Chapter 28
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Bernie had the key on a loop of green kite string, and it took him a while to work the lock, because the lock probably hadn’t been asked to do anything in a long while and neither had the door. Stella stood behind him with Joey on the little concrete step not knowing why they were there.
He’d asked them to come by before open. That was all he’d said—come by before open, the two of you, I want to show you something—and Margo was there too, standing off to the side in her cardigan with her hands clasped in front of her.
The lock gave. Bernie put his shoulder to the door and it came open with a soft complaint, the sound of a door that hadn’t been opened in years. The smell came out at them—dust and old newsprint and the ghost of the cold drinks that used to sweat in a cooler by the register.
It was small. Stella had walked past it a thousand times without once wondering what it was like inside, and inside it was one room, longer than it was wide, with a counter running most of the length of it and shelving up both walls, the old racks where the papers had gone, tilted wooden things worn pale where decades of hands had pulled the top copy.
There was a window at the front, the little pass-window where Bernie had handed papers out to the street, its shutter down now, a seam of daylight under it. Dust hung in the air they’d stirred.
“It’s bigger inside than it looks,” Joey said. It was the first thing either of them had managed.
“It is.” Bernie moved down the length of it, touching the counter as he went, not looking at them.
“Richard and I put this up over one summer. That wall’s not square and never has been—we ran out of light one night and I cut the top plate wrong and we both decided we liked it crooked.
You can see it if you look. Nobody’s ever noticed but me and now you. ”
They looked. The wall definitely leaned. Once you saw it you couldn’t stop seeing it.
“There’s room here,” Bernie said. He’d reached the back, where the room opened up.
“For an oven. A real one, not the countertop business you’ve been fighting over at the Shack.
You’d have room for a proper oven back here and a bench along that wall and your cold storage where the cooler used to sit.
It’s plumbed for a sink already, the water’s still on, I kept it on.
” He’d kept the water on. For years. On an empty building.
Stella’s breath came faster and she walked further in.
“And there.” Bernie pointed at the wall that ran alongside the Shack, the shared wall, the one that had the Shack’s whole life going on behind it, the grill and the counter and the family, close enough to hear if you put your ear to it.
“You knock a door through there and you’re joined right up.
You use their bathroom, their water heater, their walk-in when you need it.
You’re not a separate thing sitting out here on your own.
You’re the Shack, with a door between.” He turned around and looked at them for the first time since they’d come in.
“That’s how Richard would have drawn it.
Not a stand on its own. A room off the main one, so they could talk to each other. ”
Nobody said anything. Out under the front shutter a car went by on the street, and somewhere behind the shared wall a chair scraped, the Shack waking up for the day, three feet and a world away.
“Bernie,” Stella said, and stopped, because she didn’t have the rest of the sentence. “I don’t—what is this. What are you saying.”
“I’m saying it’s yours if you want it.” He said it plainly, the way you’d tell someone the time.
“The two of you. This building, for the baking. I’m too old to do anything with it but keep the water on, and it’s just sitting here being a place I used to be, and you two need a kitchen that isn’t somebody else’s kitchen.
” He put his hands in his pockets. “So. It’s here. It’s yours if you want it.”
Stella looked at Margo. Margo hadn’t moved from her spot by the door, and she didn’t now, she just tipped her head a fraction. Yes, he means it. And—this isn’t my part. And something else Stella couldn’t read at all.
“We don’t have any money,” Joey said. He said it fast, the way he said the true hard thing before he could stop himself, the systems part of him already running the numbers and finding them empty. “Bernie, we’re eighteen. We can’t—an oven, the buildout, we don’t have—”
“You have more than you think,” Margo said, from the door.
It was the first thing she’d said since they came in.
“Stella’s been on the Shack’s books a year.
Earning. Not spending much, unless you’ve been hiding a habit from me.
” A dry look. “That’s not nothing. That’s a year of real work and real wages, and it’s sitting there.
” She let that settle. “And Joey. The scholarship fund that sent you to that program. That’s yours, not the school’s.
If you decided that money wanted to go somewhere else—somewhere you’d actually use it—I wouldn’t stand in the way of that.
It was always meant to help you make a life, not to hold you inside one you don’t want. ”
Joey went very still. Stella watched him open the door she knew he’d thought was locked, the money he’d thought only bought the one thing, being handed to him sideways as his to spend on the thing he actually wanted—and she watched him not be able to pick it up yet, because it was too much and too fast and the too-good-to-be-true of it had him by the throat.
“You’d—” he started. “You would let me—”
“I’m not letting you do anything. I’m telling you what’s already yours.” Margo’s voice stayed level. “What you do with it is your business. That’s the whole point of it being yours.”
Joey didn’t answer. He turned and looked at the back of the room, the squared-off space where an oven would go, and Stella could see him putting an oven in it in his head, and taking it back out, and not trusting himself to leave it there.
“What about—” Stella’s mind was catching up, running ahead, snagging. “This is the family’s. Isn’t it? The Shack, the—Tyler, and Anna, and Meg. It’s all of theirs. We can’t just—”
“The newsstand’s mine,” Bernie said. “Free and clear. Has been since before your father was born. That part’s not complicated.”
“But the rest of it. Them. What they’d think.”
Margo made a small sound that wasn’t quite a laugh.
“You’d have to sell it to them,” she said.
“Not the building. The idea. If you want this, you don’t get to have it handed to you in a quiet room by two old people who love you.
You’d have to stand up in front of the whole family and tell them what you mean to do and let them say their piece.
” She picked an invisible something off her cardigan sleeve.
“That’s the price. Not the money. That. Convincing the people it belongs to that you’re serious.
” She looked at Stella, and there was something in it that went back to a porch and a tart.
“If you want it. That’s the only question in this room. The rest is just work.”
And that was the thing that undid Stella, standing in the dust in a room Bernie and Richard had built crooked on purpose one summer before any of them were born—not the offer, not the oven, not even the money.
It was if you want it. The question she couldn’t answer about her own life, asked about this one thing, and finding, somewhere under the fear, that she did.
She didn’t say it. It was too big to say in that room and it wasn’t only hers to say—Joey was standing right there with his own version of the same yes stuck in his own throat, and this wasn’t the moment you said it.
“Can we think about it?” Stella asked.
“No,” Bernie said, and then, when her face fell, he smiled—not something she was too familiar with.
“I’m joking. Of course you can think about it.
Take all the time you want. It’s been empty a long time, it’ll keep.
” He looked around the little room, his room, the crooked wall, the racks.
“Go on. Talk to each other. The offer doesn’t have a clock on it. ”
He held the door for them, and the two of them went out past Margo into the ordinary morning—the street, the gulls, the Shack coming to life next door with no idea yet what had just been offered three feet from its wall.
Behind them Bernie didn’t come out right away. Stella glanced back once and saw him standing in the middle of the little room, in the dust and the light, looking at the crooked wall, not in a hurry, a man alone for a minute in a place he used to be.
Then Margo said something to him too low to hear, and he laughed, came out, and locked the door on its loop of green string.