Chapter 17
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Meg had brought her own knives.
Margo had been standing at her own counter for most of her life and she had never once seen anybody arrive at it with a roll of knives under one arm, and she had decided somewhere around the second course of prep that she was going to allow it without comment.
The girl could cook. That was the thing nobody in this family had properly absorbed.
“You can sit down,” Meg said, without turning around.
“That’s a form of sitting down at my age.” Margo folded her towel and put it on the rail and went and sat at her own table, which Meg had already laid.
The house was full, and it had not been full in a long while, and every person in it had brought something nobody needed—chairs, ice, a socket wrench, four hundred photographs on a camera card.
And two caps sat on the mantel on top of two folded gowns, navy blue, tassels hanging.
It had been at the school and Margo had been in the fourth row in the good dress, and it had been long, and both girls’ names had been called and both girls had walked, and Margo had clapped for both of them and had not thought about the last time she sat in a gymnasium and clapped for nobody.
That had been a whole different thing, and it had happened, and it was over.
Bea had already changed out of everything and was in shorts and somebody’s flannel and was telling the room that a boy in her row had thrown his cap during the D’s and hit a grandmother, who had kept it and refused to give it back.
“That’s the best thing that happened all day,” Bea said.
“Your name got called,” Anna said.
“That’s the second best thing.”
Bernie was in the good chair by the window because he had been put there. He had a plate on his knee and had been given the first of everything, which he had accepted without remarking on it.
Tyler came in from the step. “Lindsey’s still at the school. She said not to wait and not to leave her a plate.”
“We’ll leave her a plate,” Margo said.
Margo did not stand up, because she had never once in her life stood up to say anything, and she was not going to start in her own dining room.
She put her glass down on the cloth instead, and they all quieted, as they had always done for her.
“Both of you walked across that stage,” she said, “and I was in the fourth row, and I saw it happen.”
That was all she said.
Anna made a sound into her napkin. Bea said “Margo” in a wobbling voice and Stella did not say anything at all but looked down at her plate. And down at the end of the table, Tyler’s ears went red as a stop sign, and he looked hard at his own plate, and not one person in that room mentioned it.
“Well,” Margo said. “Somebody pass the bread.”
They passed the bread. Bea, who had recovered inside of four seconds, announced that she would like the record to show she had not thrown her cap, and Joey said the record already showed it because he had photographed the entire ceremony in sequence and could produce a timeline.
Luke asked whether the timeline was searchable. Joey said not yet.
For a while it was only that—family and a roast and nothing meaning anything.
Then it started with Michael, which surprised her, because Michael did not start things.
“I worked at a hardware store,” Michael said. “After high school. Two years.”
Anna turned her head.
“A register at a hardware store.” He put his fork down.
“I was very good at it. I could close out a drawer faster than the manager and I knew the price of everything in the store without looking, and I thought that was the whole of what I was going to be, because nobody had told me the thing I was doing had a name.”
“What happened?” Bea asked.
“They put in a computer.” He picked his fork back up.
“And then there wasn’t a register. And I went to a night class because I was annoyed about it, and the man teaching it said the thing I did in my head had a name, and that it was a job.
” He ate a piece of roast. “So. Nineteen and out of work and mad about a computer.”
“That’s the best story I’ve ever heard you tell,” Bea said.
Anna was looking at the tablecloth with an expression Margo had seen on her since she was four years old.
“I was terrified,” Anna said. “After graduation.”
“Of what?” Margo asked.
“Of the summer. After. Everybody was going somewhere and I was going to the Shack, and I told everyone it was temporary. I remember standing at the grill in July thinking, if I’m still here at Christmas, something has gone wrong with my life.”
“And then you left,” Meg said, from the counter.
“And then I left. College. Teaching. Half the things I swore I’d do, I did.
” She turned her water glass. “And then I came back and chose the grill, which eighteen-year-old me would not have believed.” Anna laughed at herself, once.
“Nothing went wrong. That’s the part nobody tells you.
You can be terrified of exactly the right thing. ”
“I skipped mine and went surfing,” Tyler said, “and I’ve been dining out on it ever since,” and the table said what it always said about that, and Margo did not say the thing she could have said, because she had said it once already this month and the boy’s ears had gone pink and that was enough for one lifetime.
Bea turned in her chair.
“Bernie. What about you? What did you want to be?”
Bernie was at that moment cutting something on his plate. He did not stop.
“Completely uninteresting,” he said. “Move on.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the answer you’re getting.”
“Margo, make him.”
“Nobody makes Bernard do anything,” Margo said. “It has been attempted.”
And she looked at him one second longer than the joke required, and he did not look up from his plate, and the table went on around the two of them the way water goes around a rock.
Then Bea turned the other way, which Margo should have seen coming and did not.
“Margo. Same question.”
“I’m an old woman, Beatrice.”
“So you’ve had ages to think about it.”
Somebody laughed. Margo put down her fork.
The room did not go quiet all at once. It went quiet the way a room does when four people notice at different speeds—Anna first, then Meg at the counter with the serving spoon still in the dish, then Tyler, and then Michael, who had been listening the whole time.
“I fell into mine,” Margo said.
“Into the Shack?”
“Into all of it. I was going to teach. That was the plan, and it was a perfectly good plan, and I met a man who had drawn a picture of a building on a paper napkin and after that there was no plan at all, there was just Richard.” She said his name and it came out ordinary, which she was glad about.
“And then there was a restaurant, and two children, then grandchildren, and then there wasn’t a Richard, and by the time I looked up half my life had gone by and I had a grill and a menu with one thing on it. ”
“Grilled cheese,” Bea said.
“Grilled cheese and a pickle.”
“But you wanted to bake,” Bea said. “That’s what you did before. Stella found the whole box.”
“I did want to bake.”
“So why didn’t you keep—”
“Because I couldn’t.” She put no weight on it.
It was the only way it would come out. “That’s the answer, and it’s not a good story.
Two children and a business and the man gone.
Baking is four in the morning. Baking is something you do when there is somebody else in the house who can hear the children. ”
Nobody said anything.
“So I made the sandwich. It took eleven minutes and it made money and every single person in this town could afford it.” She picked her fork up again and put it back down.
Bea’s face had done something she was clearly working to undo.
“If you’d had a choice,” she said. “If somebody had handed you one. Would you have done something else?”
And there it was, and Stella had no idea what she’d asked, and that was the only reason it could be asked at all.
Margo looked down the table at all of them.
Anna, who had been terrified of exactly the right thing.
Michael, who had lost a register. Tyler with his ears going.
Meg standing at the counter of a kitchen she had cooked in all afternoon for no money.
Two caps on the sideboard. Bernie by the window, not eating, not looking at her.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“You don’t know?”
She turned her glass a quarter turn on the cloth. “You can’t miss something you didn’t get to try. You can only miss the idea of it. And the idea gets very good, given long enough. The idea never burns the crust.”
“Margo—”
“But I’d have wanted somebody to ask me.
” She heard herself say it and did not take it back.
“That’s the honest part. Nobody ever asked.
Everyone was very kind about it and nobody ever once asked me what I would rather have been doing, and I don’t blame a single person at this table, because I never brought it up either. You don’t. You’re busy.”
The roast was going cold on eleven plates.
“Well,” Margo said. “You asked.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. It’s the first time.” Margo picked up her fork.
Bea’s eyes had gone bright and she made no attempt to do anything about it, and Anna reached over and put a hand on her back without looking at her.
Bea blew her nose on a paper napkin, loudly, and put both hands flat on the table.
“Well, I already know what mine is,” she said.
The whole table laughed, all at once, and Bea looked around at them, bewildered.
“What? I do.”
“We know you do, sweetheart,” Anna said.
“Then why is that funny?”
“Because you’ve known since you were six,” Meg said, coming around with the dish, “and you have never once considered that anybody might not know.”
“I don’t think that’s unusual—”
“It’s extremely unusual,” said four people at once.
Bea accepted this as a kind of applause, which, from that table, it was. And Margo watched her take it, this child who had never had one uncertain day about what she was for, sitting at a table with people who had not had that and had come out the other side anyway.
“Good,” Margo said. “Then don’t let anybody talk you out of it.”
“Nobody’s talking me out of it.”
“Somebody will try. Somebody always tries.” Margo picked up the water jug and filled Bernie’s glass, and he let her. “Tell them I said no.”
They were most of the way out of it and into the dessert argument when Joey spoke.
He had been quiet for the whole of it. Joey at a table with this many people ran mostly on logistics. He had been turning a spoon over between two fingers.
“It’s good that everybody found the right one,” he said.
That was all of it.