Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
Stella stood on a chair.
Not helping. Not closing. Standing on one of the dining chairs with her camera pointed straight up at the ceiling, clicking away at the shells like she’d discovered them that morning.
Anna was elbow-deep in closing—grill scraped, surfaces wiped, the last of the pesto containers sealed and stacked in the walk-in.
She’d been at the Shack since seven and her feet knew it.
The afternoon light came in hard, the way it did in June once the gloom burned off, and the dining room had that scoured look it got when the last plate went back.
She wiped down the counter and got about forty-five seconds into not saying anything about the chair, which for her was a distance record.
“Stella, we close in twenty minutes.”
“I know. Mum asked me to send her a picture of the ceiling—she says she thinks about it sometimes.” Click. “The abalone near the window, the light catches it differently depending on the time of day. Right now it’s almost purple.”
“Right now the tables need wiping and the register needs counting.”
“One more shot.” Click. Click. “There have to be hundreds.”
“There are hundreds. They’ve been there my entire life. The tables, Stella.”
Stella climbed down, but her chin stayed up, tracking across the plaster, her fingers still on the camera like she might need it again any second. She wasn’t done up there. She was just temporarily on the ground.
Tyler came out of the kitchen with a bus tub balanced on his hip and took the last two tables. Bernie was in his booth with the crossword folded over to whatever he hadn’t finished. Margo was there much later than she usually was, still drinking her coffee.
The front door opened and Meg came through it with two covered trays balanced on one arm.
“Tomorrow’s bread,” she said. “Don’t let Joey label it. He labels over my labels.”
Anna looked up from the register. “You were here Monday?”
“I was.”
“And Saturday?”
“That’s true.” Meg got the trays onto the counter by the proofing rack and turned them so her initials faced out, which Joey would redo anyway. “Is this a problem for you?”
“It is not a problem for me.” Anna went back to counting. “I’m making an observation.”
Tyler came through with the tub. “She’s been here three times this week.”
“Four,” Margo said, to her coffee.
“San Clemente’s winding down,” Meg said. “There’s a handover and then there isn’t a San Clemente, and in the meantime I have Tuesdays, and I would like everyone to stop looking at me.”
Joey materialized at the end of the counter with the closing clipboard. “Are those going in the walk-in or are they staying out?”
“I’ll do it.” Meg picked the trays back up. “Bottom shelf, left, and nobody relabels them.”
Joey made a small notation and did not agree to anything.
Meg looked around the room at the chairs going up and the light coming in long across the floor and her family in the middle of it, and pulled out a stool and sat down on it like a woman with nowhere to be. Margo’s eyes stayed on her a beat past anything the moment required.
Anna counted the drawer while Stella drifted toward the back wall and the old photos—Richard behind the counter, the bicentennial bunting, Margo young and laughing at something outside the frame.
But her chin kept coming back up toward the ceiling, and after a minute she crossed the room to the counter with the camera still in her hand.
“Margo, how did the shells start?”
Margo looked up from the coffee she’d been turning in her hands. “The shells?”
“On the ceiling. Who put the first one up? How did it become a thing?”
“Richard found the first one on the beach. The morning we opened.” Margo set the cup down. “He came in with his pockets full of sand and this sand dollar, and he put it up above the door. I asked him what on earth he was doing and he said the ocean should be inside too.”
Anna stopped counting.
Bernie looked up and squinted at the sand dollar. “He also said that the tradition was to put an actual dollar up there.”
Margo smiled and looked up. “We didn’t have one yet, so he said a sand dollar would have to do.” Margo pointed above the door. “That one’s still up there. You can see where the plaster cracked around it.”
Stella found it with the camera and held it there a long moment before the shutter went, and then she didn’t lower the camera.
“Then Mrs. Patterson brought one back from Greece,” Margo said. “She’d gone for her anniversary and she walked in with this little brown shell wrapped in a napkin and said it reminded her of the Shack. I didn’t know what to do with it, so I glued it up next to Richard’s.”
“And then everyone started bringing them,” Bernie said from his booth, without looking up.
Margo’s hand went out toward the far wall.
“From the beach, from vacations, from their grandchildren’s collections.
They’d drop them in the bowl by the register and tell me where they came from.
Every single one had a story.” She took a sip.
“I used to glue them up at night after closing. Just me and the radio and a step stool.”
She stopped.
“That’s not right,” she said. “Richard held the stool. He was the one who thought people would bring them at all—I told him nobody would.” She picked her coffee back up.
“The blue one near the window is the Barton’s honeymoon in Kauai.
The little conch above the grill is from a girl named Sophie who found it at Crystal Cove and told me it was magic, and she’s got children of her own now.
The red one by the door is a fisherman named Aldo who came in every morning for years and then moved back to Portugal.
He mailed it. Wrapped in newspaper. It took three weeks to get here and the newspaper was in Portuguese. ”
Stella’s camera went—click, click, click—following Margo’s hand across the ceiling. Then it came down. She stood in the middle of the dining room with her arms at her sides, going shell to shell.
“I need a topic for my senior project,” she said. “Mr. Reeves wants my proposal soon and I haven’t got one.”
Tyler set down the bus tub. “There you go.”
Stella looked at him.
“Reeves has been after me to come talk to his class since before you were born,” Tyler said. “Maybe you can redeem the Walsh name.”
“What did you do to the Walsh name?” Anna asked.
“Graduated out of spite. Long story.” He picked the tub back up and headed for the kitchen. “But the project’s right above your head.”
Stella turned back to the counter. “Would that be okay? If I did my project on the Shack? The history, the people, the stories behind all of this?”
“It’s a restaurant, Stella. We made sandwiches.” Margo picked up her coffee. “I’m not sure there’s a senior project in sandwiches and shells.”
“You just pointed at the ceiling and knew every story,” Stella said.
Margo paused with the cup halfway up. Set it back down. “I suppose I did.”
“There might be old things worth looking at,” Bernie said, still working the crossword. “Menus. Photos. Things from the early days.”
“There’s a trunk in the garage,” Margo said. She straightened the napkin beside her cup. “Richard’s things. Old paperwork. I never went through it. You’re welcome to whatever’s in there.”
Margo slid out of the booth and reached for her tote, and stopped at the booth on her way past. “Eleanor has me signed up for something involving potting soil.”
“You hate gardening,” Bernie said.
“I hate petunias specifically. Eleanor assures me there will be no petunias.” She hooked the tote over her arm. “Let me know if you need help, Stella. Though I doubt there’s much to find beyond sandwiches.”
She left. The door chimed. Through the window, Margo crossed the street in her painting smock with the tote over her arm, not hurrying.
Joey came back from the walk-in with the clipboard. “Closing checklist. Grill scraped, surfaces wiped, walk-in reorganized, towels bagged, patio swept. I haven’t swept the patio because Stella was supposed to sweep the patio.”
“I’ll sweep the patio,” Stella said.
“It should have been swept before we flipped the sign. The timeline exists for a reason.”
“Okay, then you go sweep the patio.”
He went, clipboard under his arm, and the broom started up outside—brisk, methodical, covering every square foot in a pattern only Joey could see.
Anna finished closing. Register counted, kitchen lights off, the afternoon still bright and flat outside the windows. Meg came back from the walk-in with a padded mailer in one hand.
“This was under the supply boxes by the door.” She turned it over and held it out to Stella. “International postage. It’s for you.”
Stella took it and checked the return address. Sydney. “It’s from Mum. She was supposed to send Nana’s recipe box at Christmas but she couldn’t find it.”
“Well, looks like it found its way.” Anna untied her apron and hung it on the hook by the walk-in.
Stella tucked the package into her camera bag and paused at the door with her chin up one more time. Hundreds of shells, and Margo could name every one.
Anna turned off the lights. The shells went flat and gray without them, all those stories pressed into plaster, each one placed by a hand that thought it mattered enough to leave behind.
She locked the door and walked home.