Chapter 21
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Stella had the camera up when Roberto came through the propped door, because the water had turned silver, which it did about ten minutes in the late morning and she’d been waiting on it.
She got him mid-stride with a crate on each arm, and then set the camera down, because the rush was already on and Anna needed the trays run.
Roberto set the ordered things down where they went and stood one crate apart on the counter, and looked at Joey. Joey came over to it between tickets.
“Quince,” Roberto said. “It’s on the order. There’s no name on the slip, but it’s on there.”
“We don’t use quince.” Joey looked in the crate—hard yellow fruit, more of it than seemed reasonable—and then at the board, where there was no quince and there had never been quince. “There’s no card for it. Take it back with the empties, I’ll note it.”
Roberto lifted a hand that meant it was off his plate, and Joey carried the crate to the returns by the back door and squared it to the wall because it was crooked and he was passing it, and then Anna called an order and he was gone to the window and the quince was the last thing on anyone’s mind.
Stella ran two plates to the patio and a coffee to Bernie, who’d folded the crossword away for a lunch he hadn’t ordered yet, and came back to find Bea at the counter, sketchbook under her arm, graphite on her cheek, talking before she was all the way in.
“—and the light on the water is—you have to shoot it, is anyone shooting it—”
“I shot it. Move, I’ve got trays.”
Bea moved half a step, and the woman at the counter reached Joey first anyway, holding a card out across the pass.
“My mother made a thing with figs in it,” the woman said. “This is my copy, so you can read it. But I brought hers too.” She had both. “I hope you can make it sometime.”
Joey took the card by two corners. “Not this week. Maybe not the week after.” He turned to the shelf and reached down the binder—COMMUNITY SUBMISSIONS, RECIPES, VOL.
1, his blue capitals on the spine—and had the fig card halfway in when Bea said, “Wait. What’s that?
” and took the whole thing out of his hands and opened the rings.
Then a four-top came in and Stella lost her for a while.
She sat them, ran their drinks, called their order, cleared a table by the window a family had left looking like a small weather event.
When she got back Bea hadn’t moved. She’d gone through the binder and stopped, and stopped talking, which for Bea was the whole announcement.
“Look at these,” Bea said.
Stella looked. She’d seen the cards come in one at a time over the weeks—she’d photographed half of them—but never all together, and together was different.
A name at the top of each in a hand that was only ever that one person’s, and under it the thing the hand made, over and over, for a family, until the week it stopped.
Blue ballpoint pressed so hard it went through the paper.
One in pencil worn half away by a thumb.
“This one pressed so hard she went through the card.” Bea held it up. “That’s a whole arm. A woman leaning on a table with everything she’s got.” She turned it to the light and set her finger on the writing and followed it. “You can’t keep these in a binder. They go up.”
“They’re archived,” Joey said, on his way past with three plates.
“They’re hidden and you know the difference.” Bea started spreading them out. “On the wall by the board. Names and all.”
She held one closer and squinted. “Cinnamon has two Ns and one M, and this woman put two Ms, and I respect her for it. From Marjorie.”
“That says one M.”
“It says two.”
“Bea, it says cinamon. One of each thing you just said.”
Bea looked again. “Then I want two Ms. I’m copying it with two Ms, as a tribute.”
“You can’t tribute her by spelling it worse than she did.”
“Her wrong, not mine. I have standards.” She set it with the keepers just as a man at table four wanted to know if the shortbread was gone, and Stella told him it was gone in an hour most days, and he said he’d come earlier, and she said everybody said that, and by the time she was back Joey and Bea were mid-war.
“—a pin through an original is vandalism.” Joey had his hand flat on the counter. “That card is older than you are and there’s one of it.”
“Small pins. At the top, where nobody reads.”
“No.”
“So copy them,” Stella said, setting down a bus tub, because the whole argument was standing in front of her with one door out. “Bea does copies for the wall. Originals stay in the binder. Nobody stabs a dead woman’s recipe card.”
Bea pointed at Stella without looking away from Joey. “That. I copy every one, exact, two Ms and all, I sign them small so nobody’s fooled, copies go up, originals stay in your alphabetical file where you can visit them.”
“Alphabetical is how you find things.”
“Alphabetical is how you find things if you’re a phone book.”
Joey considered it and didn’t object, and that was when the man spoke up from the end of the counter.
He was older, alone, and he’d been reading the cards where Bea had them spread, and something in them had turned him hopeful.
“You do things like this?” he asked, to Joey, to any of them.
“My wife’s mother made a poppy seed muffin.
Nothing I buy tastes the same as her recipe.
” He looked at the cards again. “If I brought it in, could you.”
“No, no, no, no.” Joey said it gently, already shaking his head—no custom orders, no card, not the operation. “We don’t do that. I’m sorry.”
The man nodded like he’d known before he asked. “Sure. Of course.” He looked at the cards one more time, and then at the wall where they were going to go. “It’s nice, what you’re doing. The names.” And he went out into the bright, unhurried, and the door settled shut behind him.
Stella had stopped where she stood, the bus tub still against her hip. She’d watched the hope come up in him at the cards, and she’d watched it go back down, and he’d still called it nice on his way out.
Bea put her hand flat on her chest. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, my heart. Joey.”
“What.”
“He wanted his wife’s mother’s poppy seed muffin and you said no four times.”
“I said it kindly.”
“You said it like a smoke alarm.” Her eyes had gone bright, and she pressed the back of her wrist under one of them. “Nothing he buys tastes the same. Stella. I have to sit down. We’re putting that man’s muffin on the wall and then we’re making it and then I’m lying down.”
“Don’t cry on the originals.”
“I would never cry on the originals. I’ll cry on my copies. Respectfully.” She wiped under her eye with the heel of her hand and got graphite there too, and gathered the binder up against her chest, and by the time she was at the door she was mostly back to herself.
“Tomorrow,” she said, to the room, and went out the front with the sketchbook and the binder and the whole afternoon.
Through the window Stella caught her crossing the patio, the binder against her chest, and lifted the camera and took the shot—Bea and twenty grandmothers, out into the light to be made beautiful.
She put the camera back and picked the next tray up off the rack, because the rush hadn’t cared about any of it and there were plates.
She didn’t say what she was thinking. It was just that it had started with two boxes.
Nana’s, from Sydney, the whole of it copied out in Nana’s hand so none of it would go—and behind Nana, her own mother, the one Nana had copied.
And Margo’s, from the trunk, the spidery teacup hand running under Margo’s, somebody’s grandmother behind the grandmother.
Two boxes, a grandmother behind each grandmother, a wall of them going up by the board, and a man who couldn’t buy the thing he wanted at any price.