Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
Bernie rang the doorbell.
He had never once rung her doorbell. He had knocked, he had walked in, he had stood on the porch and called her name through the screen door. But today he rang the doorbell, and Margo stood on the other side of it in her good cardigan, holding her purse with both hands. This was new.
She opened the door. Bernie had on a collared shirt. Tucked in.
“You dressed up,” she said.
“I put on a different shirt.”
“You tucked it in. You have never tucked in a shirt in fifty years of knowing me.”
“You’re keeping track of my shirts?”
“I’m observant.” She pulled the door shut behind her and locked it, which took two tries because the deadbolt stuck and always had. “Where are we going?”
“I told you. That French place on PCH.”
“You said a bakery. You didn’t say French.”
“It’s called La Petite Something. It’s French.” Bernie held open the passenger door of his sedan. The car was approximately the same age as their friendship and drove like it. “Eleanor recommended it.”
“Eleanor recommends everything. Last month she recommended a foot cream that smelled like turpentine.”
“This is breakfast, not foot cream. Get in.”
Margo got in. The seat was adjusted too far back—Bernie’s legs were longer than hers and he hadn’t thought to change it. She reached for the lever and slid forward with a mechanical thunk that startled them both.
“I could have done that,” he said, settling in behind the wheel.
“You could have done it before I got in.”
“I didn’t think of it.”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
He pulled out of her driveway. Slowly. Bernie had never been in a hurry in his life, and he wasn’t about to start on PCH. Margo held her purse and looked out the window. Breakfast with Bernard Klein. Someone else’s restaurant.
The Shack didn’t need her—Anna had the ordering, Tyler had the prep, Joey had the systems that kept everything calibrated to within an inch of its life. They were fine without her. She knew this because she’d spent months teaching herself to believe it.
But it was something. Riding in Bernie’s car, headed away from the beach, away from the Shack, toward a place with a French name and food she hadn’t made. Like playing hooky.
“Have you been here before?” she asked.
“Once. With my dentist.”
“You went to a French bakery with your dentist?”
“He’s a very cultured dentist.” Bernie turned onto PCH, merged carefully into traffic, and drove exactly the speed limit. “The croissants were good.”
“Better than mine?”
She said it without thinking and then heard it—mine. As if she still made croissants. As if she ever had, regularly. She’d made them a handful of times. Maybe more than a handful. A long time ago. And she remembered that they weren’t easy.
La Petite Maison sat between a surf shop and a realtor’s office, about as Laguna Beach as an address gets. Small, bright, a blue-and-white awning over a glass door. Through the window, a pastry case ran the length of the counter—rows of croissants and tarts and éclairs under glass.
Bernie held the door. Margo walked in and the smell hit her—butter and sugar and yeast, the feel of a kitchen with its ovens on since four in the morning. It was a smell she knew from somewhere deep and not recent, like a word in a language she used to speak.
“Table for two,” Bernie said to the girl at the counter, who looked about Stella’s age and had flour in her hair.
“Anywhere you’d like.”
They chose a table by the window. Bernie pulled her chair out first, then took his own. Margo set her purse on the empty chair beside her and did not comment on the chair-pulling, and he did not comment on her not commenting, and the new era survived another small negotiation.
“Across,” Bernie said.
“What?”
“We’re sitting across from each other. At the Shack you sit next to me.”
“At the Shack there’s a booth. This is a table.” Margo unfolded her napkin.
“I’m just noting it.”
“Note it quietly.”
A young man brought menus. Margo put on her reading glasses and studied the offerings, written in a handwriting so elegant it was nearly illegible. Quiche Lorraine. Croque monsieur. Pain au chocolat. A section called “Les Viennoiseries” that she had to tilt the menu to read.
“What’s a viennoiserie?” Bernie asked.
“Pastries. Laminated dough. Croissants, that sort of thing.”
Bernie laughed. “Who wants to eat laminated dough? Joey might, but not most people.”
Margo sighed “That’s what layering butter and dough is called, Bernard. For croissants. Laminated. Not like Joey’s procedures.”
“You know this?”
“I know a lot of things, Bernard.”
She ordered coffee and a plain croissant. Bernie ordered coffee and the quiche, because he was a man who ordered the most substantial item on any menu, every time, everywhere. The coffee arrived in white cups, smaller than the mugs at the Shack and without chips on the rim.
Margo picked hers up. Set it down. Picked it up again.
“It’s strange,” she said.
“The coffee?”
“Being here. Eating somewhere else. I’ve mostly been at the Shack every day for—” She stopped counting in her head because the number was too large and too heavy. “A long time.”
“A lifetime.”
“A long time.” She took a sip. The coffee was good. Not Joey’s, but good. “I feel like I’m cheating on my own restaurant.”
“You’re retired.”
“I’m not retired. I’m painting.”
Bernie cut into his quiche. “You’re painting instead of working. That’s retirement.”
“That’s a creative sabbatical.” She turned her cup a quarter in its saucer.
“From a whole career.”
“You’re very argumentative this morning.”
“I’m conversational. Not the same thing.”
Their food arrived. The croissant was beautiful—golden layers that took years to learn and a four a.m. start to complete. Margo tore off one end and the layers separated like. Butter and air and something almost sweet underneath.
It was very good. She ate it slowly, paying attention.
“Well?” Bernie asked over his quiche.
“It’s well made. Proper lamination. Good butter.” She brushed a flake from her lip. “Very good.”
“But?”
“No but. It’s very good.”
“That’s what you said about Joey’s grilled cheese. Right before you said the whole restaurant was falling apart.”
“This is different.” Margo took another bite. “This is someone else’s restaurant. I’m allowed to just enjoy it.”
She was nearly finished when a woman stopped at their table—mid-seventies, silver hair pulled back, reading glasses on a chain—already smiling when Margo looked up.
“Margo Turner. I haven’t seen you in years.”
The face was familiar and the name took a moment. Names arrived late these days. “Dorothy. Dorothy Kessler. You used to come in on Saturdays.”
“Every Saturday for six years. Until we moved to Dana Point.” Dorothy shifted her paper bag to the other arm. “How’s the Shack?”
“Still standing. My grandchildren run it now.”
“Good for you. You’ve earned a rest.” Dorothy looked around the bakery, then back at Margo.
“You know, I’ve been coming here for years, and the almond croissants are lovely, but they’ve never been as good as the ones you used to make.
You’d do them on Saturdays, remember? With the sliced almonds on top and that apricot glaze.
My husband used to drive twenty minutes for those. ”
Margo’s hands went still on her coffee cup.
“That was a long time ago,” she said.
“It was. But some things you don’t forget.” Dorothy smiled and patted her bag. “Lovely to see you, Margo. Give my best to the family.”
She left. The door chimed behind her. The bakery went on—the girl with flour in her hair boxing up an order, a couple at the next table sharing a tart, the kitchen sounds drifting out every time someone pushed through the back door.
“Almond croissants,” Bernie said after a moment.
“Apparently.”
“I remember those. Best I’ve ever had.”
“It was a lifetime ago, Bernard.” She finished her coffee and set the cup in its saucer, centering it precisely.
“Richard and I had ideas about expanding the menu. Baked goods, pastries, things beyond the grill. But then—” She stopped.
Straightened the napkin beside her plate.
“Well. Then things changed. And you know all of this.”
Bernie was quiet. He didn’t push. He’d been there. He knew exactly when things changed and what changed them and what went into a trunk in the garage afterward.
“Grilled cheese and a pickle,” Margo said.
“That’s what I could manage. After.” She looked out the window at the Pacific, blue and flat in the morning light.
“I barely remember making croissants at all. Isn’t that strange?
Dorothy Kessler drove twenty minutes and I can barely picture it. I guess I was busy.”
“You were surviving,” Bernie said. “There’s a difference.”
Bernie put his hand over hers on the table. He didn’t say anything about it and neither did she. He had been right there when she put all of it away, and he had never once told her she should have kept going.
“Should we get the check?” she asked.
“I’m paying.”
“You are not paying.” She reached for her purse.
“I invited you. I’m paying.”
“Bernard, I have been financially independent longer than you’ve had that car.”
“And I’ve been trying to buy you breakfast since Ford was president. Let me have this.”
Margo pressed her lips together. “Fine,” she said. “But I’m driving home.”
“You’re not driving my car.”
“Then I’m choosing where we go next time.”
“There’s a next time?” Bernie asked to the last of his coffee.
“Don’t push your luck, Bernard.”
She let him pay. They walked out into the morning sun, Margo’s purse over her arm, the Pacific stretched out blue and endless across the highway.
He opened the car door for her again. She got in without commenting on it this time.
They drove back toward the beach in silence, the windows cracked, the air carrying salt and jasmine. Margo looked at the ocean. Almond croissants and apricot glaze and a kitchen that used to smell like more than grilled cheese.
She couldn’t quite get the picture back. Just the edges of it. Just the feeling.
A lifetime ago.