Chapter 25
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Margo saw her coming up the hill before she heard her. That was the first sign. Stella took those stairs two at a time on a normal day, and today she was taking them like a person going somewhere she didn’t want to arrive.
Margo was on the porch with the crossword and a pencil that needed sharpening. She put both down.
“There’s tea in the pot,” she said, when Stella got to the top. “It’s gone lukewarm but it was good an hour ago.”
“I’m okay.”
She was clearly not okay. She stood at the top of the steps with her bag on one shoulder and did not put it down, the way you don’t put your bag down when you’re not sure you’re staying, and she looked at the porch boards and not at Margo, and Margo let her stand there and did not fill it, because whatever Stella had carried up the hill she was going to have to set down herself.
“Sit,” Margo said, finally. “You’re making the porch nervous.”
Stella sat. On the edge of the other chair, not back in it. Margo waited.
“I came to say sorry,” Stella said, to the boards.
“To you especially, but—all of you. I’ve been trying to figure out how to say it and there isn’t a good way so I’m just going to say it badly.
” She stopped. Started again. “You’ve all been so good to me.
Since I got here. You didn’t have to be—I showed up from the other side of the world and you just—made room.
And the Shack’s been so good to me. And I took that, and I got—” Her hand came up over her eyes, fingers spread, like she could hold the rest of it back that way.
“What I wanted got in the way of what was best for the Shack. Joey and me. We got so far into our own thing we put a hole in the Shack and Meg had to fix it and Anna had that whole party go sideways and it was because of us. Because of what I wanted. And I keep wanting to say it’s because I’m good at it, like that makes it better.
I don’t know if it makes it better. And that’s not—you don’t do that to a place that’s been that good to you. So. I’m sorry.”
Margo let the porch hold it a moment. “Stella. I already know all this.”
The hand came down off her eyes. “You—”
“Anna called me the night of the party. Meg called me the morning after, and talked at some length. I’ve had the whole account from two directions, with the times and temperatures included.” Margo picked up her tea. “You climbed my hill to confess something I heard about days ago.”
“Oh my gosh.” Stella put her face in both hands. “Of course they told you. Of course they would.”
“There are no secrets in this family, and there is certainly no secret from me. You may as well take the wrapping off it—I know what’s inside.
” She set the tea down. “And most of what you just said is wrong, so I’m glad you came, because I’d sooner fix it here than let you carry it home and keep it. ”
“It’s not wrong, though.” Stella’s head came up, and there was some fight in it, which Margo was glad to see.
“We did do it. Meg promised a woman her grandmother’s tart and couldn’t deliver it.
Anna had a party come apart in front of actual customers.
That happened. I’m not being dramatic—it actually happened, because we weren’t paying attention. ”
Margo reached over and picked up the plate she’d brought out earlier, the one with the tart on it she’d cut before Stella ever reached the top of the stairs.
“I didn’t come up here to get fed. I came to apologize, I don’t want to just sit here eating a—”
“I didn’t ask what you came for. Take the plate, Stella.”
Stella took the plate. She held it in her lap and didn’t eat it, which Margo allowed, because getting it into her hands was the part that counted.
“Now,” Margo said, and picked her own tea up, then put it down again without drinking it.
“Here is what you’ve got wrong. You think if the two of you had been paying attention, none of it would have happened.
That the trouble was you.” She looked out at the tree, and back.
“You were there for the eighty tarts. You carried them down my hill yourself, and you texted me the score—gone in two hours, Mrs. Feldstein bought three. Eighty. My whole day, both my hands, a lifetime of knowing exactly what I’m doing, and people bought all of them by lunch and wanted more.
Don’t tell me the problem was just one oven.
” She set her cup down. “The trouble is this town wants more than any one kitchen can make—mine, yours, anybody’s.
That’s not a sin, Stella. That’s a problem.
Sins you apologize for. Problems you solve. ”
Stella was quiet. She looked at the tart in her lap.
“There was a man,” she said, to the tart. “Before any of it went wrong. He wanted his wife’s mother’s poppy seed muffin, and we said no, and he was nice about it, but I can’t stop thinking about him. I don’t know why he’s the part that stays.”
Margo turned her cup on its saucer. A woman had stopped her at a bakery table once, about almond croissants and a husband who used to drive twenty minutes. She did not say so.
Margo let a beat go by, and then asked the question she’d been saving, in the voice she used when she wanted something and didn’t care to have it known that she wanted it.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you something. Mrs. Feldstein says yours are better than mine now.” She turned her cup a quarter. “I’ve made that tart ten thousand times. What are you two doing to it that I’m not.”
And there it was.
Stella’s whole face changed. The apology went off it like weather clearing, and she sat up, and the words came faster, and Margo watched a girl who’d climbed a hill loaded down with shame forget every ounce of it inside four seconds, because somebody had asked her about the baking.
“Okay, so—it’s the resting. Joey worked it out.
Most people use the curd straight off, once it’s cooled, right, but Joey read this—he read about nine things—and now we let it rest first. Not in the fridge.
On the counter, covered, forty minutes, and Joey times it, he actually stands there and times it, and something happens in that forty minutes—it goes silkier, it sets different, the flavor kind of rounds out—” She caught herself, and flushed.
“It might be nothing. Joey ran it both ways to check and honestly the two were pretty close, so it might be completely in our heads. But we swear we can taste it. So now we won’t skip it.
It’s kind of a—” she went pinker—”we’re a little superstitious about it now. ”
“Forty minutes on the counter,” Margo said.
“On the counter. Covered. Forty exactly.”
“I’ve been resting curd on that counter my whole life and never once timed it.”
“Well,” Stella said, with total seriousness, “that’s the difference,” and then laughed.
Margo did not tell her that forty timed minutes was very probably nothing—that curd was curd, and a warm afternoon and a girl who loves what she’s doing will beat a bored expert every day of the week, and the clock has nothing to do with it.
She didn’t say it. Stella’s whole face had already told her everything she needed to know.
“Bernard likes yours better than mine, too,” Margo said.
“He’s never said so and he never will—he’d sooner eat glass.
But I’ve watched which plate he reaches for when he thinks I’ve gone back to the kitchen, and it stopped being mine a while ago.
A lifetime feeding that man, and he throws me over for you. I’ve made my peace with it. Barely.”
Stella laughed—a short wet one, surprised out of her—and wiped her wrist across her eyes, and finally, without seeming to decide to, ate a bite of the tart.
“There’s something else,” Stella said, after a while, and it came out sideways, the way the real ones did.
“Joey was really upset too. We talked about it and he told me something that I probably shouldn’t share.
” She stopped, tangled. “He doesn’t want the program.
The marine one. He hates it, he wants out, he’s wanted out.
And I keep thinking—if what I want can ruin an entire party and be that much trouble, then what’s he supposed to do with a whole life pointed at something he doesn’t want? ”
Margo’s eyebrows rose a bit, then she paused.
“He’ll find his way to saying it,” Margo said. “Out loud, to the right person, when it costs him something. That’s the only way any of them ever get said.” She picked up the crossword and set it back down—as much as she was going to give that subject—and Stella let it close.
Stella finished the tart. She set the plate on the tray, and squared it, which she’d got from Joey.
“I still feel bad,” she said. “About the week.”
“Good. A bit of bad is respect—it means you saw what it cost.” Margo stood, slower than she used to, one hand finding the arm of the chair.
“But you carry the whole hill of it back down with you and I’ll come take it off you myself.
You didn’t wreck anything that a good idea won’t fix.
And there are good ideas coming. That’s all I’ll say about that. ”
Stella looked up. “What does that mean?”
“It means go home. I need my afternoon back.” But she put her hand on Stella’s head for a second going past, the way you’d steady something, and left it there a beat longer than steadying took, and then took it away.
Stella went down the hill lighter than she’d come up it. Not fixed. Margo could see that from the porch, the set of her shoulders still carrying some of it. But lighter, and eating the last of a tart she’d made with her own hands and finally letting herself think it was good.
Margo picked the crossword back up. She did not do any of it. She sat with the cold tea and the empty plate and the tree going gold at the edges, and thought that Stella was going to be all right, eventually.