coming,” he said.
Margo didn’t move.
“I’m not saying I don’t —“ He stopped. Started again. “I’m saying I’m fine. The surgery is done. The recovery is done. I can make my own tea and cook my own dinner and walk to the Shack and walk home. You set up a system to take care of me and the system worked and now I’m better.”
“I know you’re better.”
“Then you know you don’t need to come three times a week.”
She picked up her mug. The tea was too hot. She drank it anyway.
“I didn’t say I was coming because you needed me to,” she said.
“Why are you coming?”
She didn’t have an answer. She had several answers — the cards, the tea, the routine, the kitchen with the light that moved, the lemon tree in the garden, the tally on the fridge — but none of them were the answer to what he was actually asking and she knew it.
“I’m not asking you to stop,” he said. “I’m asking you to think about why you come. Because if it’s because I had surgery, the surgery is over. And if it’s something else, then I’d like to know what it is.”
Margo stood up.
She didn’t plan to stand. Her body stood.
She picked up her mug and took it to the sink and set it in the basin without rinsing it, which she never did, and she stood at the sink with her hands on the edge of the counter and looked out the window at the lemon tree and the bench and the rosemary in the pot.
“Margo, that’s not what I —”
“I heard you.”
“I’m not trying to —”
“I said I heard you, Bernard.”
She turned around. He was still in the chair. His tea in front of him.
“I have to go,” she said.
“You just got here.”
“I have to go.”
She got her coat from the hook and her purse from the table by the door. She didn’t look at the tally on the fridge. She didn’t look at the flamingo cards. She went to the door and opened it and stopped.
She wanted to say something. She didn’t know what it was. It was in her chest, behind her ribs, pressing against something she didn’t want to come out in Bernie’s kitchen on a Wednesday afternoon.
“Goodbye, Bernard,” she said.
“Goodbye, Margo.”
She pulled the door closed and walked to her car.
She drove home. It was six blocks. She could have walked but she’d driven today because she’d had groceries in the car that she’d planned to bring in, and she’d forgotten the groceries, which were still in the back seat, which she realized when she pulled into her own driveway and saw the bag and sat there looking at it.
She brought the groceries inside. Put them away. Stood in her kitchen.
She was angry. That was the first thing she identified.
She was angry at Bernie for saying what he’d said in the specific way he’d said it, which was calm and reasonable and true, and she was angry at herself for leaving, and she was angry at the leaving for feeling like something she hadn’t meant to do.
Underneath the anger was something she didn’t want to name.
She’d been hurt.
Not by a thing he’d said. By the idea of not going back. By the idea that Wednesday might not be Wednesday anymore.
She stood in her kitchen for a long time.
Then she went to the studio and stood in front of the canvas and didn’t paint.
Friday was Circle night. She’d go to Eleanor’s. She’d drink the wine. She would not talk about this.