Chapter 18
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Lindsey came late, still in the dress she’d run a graduation in, and sat down with a plate while people talked at her, and said the chair situation had been resolved by an act of God and a man named Dwayne.
“So,” she said, over her fork, to Stella. “What did Reeves think of your project?”
Stella went quiet, the stillness Margo recognized from watching her behind a camera.
“I think he liked it,” Stella said.
“Oh, come on, Stella.” Bea put her fork down for this. “It was very cool. Slide show. Music. The history of the Shack. And it turned out to be a lot more than that. And you got an A.”
“An A+,” Stella said with a shy smile, like she was admitting something she didn’t want to.
“An A+.” Lindsey smiled. “Reeves doesn’t normally do plusses. Congratulations.”
Margo leaned back in her chair. “Do you want to tell them any more about it? We talked a very long time about all this.”
Stella looked down at her napkin and nodded. “There ended up being a lot to tell.”
Bea laughed. “She found really cool stuff in Margo’s trunk. From way, way, way back.”
Margo turned to her. “One ‘way’ is sufficient, Bea.”
“Oh, sorry,” she said.
“Okay, spill,” Anna said, and leaned back and crossed her arms. “All of it. I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
“There’s a slide show,” Bea told the table. “With a soundtrack. It made me cry.”
“Everything makes you cry.” Stella pushed her plate back and got up. “The soundtrack’s for the real showing. You get the quick version.”
She came back with the trunk—the actual trunk that she’d brought in the truck, because tonight it was coming home.
She set it down on the fireplace hearth and opened the lid, and started at the beginning, the way she’d never let herself start it for anybody before.
“It all started with the shells. Richard found the first one,” she said. “The sand dollar over the door. The morning they opened—he came in with his pockets full of sand and put it up, and when Margo asked what on earth he was doing, he said the ocean should be inside too.”
“Tradition says you put up the first dollar you earn,” Bernie said, not looking up.
“We hadn’t earned one yet,” Margo said.
“So a sand dollar had to do.” Stella looked up. “That’s the first thing that ever happened here. Before the grill was even hot.”
She went into the trunk and came up with a photo.
“This one’s from right after you two painted the sign,” she said, turning it to Bernie. “Klein’s. I don’t think you’ve seen it—it was folded inside a menu, way at the bottom.”
Bernie and Richard, younger than anyone at that table had ever known them, paint still wet on the letters behind them, both of them squinting at whoever was holding the camera.
Bernie didn’t say anything, but something happened around his eyes that he didn’t try to stop.
“I thought you weren’t a crier,” Bea said, gently, and didn’t get an answer.
Tyler leaned in over Bea’s shoulder at the next one—the newsstand from the side, a crack running the top plate that hadn’t gone anywhere in decades. He didn’t say anything either, and from Tyler, at a table that full, quiet was its own kind of loud.
Stella laid the next one down where everyone could see it. Richard at the grill, caught mid-laugh, and Margo coming down the counter with plates up both arms, saying something that had the whole room turned toward her.
“He burned whatever he was cooking whenever he laughed,” Margo said. “Which tells you how the place smelled, most days.”
There was one more, further down, and Stella set it beside the others without saying anything at first.
Three kids on the patio in bathing suits, sundaes in hand, squinting the same squint, a bandage taped crooked on somebody’s chin. Margo behind them, younger than any of them had ever known her, one hand on a shoulder.
“That’s the chin one,” Tyler said, before anyone asked. “Not the toe, everybody always says toe. I split it open on the back step. Needed four stitches.” He looked at it a long moment. And these two cried. Not me—them. I’m bleeding down my shirt and it’s a two-girl funeral.”
“We were sympathetic children,” Anna said.
“You were loud children.” He looked at the picture a long moment. “Margo took me to the hospital. When we got back, she had sundaes for all three of us. Not just me.”
“Hot fudge,” Meg said, quiet. “I don’t remember the stitches at all. I remember the sundae.”
“So do I,” Anna said.
Bernie, from his end of the table, didn’t look up from his plate. “Was it Sanders?”
“It was not Sanders.” Margo picked up her coffee. “I hadn’t been introduced to that particular religion yet.” She turned her cup a quarter. “The crying stopped, though. It generally did, if you fed them.”
“There’s a menu too,” Stella said. “One Margo and Richard drew up together. He wanted to add something—I can’t even read the word, his handwriting’s terrible—and he underlined it twice and wrote trust me next to it.
And underneath, in a different hand, small and straight up and down.
I do. Not about this.” She looked at Margo.
“You wrote that. Like you were still arguing with him.”
Margo paused for a moment. “I remember that argument,” she said, finally. “I don’t remember losing it.”
“You didn’t lose it,” Bernie said, not looking up from his plate. “It never went on the menu.”
“No,” Margo said. “It didn’t.”
That was as far as either of them was going to take it, and everyone at the table let them.
“And then I found all of these,” Stella said, and started setting the recipe cards down the length of the table, until there wasn’t much room left for plates. “Margo’s. Her mother’s. Her grandmother’s. You can tell whose is whose from across the table.”
She held one up, alone.
“And then this one came after. I’d already turned the whole thing in.
Ruth just walked into the Shack one day and handed it to us—her grandmother’s date loaf.
” She turned it over in her fingers. “It never went in the project. It’s what the project turned into.
Turns out everybody’s got a grandmother somewhere with a handwriting nobody else has.
In this family, it’s all written in food. ”
Bea picked Ruth’s card up first, careful, by the edges. “Look at her handwriting. It’s so pretty. Nobody writes like this anymore.”
Anna took the card from her, careful the same way, read the front of it, turned it over.
“It’s the same thing you did for school, then,” she said, setting it down in front of Stella. “Somebody’s grandmother, tracked down and kept.”
“I needed a senior project,” Stella said. “Dad told me it was right above my head. It was supposed to be about the building.” She set Ruth’s card back down on the pile. “That’s the whole project. That’s what I turned in.”
Margo reached into the trunk herself and came up with one of her own—never again on a Sunday across the top, in her own younger hand.
“I’ll keep this one out,” she said. “It’s been long enough.” She turned it over once. “And it will not be a Sunday.”
Meg picked a card off the pile before anyone told her she could—the walnut bread, R says double it, R was right—and held it a second like she was deciding whether to put it back.
“Can I keep this?” she asked. “I want to try it. Properly.”
“That’s my great-grandmother’s,” Stella said. “Technically.”
“I know whose it is.” Meg didn’t put it down.
Margo picked her coffee back up. “Everybody wants to remember somebody’s grandmother. Doesn’t much matter whose.”
“Okay, can we please talk about something that isn’t going to make Bernie cry again,” Bea said, “because I’m ready for dessert.”
“As a matter of fact, there’s dessert,” Joey said, and got up. “It’s a recipe from the box.”
He came back with a covered plate, set it down, and took the foil off himself, folding it in quarters before he sat back down.
“Michael’s is the one on the left,” Joey said. “Made it dairy-free. Different butter, same result, mostly.”
Apricot slice. Margo’s grandmother’s handwriting, dated who knew how long ago, made real in a pan Joey had found the right size for after two failed attempts nobody had been told about.
Bea had a piece in her mouth before anyone had officially said go.
“Joey, this is—this is incredible.” Her voice had gone reverent in a way that had nothing to do with manners.
“I know.”
“You’re really good at this,” Anna said, and meant it the way she meant things, plainly and once.
“Stella helped,” Joey said, and didn’t take it back.
They all laughed, and the moment loosened, and Stella got up to put the trunk back where it lived.
“I still want the slide show,” Anna said, to her back. “The whole thing. Soundtrack and all.”
“I’ll set it up at the Shack some night,” Stella said, over her shoulder. “Big screen.”
The girls got sent for the coffee and came back arguing about how much to make.
Stella had her camera out. She had been shooting all night, low, from the corner, and at some point she had got behind Bea’s chair and got the whole table in one frame—everybody mid-sentence, nobody looking, two navy caps on the sideboard in the background out of focus.
She checked it, but didn’t show anybody.
Margo went out to the front step for a minute, on her own, because lots of people in a house is lots of people in a house.
The night was warm and the jasmine was going along the fence and the ocean was down there somewhere doing what it did.
Bernie came out a minute later and stood next to her without saying anything, and for a while neither of them filled it.
“I hadn’t seen that photo in years,” Margo said, finally. “You and Richard. I don’t think I even remembered it existed.”
“Neither did I.” Bernie kept his eyes on the water. “Funny thing to find out at somebody else’s graduation.”
“Everything gets found out at somebody else’s something. That’s how families work.”
He didn’t answer that. Behind them, through the door, the family was arguing about whether there was enough coffee for everyone and whether anybody actually wanted coffee at this hour.
“Your lemon tree’s dying,” he said, eventually.
“It is not dying.”
“That whole side’s yellow.”
“That side is always yellow in June. It does it every year, Bernard, and every year you say it’s dying.”
Bernie leaned on the rail. “One year I’ll be right.”
“You’ll be dead.”
“Then I’ll be right posthumously,” Bernie said, and they stood there.
Inside, somebody dropped a spoon and somebody else laughed at whoever dropped it.
Margo looked at the yellow side of the lemon tree, which was not dying. It had been planted for tarts. It had gone on making lemons ever since, whether or not anybody was baking.
Then she went back in, because they’d got the coffee wrong, and she could hear it.