Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Shack before opening belonged to the people who worked there, and apparently to Bernie.
Stella came through the back door with her camera bag and a yellow legal pad of questions she’d written the night before—eleven of them, numbered, because if you meant to interview a man for posterity, you should at least look like you knew what posterity required.
Finals week had blown holes in the senior schedule and she had a little time until she had to be back.
Anna was at the grill with the cheese lined up in its morning order.
Tyler had the radio on low and half a rack of sourdough still to shelve.
Joey stood at the espresso machine with a small screwdriver, calibrating something that had not drifted since yesterday, because the rotation said so and the rotation did not get changed.
Bernie sat in his booth with the crossword and the mug with the chip on the rim, exactly where every morning of her Laguna life had put him.
She slid in across from him and set the legal pad on the table. “I have questions. Eleven of them.”
“That’s ten more than most people bring.” He didn’t look up. “Four-letter word for stubborn.”
“Firm?”
“That’s you, in this booth.” He wrote in something that was not firm. “Go ahead.”
“It’s for my project. The history of the Shack. You’re my first official interview.” She clicked her pen and set her phone on the table between them, recording. “I’m being professional about this.”
“You’re being Joey about this.”
“I heard that, Mr. Klein,” Joey said from the espresso machine, without turning around. “I’ve decided to take it as a compliment.”
“It was one.”
Stella read from the pad. Question one had taken her an hour to write and it still looked wrong. “When did you first come to the Shack?”
“The day it opened.”
She waited. He filled in another answer, the pen scratching in the quiet.
“That’s it? Four words?”
“That was the question.”
Right. This was how it would go. She crossed out question two, useless now, and went off the pad entirely. “What was it like? Back then.”
Bernie set the pen down.
That was how she knew she’d asked a real one. The pen went down.
“Smaller,” he said. “Louder, somehow, with half the people. Most of the town thought a sandwich stand on the bluff was a bad joke. Richard stood behind a secondhand grill and learned everybody’s name before their food came up, whether they’d offered it or not.
Grilled cheese and a pickle. Take it or leave it.
” He turned his coffee cup a quarter turn. “That’s how it opened, anyway.”
Stella wrote fast, then gestured out the windows to the bluff. “Why here? It’s not on the way to anything.”
“The light.” He tipped his head at the front windows, where the morning came in low and turned the water to hammered metal.
“Richard picked the bluff for the way the afternoon comes off the ocean. Everyone told him you choose a restaurant for the foot traffic. He said people would walk for a view. Took years, but he was right.”
“You knew him well?”
“I had the newsstand next door.”
She looked at him over the top of the pad. “That’s not what I asked.”
“It’s most of the answer.” The pen hovered over the crossword and didn’t land. “We were friends. He was the best one I had.”
She wrote it down word for word and kept her eyes on the page until her handwriting steadied.
Tyler came by with a plate and set it at Bernie’s elbow—one muffin, dark as a hiking boot. “Joey’s recipe. I leave yours in longer.”
“It’s the only correct way to make them.” Bernie broke it in half and slid the plate to the middle of the table, and Stella took her half because some questions answer themselves.
“Okay.” She turned the pad sideways to read her own handwriting. “Tell me about the newsstand.”
“Klein’s Newsstand.” He said it the way you introduce someone.
Formally. “Every paper in the county, and four I had shipped in for people who asked. Magazines. Gum. Cold drinks out of a cooler I filled myself off a bag of ice from the market.” The pen was down.
“I opened at five. Fishermen first, then the school run, then the men from the yard. By eight I could have your paper in your hand before you got to the step.”
“Five in the morning?”
“Every day but Christmas.” He said it with no weight on it whatsoever. “Best job I ever had.”
“Why’d you stop?”
“Knees. You can’t open at five if you can’t get down the hill at five.” He looked at the crossword without seeing it. “That was the worst day. Not the knee. The stopping.”
Stella wrote that down too.
“That’s the one Dad drove into.”
“Yes, that’s the one your father drove into.”
“He spent the whole summer rebuilding it?”
“Board by board. Margo stood over him with a list.” Bernie’s mouth twitched, almost into a smile. “He was sixteen, and he cried about it, and he will tell you to this day that he did not.”
“Sawdust in his eyes?”
“For three months,” Bernie said.
Stella laughed, and then she looked at the pad, and then she looked back up.
“So who built it? The first time.”
“Richard.”
Stella’s pen stopped.
“Richard built your newsstand?”
“Drew it and built it. I guess technically we did it together. But I handed him things and held the other end of the boards.” Bernie filled in a box on the crossword. “He was better with his hands than anybody gave him credit for. People looked at that man and saw a talker.”
“Nobody ever told me that.”
“Nobody asked.”
She wrote it down, and underlined it, and did not yet know why.
At ten Anna flipped the sign, and the morning found its places—Mrs. Feldstein to table two with the coffee she would defend for the rest of the morning, a pair of tourists at the window table pointing at the surfboards on the wall, Joey meeting the door with his opinions about where people should sit, Tyler’s towel back over his shoulder, Anna calling the first order to nobody in particular the way a bell starts a school day, and Bella stationing herself at the patio door, officially an outdoor cat, already negotiating.
Mrs. Feldstein detoured past the booth on her way to table two and put a folded napkin next to Bernie’s crossword. “My picks.”
“You’re early. My bracket closes this week.” Bernie put the napkin in his shirt pocket without reading it.
“I like to beat the rush.” She went to her table.
Stella looked from the pocket to his face. “Do I want to know what that was?”
“Community engagement.” He picked his pen back up. “Don’t put it in your project.”
She put a small star in the margin so she’d remember to put it in her project. Then she reached into the camera bag on the seat beside her and took out the folder.
“I found something in the trunk. I can’t read it.”
She slid the napkin across the table. Bernie put the pen down and did not pick it up again.
He didn’t touch it. After a while he turned it a quarter turn with one finger so it faced him, the way you’d turn a photograph.
“Where was this?”
“The bottom, under the menus. In a folder with nothing else in it.”
“He kept it.” Bernie looked at it for a long moment. “Well.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a plan.” He put a finger down beside the pencil without touching the paper. “That’s this building. That’s the stand next to it. He drew that when we were young men, before there was anything on this bluff but ice plant and a road nobody used.”
Stella leaned over the table. Now that somebody had told her what it was, it was obvious—two boxes, one bigger than the other, and a line under them that had to be Coast Highway.
“There’s writing.”
“There is.” He didn’t read it out. “It says that one’s yours.”
The coffee machine came on behind the counter. Joey said something to Tyler about the second shelf and Tyler said something back.
“He drew it before he met her?” Stella asked.
“He drew it before he met anybody, really. Just me.”
She looked at the napkin, thin and worn, folded and unfolded more times than one piece of paper should survive.
Bernie slid the napkin back across the table and it stopped square in front of her.
“Keep that flat,” he said.
Stella slid it back into the folder and put the folder in her bag.
“There was a recipe box in there too,” she said. “Under everything. Wrapped in a tea towel.”
Bernie looked up.
“Hers?”
“Hers. And her grandmother’s, some of them.” Stella got her camera bag onto her shoulder. “I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t know if she wants it back or if she put it in there on purpose.”
“Both, probably.” He picked the pen up and then didn’t use it. “Take it to her yourself. Don’t send it. Don’t soften it. Hand it to her.”
“And say what?”
“Nothing.”
Stella looked at her legal pad. Eleven questions, and she’d written them all the wrong size—dates and menus and what year did the big machine arrive, little questions for a man who had been three feet from all of it since the day the doors opened.
The history of the Shack drank coffee in the corner booth and did the crossword in pen.
“He used to bring sandwiches over,” Bernie said. “From here. We’d eat them sitting on the step of the stand and argue about baseball, and then he’d go back to his grill and I’d go back to my papers.”
“That seems like the whole story of the two of you.”
Bernie nodded. “Put that in your project.”
The door chimed. Margo came through the front—no apron, canvas tote over her arm, paint on the side of one hand—and crossed the room to the booth, where she stopped and looked at Stella with her head tilted.
“You’re in my seat.”
Stella slid out and stood, legal pad against her chest. Margo settled across from Bernie, and he slid the folded newspaper over to her side of the table without looking up from the crossword, and she took her reading glasses out of the tote and took the crossword without saying thank you, because some things had stopped needing either.
“Has he been telling you stories?” Margo asked, unfolding the paper.
“Facts,” Bernie said.
“Both, then.”
Stella backed up to the counter, and from there she raised the camera.
In the viewfinder—the two of them on opposite sides of the booth, the paper passed between them.
Margo said something too quiet to reach the counter, and Bernie’s mouth moved at one corner, and Stella pressed the shutter and knew before she checked the frame that she’d gotten something true.
Behind her, Joey seated the tourists at the wrong table and corrected the matter with diplomacy and a laminated chart. Anna sent out the umpteenth grilled cheese of the day. Tyler turned the radio up one notch, caught his sister’s look from the grill, and turned it back down.
Stella flipped the legal pad shut. He’d answered her first question in four words, and it had taken her the whole morning to hear all of them.
The day it opened. And he’d never really left.