Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
The box had been on the table since half past ten.
Pink, the kind bakeries used, with a flat lid and a length of white twine tied around it in a bow that had clearly taken more than one attempt.
Joey had produced it from the back office with no ceremony and no explanation, and when Margo asked him where a pink bakery box had come from he said he’d ordered a case of them.
“A case.”
“Fifty. It was the smallest quantity available.” He’d squared the box against the counter edge before he handed it over. “Just in case.”
Just in case. She’d carried it home under one arm and set it down and not opened it, and then the morning had gone, and then most of the afternoon.
She’d cleaned instead. Wiped down a kitchen that was already clean. Watered the lemon tree, which did not need it in June and would tell her so in July. Stood in the front room for a while.
The house had been hers a long time. Long enough that she had stopped seeing most of it—the doorframe with the marks on it, painted over twice and still legible if you knew where to look.
The good plates in the cabinet, white with the thin blue rim, the ones that came out for anything special.
The couch that had been reupholstered once and should have been twice.
She’d raised two children in these rooms and buried a husband out of them and had pretty much raised three more children and painted a few hundred canvases in a garage that had once held a car.
And Stella had come into it two weeks ago and carried a trunk out.
That was the thing she kept setting down and picking back up.
Not that Stella had gone through it—she’d told her to, she’d meant it.
But something had come loose. The house had held still for a very long time and now it wasn’t holding still, and Margo could not have said whether that was a good thing, and she was aware of being the only person in the family who had noticed it was happening at all.
At three-fifteen the screen door opened without a knock.
“It’s me.”
“I know who it is.”
Bernie came into the kitchen with the paper folded under his arm and stopped when he saw the box.
“That’s new.”
“That’s Joey.” Margo pushed it an inch toward the middle of the table. That was the closest she’d come to it all day. “He ordered fifty of them. The boxes.”
“Fifty?”
“Smallest quantity available.”
Bernie pulled out a chair and sat. He looked at the box, and then at her, and then he reached over and pulled one end of the twine.
“You could ask,” Margo said.
“I could.” He got the lid open.
Shortbread. Cut in fingers, edges gone gold, the tops fork-pricked in two rows the way her grandmother had done it because her grandmother had never in her life owned a stamp or a cutter and thought decoration was for people with time.
Margo looked at them for slightly too long.
“Stella made these,” she said. “This morning. From the recipe box.”
“Which one?”
“The shortbread. My grandmother’s.” She sat down across from him. “Joey did the timing. She did the hands.”
Bernie took one. He did not make a production of it. He ate about half, and set the other half down, and looked out the window over the sink at the lemon tree for a moment.
“These are as good as I remember,” he said.
“That’s not possible.”
“All right.”
“It isn’t possible, Bernard. You’re remembering a different thing.
You’re remembering being young and the whole street coming down the hill and my grandmother’s recipe in my hands and Richard—” She stopped and straightened the twine on the table where it had fallen.
“You’re remembering the room. Not the biscuit. ”
“Could be.” He picked the other half up and ate it. “They’re still as good as I remember.”
Margo took one herself, finally, because there was no way around it now.
It was the shortbread. That was the trouble with it. Not close, not a nice attempt, not a young person’s version. It was the thing itself, made by hands that had never met the woman whose hands it came from, and it tasted like a Saturday in a kitchen that did not exist anymore.
She set it down half-eaten, same as he had.
“She wanted to know if it was right,” Margo said.
“Stella?”
“She stood there with flour on both wrists and asked me if she’d got it right. And Joey had the box already, because Joey had a box, because of course Joey had a box.” Margo put her hands in her lap. “And I said it looked lovely.”
“It looked lovely.”
“That’s what I said.”
“That’s not an answer to what she asked.”
“No,” Margo said. “It isn’t.”
Bernie brushed the crumbs off his fingers over the box and didn’t say anything else. That was worse.
“I couldn’t do it in the room,” she said.
“There were four people in the room and one of them was Anna, and if I’d stood at that counter and eaten my grandmother’s shortbread out of a pink box in front of all of them, I’d have—” She stopped.
“I’d have needed a minute. And there isn’t a minute at eleven o’clock with a rush coming. ”
“So you took it home.”
“So I took it home and cleaned the kitchen twice.”
Bernie let that sit.
On the wall by the doorway, where it had hung so long she genuinely did not see it most days, was Richard behind the counter in an apron, caught mid-sentence with a spatula in one hand, the photograph gone warm and orange the way they all went. She’d walked past it that morning four times.
She went over and took it off the wall and looked at it, which she had not done in years, and put it back on its nail, and had to adjust it twice to get it straight.
“Stella’s got the trunk,” she said, with her back to him.
“The actual recipe box came home, but she’s got the trunk.
The menus are in it. The ones we drew at the table.
She’s photographed every page and she’s asked me about half of them and she’ll ask me about the rest, and I answer her, and every single time I answer her I find out I remember more than I thought I did.
” She turned around. “I’d made my peace with not remembering. That was something I’d finished doing.”
“And now you’re not finished.”
“Now I’m not finished.” She sat back down.
“Everything’s moving, Bernard. The girls are graduating.
Bea’s going right after Labor Day and she’s already gone, really.
Meg’s working herself into the ground and won’t be told.
Anna’s got—” She made a small gesture at the air.
“And I’m here. Where I’ve been. And it’s all going past me a little faster than I can keep track of, and I don’t say that to anyone because it makes me sound like an old woman on a porch. ”
“You are an old woman on a porch.”
“I am in a kitchen.”
“You’re in a kitchen with fifty pink boxes coming.”
“Forty-nine.” Margo almost laughed and did not quite. “I have his first.”
Bernie looked at the shortbread. Then at her.
“Well,” he said. “What are you going to do?”
And there it was, laid on the table between them in that mild way he had, the way he’d asked her about the storm and the newsstand and every other thing since they were young—one question, no push behind it, and no way out of it either.
Margo didn’t answer.
The refrigerator came on. Out the window the lemon tree moved a little in whatever wind was coming up the hill, and somewhere down the street a car door shut.
Bernie stood up and closed the box and squared it on the table.
“Come down to the house,” he said. “The game’s at five. There’s fudge.”
“There’s always fudge.”
“That’s the point of it.”
Margo looked at the box a moment longer. Then she went and got her cardigan off the back of the chair. They went out through the front, and she locked the door with the deadbolt that stuck, two tries, the way it always did.
They walked down the hill. Neither of them said anything about the box she’d left on the table or the question.
It was a good evening, clear and warming up.
The jasmine was going somewhere along the fence line and the ocean was flat and metallic past the rooftops and a man neither of them knew waved at them from a driveway, and Bernie’s house came up behind its low hedge with the porch light already on because he’d left it on that morning.
The jar was on the counter where it lived now. It had spent one whole winter in the back of his freezer behind the ice trays, being saved, and it had come out to the counter in the spring and never gone back.
Margo got the bowls down without being told where they were.
Later, on the couch, with the game on and the good spoons and the fudge going soft in its jar between them, she took out her phone and held it a moment. Then she typed four words, and read them over, and sent them, and put the phone face down on the arm of the couch.
“Anything?” Bernie asked, not looking away from the television.
“Nothing,” Margo said. “Pass the fudge.”