Epilogue
It was early Saturday morning and the Shack in its rhythm.
Anna was at the grill, doing something with eggs that involved more wrist action than Stella thought eggs deserved.
Tyler at the prep station, slicing tomatoes with the knife Lindsey had bought him for Christmas that he treated like a surgical instrument.
Joey at the pass with his clipboard and a new pen—blue ink this week, which represented a change from the black ink of the previous six months that Joey had announced at a volume suggesting it was a policy shift and not a pen preference.
“Blue ink photographs better,” Joey said when Stella raised the camera. “I did research.”
“You researched ink colors?”
“I researched everything. That’s why the systems work.” He made a note on the clipboard. “Table four needs a bus. Also the pepper grinder on six is at forty percent. I can tell by the resistance.”
“Forty percent?”
“I calibrate on Mondays.”
Stella took the shot. Joey mid-calibration, clipboard in hand, the morning light from the front windows falling across his apron. She’d keep that one.
The dining room was half full with the Saturday breakfast crowd.
Regulars in their spots—Mrs. Feldstein at table two with her crossword and her single cup of coffee that she made last ninety minutes.
The couple from Irvine who came every other week and always ordered the same thing and always asked what was good as if they might order something different. They never did.
The booth was occupied.
Bernie sat with his tablet propped against the sugar dispenser and his coffee at the angle it always sat — handle at two o’clock, positioned at the precise spot on the table where whoever was refilling it could reach without leaning.
He’d been doing this for as long as Stella had been photographing him, which was over a year now, and she’d stopped wondering if he knew he did it.
He knew. He’d always known.
Margo came through the kitchen door at ten.
Not from behind the counter—from the front.
She’d walked in through the dining room, which she never used to do, because she used to come from the kitchen where she belonged to the grill where she worked.
She came from the front now. Through the door, past the tables, past the counter.
She stopped at the booth.
“Morning,” she said.
“Morning.” Bernie didn’t look up from his tablet.
“You’re reading the same article you were reading yesterday.”
“It’s a long article.”
“It’s a short article. You just read slowly.”
“I read at a pace that honors the material.”
“The material is a story about a dog that surfs.”
“Surfing dogs deserve respect, Margo.”
She sat down across from him.
Not behind the counter. Not at the grill. Not in the place she’d stood for decades. Across from him, in the booth, with the coffee between them and the morning light through the window and the salt shaker Joey had maintained for months.
Anna glanced up from the grill. She looked at Margo sitting in the booth and she went back to the eggs without a word.
Tyler saw it too. He nudged Stella with his elbow and tilted his head toward the booth. Stella already had the camera up. She looked through the viewfinder—Margo and Bernie in the booth, the coffee, the tablet with the surfing dog, the morning light.
She lowered the camera.
“Not taking it?” Tyler said.
“Don’t need to.” She put the lens cap on. “I’ll remember.”
Joey appeared at the booth with a second coffee and set it in front of Margo at the same angle as Bernie’s—handle at two o’clock, positioned for easy reach. He stepped back, examined both cups, adjusted Margo’s a quarter inch to the left.
“Symmetry,” he said, and went back to the pass.
Margo picked up her coffee. Bernie picked up his. They drank without talking. The silence between them had its own rhythm by now.
Back to work. Table four needed bussing. The napkins needed refilling at the angle Joey specified. The counter needed wiping and the muffin inventory needed checking — cranberry walnut at sixty percent, which Stella told Joey and watched him write down with the blue pen he’d researched.
The morning moved the way mornings moved at the Shack — customers in, customers out, the grill going, the coffee flowing, the ocean through the windows doing what the ocean always did.
Bea texted at noon.
how’s the shack?
Stella looked at the dining room. Tyler at the grill now, Anna on break, Joey reorganizing something that didn’t need reorganizing.
Mrs. Feldstein on her second crossword. The couple from Irvine gone.
Bernie in the booth with his tablet. Margo across from him, reading the paper he’d finished and folded and left for her.
She typed back.
everyone’s where they’re supposed to be.
She put her phone in her pocket and picked up her camera and went back to work. The light through the front windows was good—the kind of good Bea would have noticed and mentioned fourteen times—and there were photographs to take and napkins to fold and a family to keep watch over.
Another morning at the Shack. The same as every morning. Except for the quarter inch everything had shifted, which was just enough to change the view from every angle in the room.
Thank you for reading—and for spending time with Meg, Margo, and the Beach Shack crew.