Chapter 33
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
She came at four. Not at three-fifteen—that was Wednesdays. Sundays she came at four, after the Shack closed, after the grill was cleaned and the apron hung and the walk home that had become the walk to Bernie’s house instead, a lot of days.
She let herself in. The door was unlocked, which it always was on the days she came because he’d started leaving it unlocked for her, which was a thing neither of them discussed.
He was in the kitchen reading the Sunday paper, which he still got delivered because he believed news should arrive on paper and be read with coffee and folded in quarters when you were done.
He’d stopped going to the Shack every day—not because the knee couldn’t make it, but because the kitchen table had become the better booth. Two mugs on the table. He’d made hers.
“You’re early,” he said without looking up.
“I’m on time.”
“Four-twelve is early.”
“Four-twelve is on time.”
“You used to come at four-fifteen.”
“I walk faster now.”
He folded the paper and set it aside. She sat down across from him and picked up the mug. He’d gotten the temperature right again, which was an adjustment she was making slowly and without grace.
They drank their tea. The Sanders jar was on the counter next to the stove—it had migrated from behind the ice cube trays to the counter sometime in the last two weeks, which meant it was no longer being saved. It was being used.
“I want to show you something,” she said.
He looked at her over his mug.
“Come with me,” she said, and stood.
She walked to the hallway, the one between the kitchen and the bathroom. The one with the photos.
She’d seen them the first time she’d come to his house—the day of the soup, the day she’d put the hand towel on the rack and stopped in the hallway because the frames were arranged and the faces in them were people she didn’t know and one she did. But she hadn’t asked about them.
She stood in front of the wall. Bernie came and stood beside her.
“Tell me about them,” she said.
He was quiet for a moment. Then he reached up and touched the frame of the first photograph—two boys in matching shirts at what looked like a beach in the 1950s.
“That’s me and my brother,” he said. “Huntington Beach. I was eight. He was six. My mother took it with a camera she’d won in a church raffle.” His hand moved to the next frame. “That’s David—his boy. Wedding day, ninety-four. I wore a tuxedo. I looked like a waiter.”
“You probably did.”
“I’ve never claimed otherwise.”
She pointed at the black-and-white shot of the shaggy dog on the porch.
“Walter,” he said. “Named after my uncle, which my uncle did not appreciate. Walter lived fourteen years and never once came when called. My brother said he had principles.”
Margo laughed. “Sounds like your brother’s habit of naming animals after family members is not new.”
The next frame she already knew. The Laguna newsstand from the early eighties, Bernie in an apron in front of it, holding a stack of papers. KLEIN’S NEWSSTAND on the awning above him.
“I remember that awning,” she said.
“You remember Tyler driving into it?”
“Tyler was sixteen and had his license for three days.”
“He took out the entire front panel. The newspaper rack. And a sandwich board I’d had since 1978.” Bernie looked at the photograph. “You made him come back the next day with lumber and nails and rebuild the rack himself.”
“He needed to learn consequences.”
“He built the worst newspaper rack in the history of Laguna Beach. It leaned eleven degrees to the left. Papers fell out every time someone opened it.”
“But he built it.”
“He built it.” Bernie touched the frame. “I kept that rack for six years. Customers thought the lean was intentional. An artistic statement.”
“Tyler’s first artistic statement.”
“Unintentional. Which is the best kind.”
The last frame on the wall was a photograph Margo hadn’t looked at closely before.
Two men at a table—outside, somewhere bright, a striped umbrella in the background.
One was Bernie, younger, thinner, his hair still dark.
The other was a man Margo recognized from a place so deep in her memory that seeing him here, in Bernie’s hallway, made her hands go still at her sides.
“That’s Richard,” she said.
“Seventy-seven. We’d gone to the track in Del Mar. He bet on a horse called Kitchen Sink because he said any horse with that name had a sense of humor. It came in fourth.”
“That sounds like Richard.”
“He was a terrible gambler and a good friend.” Bernie looked at the photograph. “We used to eat lunch at the newsstand on Fridays. He’d bring sandwiches from the Shack and we’d sit on the step and argue about baseball.”
“He never told me that.”
“Men don’t tell their wives about lunch.”
Margo looked at Richard’s face in the photograph.
Young, laughing, alive. The man who’d found the first sand dollar and put it above the door.
The man who’d called her “always the artist” when she rearranged the shells to match the constellations.
The man who’d died too young and left her with the Shack and two children and a life she’d built out of grilled cheese and stubbornness.
“I’m glad you were friends,” she said.
Bernie nodded. “Forty years. Until he died.”
“And then you kept coming to the Shack.”
“Every day.”
Margo looked at him. Bernie looked at the photograph of Richard.
They stood in the hallway. The photos on the wall. The afternoon light from the kitchen behind them. Richard at the track with his friend, laughing about a horse called Kitchen Sink.
“Why didn’t you ever marry?” Margo said.
He looked at her. Then at the photograph of Richard.
“Never found a reason to stop coming to the Shack,” he said.
Margo pressed her lips together. The hallway was narrow and they were standing close and the light was behind them and Richard was laughing about a horse at the track and Bernie was looking at her.
They went back to the kitchen and sat in their chairs.
“Now I want to tell you something,” she said. “The painting. The canvas that’s been on my easel since the night of your knee. I know what it is now.”
“What is it?”
“It’s you.”
He looked at her.
“It’s you in this kitchen. At this table. With the light on the wall behind you and the cards on the corner and the tally on the fridge.” She picked up her mug and held it. “I’ve been staring at a blank canvas for months because I couldn’t see what was in front of me. And now I can.”
Bernie didn’t say anything for a long time. He sat in his chair with the light moving across the kitchen and the photos in the hallway behind him—the brother, the nephew, Walter, the newsstand, Richard at the track.
“When?” he said.
She shrugged. “When I’m ready.”
“Take your time,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
They finished their tea. She gathered the flamingo cards and dealt. Two hands. She won both. She wrote the score on the tally and walked it to the fridge and centered it with the round black magnet.
At the door she stopped.
“Bernard?”
“Yes?”
“Fifty years of sitting in that booth. Every single day. That’s a lot of coffee.”
“It was never about the coffee, Margo.”
She let herself out and walked home in the last of the daylight, and the walk was four blocks and she knew every house and every tree and every crack in the sidewalk, and she walked through them all feeling like she was seeing them for the first time.