Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
Margo’s cottage smelled like lemons, inside and outside both.
Stella stood on the porch and breathed it in—warm sugar and citrus and something scorched at the edge of it.
Margo had baked something and gotten distracted, probably by her painting, probably at exactly the wrong moment.
The blue shutters were open. The porch light was on against the dark.
Through the front window the television flickered, and sneakers squeaked on a basketball court somewhere inside.
She knocked. Nobody answered. She knocked again.
“It’s open,” Bernie called from inside.
Stella pulled open the screen door and found them on the couch—Margo at one end with her feet tucked under her, Bernie at the other with a plate balanced on his knee. The game was on. A lemon meringue pie sat on the coffee table between them, one slice already cut.
“I’m here for the trunk,” Stella said.
“I know. It’s in the garage.” Margo didn’t look away from the television. “Sit down. Have some pie. The Finals are on.”
“Who’s playing?”
“We’ve moved on from college to the NBA,” Margo said. “I might need a new jersey.”
“You don’t have a jersey,” Bernie said.
“I might get one. To support the transition.” She waved at the pie. “There’s a plate in the kitchen.”
Stella went to the kitchen and found a clean plate and a stack of napkins Margo had folded into triangles.
Not unlike Joey’s method. The counters were spotless except for a dusting of flour near the mixer and a bowl of lemons from the tree in the side yard—small, bright, none of them the same size, the kind that only grew in somebody’s garden and never in a store.
She came back into the living room and cut herself a slice.
The pie was good. Really good. The meringue was tall and lightly browned and the filling had that sharp bite that meant Margo had used her own fruit instead of bottled juice. The crust had gone dark on one side.
“The crust burned,” Margo said, eyes on the screen. “I was in the studio.”
“It’s perfect.”
“It’s overbaked on the left. But the meringue held, which is all that matters.”
Stella ate her pie and let the scene settle around her—the two of them on opposite ends of the couch, the game between them, the pie on the coffee table.
Margo in her house cardigan with her reading glasses pushed up on her head.
Bernie in a flannel shirt that had seen better decades.
Two remotes on the coffee table, one sleek and new for the soundbar Tyler had installed, one held together with electrical tape for everything else.
“And yet here we are,” Bernie said, during a timeout. “Two people. Two remotes. Two houses.”
“Don’t start, Bernard.”
“I’m not starting. I’m observing.”
“The trunk,” Stella said. “It’s in the garage?”
“Behind the painting supplies. There’s a green tarp over it.” Margo pulled her cardigan tighter. “I haven’t looked at it in years. It’s Richard’s things, mostly. Old menus, paperwork. I don’t know what else.”
“You could go through it first,” Bernie said. “Before she takes it.”
“Why would I do that?”
“To see what’s in there.”
“Just old menus and paperwork. I just said that.” Margo reached for her water glass. “Stella needs it for her project. She’s welcome to it.”
Bernie looked at Margo for a moment. A long one. Then he turned back to the game.
“Tyler’s coming to help carry it,” Stella said. “It’s too heavy for me.”
“It’s not that heavy.”
“Margo, it’s a trunk.”
“It’s a small trunk.”
“You said it was behind the painting supplies?”
“Behind, not under.” Margo looked at the screen. “This point guard has no composure.”
The doorbell rang.
“It’s open,” Margo and Bernie said in unison, and then looked at each other.
Tyler came through the door, car keys in hand. He stopped in the doorway and took in the scene—the two of them on the couch, the pie, the game, the two remotes.
“Look at you two,” he said. “Just like old married people.” He tilted his head. “At least I think that’s what old married people do. I wouldn’t actually know.”
“We are not old married people,” Margo said.
“You have matching remotes.”
“The remotes do not match. That is precisely the problem.”
Tyler grinned and crossed to the coffee table. “How’s the soundbar working?”
“Beautifully,” Bernie said. “I can hear every sneaker squeak. It’s like being courtside.”
“Better than courtside. Courtside doesn’t have lemon meringue pie.” Tyler got a plate from the kitchen and cut himself a slice without being invited—a move only a grandson could survive in Margo’s house. He ate it standing up. “This is incredible. Is this from the tree?”
“Where else would it be from?”
“You could buy lemons like a normal person.”
“Normal people don’t have a Meyer lemon tree, Tyler.”
“Good point.” He finished the slice in four bites. “Garage?”
“Behind the painting supplies. Green tarp.”
Tyler and Stella went through the kitchen to the side door that led to the garage. Tyler pulled the chain on the bulb and the room came up yellow.
No car had been in here in a long time. Canvases stood along the far wall, stacked four and five deep, face-in, so what you got was a row of wooden stretcher bars and staples and somebody’s handwriting on the backs in pencil. Dates, mostly. A few had words. Heisler, wrong. One said only no.
The bench under the window held the paint—tubes flattened from the bottom up the way a person does it when she’s been doing it her whole life, cadmium yellow, burnt sienna, raw umber, a titanium white gone to concrete around the cap.
A jam jar of blue sat apart from the rest with a strip of masking tape on it and nothing written on the tape.
Coffee cans of brushes. A palette that was a dinner plate, and under the smears Stella could still see the thin blue rim of the good ones.
There was a bicycle with no chain. A box of Christmas things. A folded stroller.
Stella stood in the middle of it with her hands in her back pockets.
She’d been in this house what seemed like a million times.
Ate at the table, sat on that couch, learned the trick of the deadbolt.
And ten feet off the kitchen was a room that had been filling up since before her father was born, and nobody had ever thought to mention it, because to everyone else it was just the garage.
“She painted all these?”
“That’s not even most of them.” Tyler was already at the back corner. “The good ones are in the house. These are the ones she doesn’t like.”
“There’s a hundred paintings in here.”
“Yeah, maybe more.” He put his hand on the green tarp. “Here it is.”
The trunk sat under it in the corner, exactly where Margo said it would be—a wooden chest, not large, with brass hinges now dark with age.
Tyler pulled back the tarp. Dust came up off it and Stella waved it away.
“Heavy?” Stella asked.
Tyler lifted one end. “Not bad. Get the other side.”
They carried it through the kitchen, through the living room—“Don’t hit the coffee table,” Margo said without looking up—and out the front door to Tyler’s truck. Tyler slid it into the bed and closed the tailgate.
“That’s everything?” Tyler asked, leaning back into the house.
“That’s everything. Drive safe.”
“Yes ma’am.” Tyler stopped with one hand on the doorframe. “You mind if I take the rest of that pie to Meg and Luke?”
“Take it. There’s foil in the drawer by the stove.” Margo did not look away from the television. “The tin comes back clean.”
Tyler went and got the foil and did the pie over the coffee table, badly, while Bernie supervised without offering to help.
“Meg was at the Shack again today,” Margo said.
“She’s been at the Shack all week.” Tyler folded a corner down with his thumb. “Luke says San Clemente’s nearly over and she hasn’t lined anything up behind it.”
“Good,” Margo said.
“You don’t sound like it’s good.”
“It’s good.” Margo reached for her water. “It’s just been a while.”
Stella was halfway down the porch steps when the screen door opened behind her.
Bernie stood in the doorway with the television still going behind him.
“Be gentle,” he said. “With whatever you find in there.”
It was a strange thing to say about old menus and paperwork.
“I will,” she said.
Bernie nodded once and went back inside.
Tyler was already in the truck with the engine running. Stella climbed into the passenger seat and buckled her seatbelt. The trunk sat behind them in the bed, brass hinges catching the streetlight.
“What was that about?” Tyler asked, pulling out of Margo’s driveway.
“I don’t know.”
They drove home in the dark, the trunk riding behind them, the Pacific somewhere out there beyond the rooftops, invisible but present. The way it always was.