Chapter 20
CHAPTER TWENTY
There were eighty of them and there was nowhere left to put them.
They had run out of counter an hour ago and moved to the kitchen table, and then out of table and onto the sideboard, and the last two trays were cooling on a bath towel Margo had folded over the top of the piano because the piano was flat and nobody had played it since Anna was in school.
Lemon tarts. Eighty of them, in their little pleated shells, the curd set and gone glossy the way it did when it was right.
“That’s eighty,” Stella said. “I counted twice.”
“Count it again when they’re in the boxes. They travel worse than you’d think.”
Stella counted them again into the boxes, which took a while, because Joey had sent forty of the pink ones over in the back of Tyler’s truck with a note on top of the stack that said FOR THE TARTS. DO NOT USE FOR ANYTHING ELSE.
The kitchen was a wreck and Margo was pleased about it.
Flour on the floor by the mixer. Two bowls in the sink she’d given up on.
The zester in the drainer with a lemon still stuck in the teeth of it.
Out the window over the sink the tree stood in the last of the light looking robbed—she’d taken everything off the low branches and then made Stella get the ladder for more, and there was not one lemon left on it under six feet.
“Your mother’s going to ask what happened to the tree.”
“My mother’s in Sydney.”
“She’ll see it in a photograph and she’ll ask.”
Stella laughed, closed a box and squared the lid, which she had gotten from Joey and would probably never lose.
It had been a good day. She had known it at about the third tray, when the rhythm arrived—shells out, curd in, tray in, tray down, and the thing her hands did that she never had to think about and had not been asked to do in a very long time.
She had directed and Stella had carried, and somewhere around the middle they had stopped talking except about the work. That was the best part of it.
“You’re sure about tomorrow?” Margo asked.
“Joey’s sure. Joey made a chart.”
“Then we’re all right.”
They loaded the boxes into the truck two at a time because the boxes were pink and flimsy and Margo would not have them stacked. Stella took the last two out, came back for her bag, and stood in the doorway a second.
“That was fun,” she said, as if it surprised her.
“It was.”
Then the truck went off down the hill and the house was quiet and Margo turned around and looked at her kitchen.
She started with the bowls. Then the trays, which had to be done by hand because the good ones didn’t go in the dishwasher, and then the counter, and then the floor by the mixer, and somewhere in the middle of the floor she stopped and stood with the broom and did not do anything with it for a moment.
It took her twice as long as it should have. She did not particularly want to look at why.
When it was done she sat down in the chair by the window with a glass of water to drink before she went and had a shower, and she meant to drink it, and the light moved off the wall behind the stove, and she did not.
She woke up because her phone was going off in her lap.
Her neck had a crick in it that was going to be there tomorrow. There was still flour on the floor by the mixer, in a patch about the size of a dinner plate, which she had swept twice and apparently not swept well at all.
It was a text from Stella.
Gone in two hours, ALL OF THEM. Joey says he has never seen anything like it and he’s writing it up.
And then, underneath.
Mrs. Feldstein had three.
Margo sat in the chair in the fading light with the phone in both hands and read it again, and then a third time, and there was nobody in the house to see her face, and she was glad of it.
Circle was at Eleanor’s. A short walk uphill. Margo walked it, and got there later than she meant to, and did not say why.
They were already out on the porch with the good glasses.
Eleanor had made something with olives in it that nobody had asked for.
Vivian was in the wicker chair she considered hers by long usage.
Nadine had brought crackers and arranged them.
Letty had the loud end of the table because Letty always had the loud end of the table.
“There she is,” Letty said. “You look like you’ve been somewhere.”
“I’ve been in my kitchen.”
“Doing what?”
“I made eighty lemon tarts.”
All eyes turned toward her.
“Eighty,” Vivian said.
“Eighty.”
“How long did that take you?”
“A while.” Margo sat down. Sitting down was better than standing up. “They sold out in two hours. All of them. Stella texted me.”
And then they all started talking at once.
That was the thing about that porch. Four women talking over one another about a girl none of them had raised, and Eleanor got up and put a glass in Margo’s hand without being asked, and Letty wanted to know whether they were doing it again tomorrow and Nadine wanted to know what was in the curd.
“That’s the whole trouble,” Margo said, when they’d got most of the way through it. “They can’t make enough. Two children and one oven, and every day they run out before lunch and turn people away.”
“So make more,” Letty said.
“That’s what I did today.”
“So do it again.”
Margo looked at her glass.
“I was going to ask you,” she said. “All of you. Whether we might—” and she did not get to the end of the sentence, because Eleanor was already reaching behind her for the pad she kept by the door for lists.
“We’d want a rotation,” Eleanor said. “Two of us a day, so nobody’s doing it back to back. Vivian’s oven is the best one but Vivian’s kitchen is the worst one—”
“My kitchen is a jewel.”
“Your kitchen is a corridor with a stove in it. Nadine, could you do a Tuesday.”
“I could do a Tuesday,” Nadine said. “I couldn’t do the standing.”
It went past Margo the way something does when you have already heard it and haven’t caught up to it yet.
“You could sit for the shells,” Eleanor said, writing.
“I could sit for the shells. I couldn’t do four hours on my feet at the counter for the rest of it. I can’t do the church luncheon anymore and that’s two hours.”
“Fair enough. Letty, you’d have to be the second one, then, on the Tuesday—”
“I’d love to,” Letty said. “You’d have to do the rolling. This one’s no good anymore.” She turned her right hand over on the table, wrist up, and put it back, and went straight on. “I can pipe. I can do anything sitting down with my elbows in. I just can’t roll.”
“Since when?”
“Since the winter.” Letty waved it off with the other hand. “It’s nothing.”
“It isn’t nothing if you can’t open a jar.”
“I can open a jar. I use the rubber thing.”
Eleanor was still writing, and then she wasn’t.
Nobody had said no. That was the part Margo kept turning over afterward.
Not one of them had said no, or hesitated, or asked how much, or looked at anybody else the way people do when they want somebody else to be the one.
They had gone straight to the rotation. And in about ninety seconds of getting to the rotation they had between them a wrist and a back and Vivian’s daughter due in August, and Margo had sat there with her glass and let it go past her and had not argued with a single word of it.
Because she had slept in a chair that afternoon. That was the thing. She had made eighty tarts, once, in her own kitchen, with Stella to carry them, and she had gone down like a felled tree at four in the afternoon and woken in the dark with flour still on her floor.
Once. And they’d want it every day.
“Margo,” Eleanor said.
Margo looked up from her glass.
“You fell asleep, didn’t you.”
The porch was quiet again. Vivian looked at her over the top of her glass and did not say anything, which from Vivian was a diagnosis.
“I sat down,” Margo said.
“You fell asleep.”
“I sat down and then it was dark.”
Eleanor put the pen on top of the pad and left it there, and did not tear the page off, and did not put the pad away either.
“Well,” she said.
“Well.”
And that was as far as anybody took it, which Margo was grateful for, and the talk went somewhere else the way it always did—Nadine’s neighbor and the fence, and whether the Hendersons had finally done something about the pool—and Margo sat in it with her glass and let it move around her.
She walked home in the dark. Downhill this time.
The house smelled like lemons, which it would for days, and there was still a patch of flour by the mixer that she was going to have to do something about in the morning. Her hands hurt. Her neck hurt. Her back had complaints of its own.
She stood in the doorway of her own kitchen and looked at it and thought, eighty.
People had bought them all by lunch.
She did not know yet what to do about any of it, and she was not going to work it out standing up at this hour, and it had been the best day she’d had in more years than she was prepared to count.
Both of those were true, and she took them both to bed with her.