Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
The house was hers for the evening. Tyler was at Lindsey’s—leftovers in the fridge, note on the counter. Stella spread an old beach towel on the floor, knelt in front of the trunk, and worked the brass latches, which were stiff and gave one at a time.
The lid came up with a smell she’d never smelled before. Old paper. Dust. Something dry and faintly sweet underneath, maybe cedar, maybe just time.
She photographed the top layer before she touched anything, straight down, the whole layer in frame. Joey would have approved. She decided not to tell him.
The top layer was paperwork, and it was wonderful and it was homework.
Supplier lists on carbon paper. A bicentennial pennant, folded, the felt gone bald in a couple of places.
A rubber-banded set of table number cards, the rubber band dried to threads, the cards themselves hand-cut and not quite square—somebody’s first try at a system the Shack still used.
She photographed everything, laid it out on the towel in rows, and kept going.
Her phone buzzed on the floor beside her. It was Bea.
have you tried it on yet.
She turned the phone face down.
The menus were in the second layer, flat in a folder of stiff cardboard, and they stopped her before she understood why.
They were hand-lettered. Not typed, not printed—drawn, in tall loose capitals that leaned right, with the prices set off in little boxes and, on the second one, down in the corner, a small drawing of the Shack itself with three lines of ocean behind it and the sign too big for the building.
She knew the lettering from the photos on the wall at the Shack.
Her great-grandfather Richard’s. And the food wasn’t grilled cheese.
Fish stew. A roast chicken with lemon. Dishes with names she had to sound out, dishes that belonged to a bigger restaurant than the one in the drawing.
And there was a second set of handwriting on every page.
Small, straight up and down, in harder pencil.
She knew that one too—it was the handwriting in the ledger Margo still kept by the register.
Margo’s writing, crossing things out. Too many pans.
Not on a Saturday. Under a dish Richard had underlined twice, the tall hand had written, trust me.
And under that, the small handwriting, I do. Not about this.
Stella sat back on her heels and read the argument again. Margo helping with the paperwork. Checking his numbers. She photographed each menu twice, filed the folder in her head under menus, annotated, and set it carefully on the towel.
Near the bottom there was a manila folder, soft at the corners, unlabeled.
She opened it expecting more menus. Inside was a folded paper napkin, with faded pencil on it that she couldn’t read in the evening light, and not much else.
She looked at it for a moment. It meant nothing to her and it had been kept, and those two things didn’t usually go together.
She closed the folder and put it on the corner of the towel, in the pile she’d started calling ask Bernie, and made herself keep going.
The last thing in the trunk was in the corner, under everything, and it was wrapped.
That was what she registered first—not what it was, but that it was different.
Everything else in the trunk had been stored.
Stacked, folded, rubber-banded. This was wrapped, in a dish towel with a faded red stripe, the ends folded under the way you’d wrap a package to mail, and it had been tucked into the corner where the paperwork would cover it.
Stella lifted it out with both hands and sat down properly on the floor, cross-legged, and gently removed the towel.
A recipe box. Wooden, plain, the finish worn through at the latch.
The cards inside were in Margo’s hand. LEMON TARTS.
ALMOND CROISSANT with a note about apricot glaze.
Recipes she half-recognized, cousins of things she’d eaten in that dining room her whole time in Laguna, and recipes she had never heard of at the Shack or anywhere else.
And scattered through them, older cards—older paper, older ink, a slanted spidery handwriting that measured in teacups and called for butter the size of an egg.
Somebody’s grandmother, behind the grandmother she knew.
The house was very quiet. The refrigerator cycled on in the kitchen and cycled off again. Outside a car went by slow and its headlights crossed the ceiling.
Stella sat on the floor with the box in her lap for a long time.
This wasn’t for the project. She didn’t know yet what it was for.
She didn’t call her dad. She started a text to Bea three times and deleted it twice and the third time never sent it.
Then she got up, because there was another box in this house and she wanted to look at it.
Nana’s had been on the kitchen counter since the afternoon it came, still in its padded mailer behind the fruit bowl, the customs form taped to the front.
Her mother’s handwriting in the little box marked CONTENTS. Recipes. No commercial value.
She’d forgotten all about it.
She brought it back to the towel and sat down with one on either side of her, and that was when she saw it.
They were the same box. Not the same—Margo’s was darker and the latch was different—but the same idea, the same size, the same wood worn pale at the corner where a thumb had gone a thousand times.
She opened Nana’s.
Cards, upright in their rows, smudged at the corners.
And every one of them in the same small handwriting, the old ones and the new ones both.
The old ones should have been older. She turned four or five of them over looking for a different handwriting and didn’t find one, and then she stopped, because it was late and there was already a dead woman’s handwriting spread out on the floor and she had reached the end of what she could take in.
She did the math she’d been doing her whole life, and called her mother.
Fiona picked up on the third ring with something going on behind her—a radio, a tap running.
“Hi, Mum,” Stella said.
The tap went off. “Hi.”
Stella lay back on the floor with the phone against her ear. “It came. The box.”
“Oh, fantastic.”
“It was under the supply boxes by the back door. It’s been at the Shack for who knows how long.” Stella pulled the padded mailer toward her across the towel and picked at the customs form.
“I sent that in—” Her mother stopped. “I sent that a while ago.”
“I know. The customs form’s got a date on it.”
“Have you opened it?”
“Just now.” Somewhere behind her mother the radio changed to a voice, low, and changed back.
“And?”
“It’s all one handwriting, Mum. The old ones too. I thought some of them would be older.”
“That’s Mum.” Fiona said it the way you say something you’ve explained before. “Her mother had a box and half of it was falling apart, so she sat down and copied the whole lot out fair in her own hand so none of it would go. Took her a year. She used to do it at the table with the cricket on.”
Stella looked at the ceiling.
“Is the jam drops card in there?”
“Hang on.” She sat up and went through them. It was near the front. JAM DROPS, block capitals, and under it in the margin, smaller, let her do the thumbs.
“It’s here.”
“She let me do the thumbs,” Fiona said. “That was the whole job. I did the thumbs from about four years old and I thought I was running the operation.” Her mother laughed. “Make those first. They’re impossible to ruin and you’ll get it in one try.”
“Okay.”
Behind her mother somebody asked a question and somebody else answered it, and a door closed, and the radio got quieter.
“They’ve given us the gowns,” Stella said.
“Have they? Have you put it on?”
“It’s on the back of the door.” She rolled her head to the side and looked at it from the floor, navy in its plastic, the tag still on.
“That is not what I asked you.”
“It’s navy.” Stella put her arm over her eyes. “It zips in the front and then you’re a person who owns a gown.”
“Send me a photo of you in it or I’ll ring Bea, and Bea will send me nine.”
“She’d send more than nine.”
“Then we understand each other.” A pause, and then her mother said, with a different tone, “I’m not going to get there. For the day. I’ve looked at it every way there is.”
“I know,” Stella said. She took her arm off her eyes, peeked at the gown and put it back again.
“Somebody has to film the walking part. Tell your father, he’ll do it properly, and he’ll want a second angle.”
“He’s already talked about a second angle.”
Fiona laughed.
Stella turned the jam drops card over in her fingers. The back was blank. She had hoped to find something more.
“It’s fine, Mum,” she said. “It’s an auditorium and a stage and three hundred names.”
“It is not fine. And neither is the box. I said we’d cook the whole box together and instead I posted it to you. That’s not what I meant to do.”
Stella didn’t say it was all right, because it wasn’t, particularly, and her mother would have noticed it.
“Then tell me the next one,” she said. “After the jam drops.”
There was a sound down the line that could have been a laugh getting away from somebody.
“Get a pen,” Fiona said.
Stella got a pen, and they went through the box that way, her mother naming cards from memory on the other side of the world and Stella pulling each one and setting it on the towel.
When they hung up, the cards were out in rows on the beach towel, Nana’s on one side and Margo’s on the other, and the whole floor of the living room was covered in other people’s handwriting.
Stella wrapped Margo’s box back in its towel and folded the ends under the way she’d found them, because it had come to her wrapped.
Then she picked up the manila folder, slid the napkin out, and looked at it once more under the lamp, and put it in her camera bag by the door where she would not forget it in the morning.