Chapter 9
CHAPTER NINE
Bea came up the front walk in her cap and gown, the zipper undone, the gown flowing behind her—navy blue over cutoffs, tassel swinging, backpack over one shoulder, crossing a residential street in the middle of a weekday afternoon like a woman on her way to receive an honorary doctorate.
Stella opened the door before she could knock.
“How long have you been wearing that?”
“Since yesterday. Not the whole time. I took it off to sleep.” Bea came in past her and dropped the backpack on the couch. “Where’s yours?”
“Somewhere.”
“Where’s yours, Stella?”
“I put it in the closet.”
Bea stopped moving.
“That’s where things go. It’s a closet.”
“It’s where you put something when you don’t want to look at it.
” But Bea was already down the hall, and came back with it anyway—hanger and all, plastic still on—and held it up against Stella with enormous satisfaction until Stella gave in and put it on, to make her stop, probably, but a win was a win.
They ended up on the floor with their backs against the couch afterward, both of them still in the gowns, because taking them off had somehow not happened, crackers between them that Stella had found in the kitchen.
“My mom’s lost the kitchen table,” Bea said.
“I’ve got three piles on it. Coming With Me, Staying, To Be Determined.
” She reached for another cracker. “Coming With Me is the smallest pile. That surprised me. Four sketchbooks, the good brushes, the tablet, the photo of everybody on the patio from the wedding. Eighteen years and it’s all in a crate. ”
“I got here with about the same,” Stella said.
Bea stopped with her hand out for the crackers.
“That’s different.”
“Not really.” Stella gave her the box back.
“I’ve assigned visit weekends,” Bea said, and pulled a folded campus map from her backpack.
“You’ve what?”
“Assigned. Week one is Mom, obviously. Margo and Bernie get October, when it’s cooler, and Tyler and Meg can fight over November. Joey gets a day trip in the spring and he can build the itinerary.”
“He’ll laminate the itinerary.”
“He will.” Bea smoothed the map flat on the carpet between them. “And you get whatever you want. Open invitation, no weekend. You can turn up on a Tuesday.”
“What did everybody else do wrong?”
“Nothing.” Bea kept her eyes on the map. “You’re just you.”
Stella looked at the map and didn’t say anything.
“Are you nervous?” Bea asked. “About the walking part.”
“No, I’m not nervous.” Stella pulled a thread loose from the carpet.
“I’m just going to be standing there with everybody’s parents watching and a piece of paper that says I finished something, and then I’m going to walk off the other side of the stage and I don’t know what happens after that.
That’s not nerves. That’s just the actual situation. ”
The phone buzzed on the carpet between them. Bea did not look at it.
She did not say it’s okay not to know. She had said it in the car outside the school and it had landed wrong, and she had filed it. So she let it alone—which sat there being worse than saying it—and reached for the next thing instead.
“What’s the project on?” she asked. “For real. You keep saying ‘the Shack’ like that’s a topic.”
“It is a topic.” Stella got up, went down the hall, and came back with a box—an actual box now, not the folder it had started as—and set it on the carpet between them and took the lid off like it was nothing, which meant it was not nothing.
Inside were prints. Stacks of them, and cards, and what looked like old menus gone soft and yellow. Bea pulled the gown up out of her way and got in close, which was the only way Bea knew how to look at anything.
“These are the recipe cards from Margo’s box,” Stella said. “The one that was in the trunk. I photographed all of them before I gave the box back. Look at the handwriting—that’s Margo’s grandmother, and that’s somebody else’s, you can see where it changes.”
Bea looked at the handwriting. She hadn’t known there was a box. She had certainly not known it had been in a trunk. She picked up a print of an old menu, the first one apparently, and it said grilled cheese and a pickle and about four other things and that was the entire menu.
“That was the whole menu?”
“In the beginning. They tried other things, but that’s all she made, after.
” Stella said it like Bea would already know the after, and Bea did not know the after, and something small turned over in her because of that.
“She used to do real pastry, though. Before. Croissants, tarts, the whole thing—laminated dough, the hard stuff. She gave it up when Richard died because you can’t do four-in-the-morning pastry with two kids and nobody in the house. So. Grilled cheese.”
“Margo did pastry?”
“For years. She was going to open a whole—” Stella stopped. “It’s in here. I’ve got the whole thing.”
Bea sat with that. Margo was her great-grandmother. Bea had eaten ten thousand grilled cheeses off that grill and never once wondered what the woman had made before.
“The sand dollar over the door,” Stella said, going through the prints.
“You know that’s the first one? The whole ceiling started with that.
Richard found it the morning they opened and stuck it up and said the ocean should be inside too.
Everything up there came after the sand dollar.
” She found the print and turned it around.
“It’s still there. You can see the plaster cracked around it. ”
“I did not know that,” Bea said, quietly, and she was a little stung by how much she did not know it. She had grown up under that ceiling. Stella had been here a year.
“The lemon tree at Margo’s got planted for tarts,” Stella said.
“Did you know that? It’s a baking tree. It’s just been making lemons for a kitchen that went to sandwiches.
” She kept going through the box, not looking up, clearly not knowing what she was doing to Bea, which was the only reason she could have done it.
“Nobody wrote any of it down. It’s just in people.
Margo, mostly. And then one day it isn’t, and it’s gone, and nobody ever knew the sand dollar came first.” She shrugged.
“So I’m writing it down. Taking pictures of it. That’s the project.”
And Bea—who had opinions about everything, who had never in her life been quiet when she could help it—did not say anything for a moment, because she was looking at a box full of her own family that a girl from the other side of the world had gone and learned, all of it, in a year, while Bea grew up inside it and never asked.
Bea put her hand flat on the stack of prints, the way you’d put your hand on something to feel if it was still warm. “Stella. This is the best thing you’ve made.”
“It’s a school project.”
“It’s not a school project.” Bea was still looking at the box.
“You should keep doing this. After. When it isn’t for a grade.
Somebody has to be the one who writes it down.
” She said it lightly, and she meant it all the way down, and something in her had already decided she wanted to be near this kind of thing—the collecting, the keeping—for the rest of her life, though she couldn’t have said so yet.
Tyler came in with grease on one wrist and stopped inside the door and took them in—two girls in full academic dress, sitting on the floor of his living room, eating crackers.
“Well,” he said.
“We’re rehearsing,” Bea said.
“For what part?”
“All of it.”
Tyler put bread in the toaster before he washed his hands, in that order, the way he had done it since Stella had gotten there, and did not ask another question. Stella’s shoulders came down an inch.
Bea left still in the gown. She took the last of the crackers. At the door she stopped and pointed at Stella with the cap.
“Don’t put it back in the closet.”
“Bea, go home.” Stella held the door open with her foot.
“On the door. That’s where it lives.”
“Fine.” Stella held the door open with her foot.
“Say it.”
“On the door.”
Bea kissed the top of her head, which she’d started doing the way her mother did it, and went out and let the door bang, and went down the walk in a navy gown past a man watering his hedge who did not react at all, which she decided was his loss.
At the end of the walk she looked back once. Stella was still in the doorway, the gown over her arm, watching her go. Bea pointed at her—on the door—and Stella waved her off, which meant yes.