Chapter 29
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
They left their shoes on the patio, side by side under the bench, and walked down onto the sand in their bare feet like the morning was a normal one, which it was not.
Neither of them had said much on the way down.
There wasn’t a way to start. They’d walked out of Bernie’s little room and past the Shack coming to life, Anna’s voice already going inside and the grill ticking as it heated, and they’d kept walking, past the patio and down the steps and out onto the beach, because the beach was the only place in town big enough to hold the size of what had just happened and empty enough this early that nobody would ask them why they were sitting at the waterline at open when they were supposed to be working.
They sat where the wet sand started. Up behind them and to the left, small from here, tucked against the Shack’s flank like it had always been part of it, was the newsstand.
From the beach you could see how they leaned into each other, the big building and the little one, one roof lower than the other, the crooked wall not even visible from this distance, just two shapes that had stood next to each other longer than Stella had been alive.
She couldn’t stop looking at it.
Joey couldn’t stop doing math.
He’d found a flat stretch of wet sand between his feet and he was writing in it with one finger, fast, numbers and then lines under numbers and then arrows, wiping it smooth with the side of his hand when he ran out of room and starting again.
She watched him do three whole passes before she said anything.
“Joey. I can’t read that.”
“You’re not supposed to read it, I’m figuring it.
” He didn’t look up. “Oven’s the big one.
A real deck oven, used, if we can find one, is—okay, I don’t actually know what one costs, I’m using a number from a forum on the internet, but call it this.
” He wrote a figure. Wiped it. “Then the buildout. The door through the wall, which is a permit, which is a person, which is money. Hood. Electrical, because a real oven isn’t running on what’s in there now.
Then—” He stopped, stared at the sand, and wrote a bracket around the whole mess.
“Then everything I haven’t thought of, which is always the number that gets you.
My dad says the number that gets you is always the one you didn’t write down. ”
“You don’t have any of those numbers.”
“I have some of the numbers.”
“You have numbers from a forum.” She reached over and wiped his whole equation flat with her palm, gently, the way you’d close a book somebody’d fallen asleep reading. “It’s sand, Joey. You’re doing a spreadsheet in the tide.”
He looked at the smooth wet place where his math had been, and for a second she thought he might be annoyed, and then his shoulders came down half an inch and he almost laughed, which for Joey in this state was a lot.
“I don’t know how to not do it,” he said. “It’s the only thing my hands know how to do with this. If I stop doing the numbers I have to just—” He turned his hand over, empty, the gesture of something too big to hold. “Feel it. And I don’t know how to do that one at all.”
“Yeah.” Stella looked back up at the little building. “I’m doing the other one. I don’t know how to do yours.”
The thing she was feeling, the one she didn’t have numbers for, was not the oven or the buildout or the money.
It was smaller than all of that and much larger.
It was that Bernie had stood in his own room and asked if you want it, and she’d been asked that question her whole life in a hundred forms—what do you want to do, what do you want to be, what do you want, Stella—and never once had an answer that didn’t feel like a coat that didn’t fit.
And standing in the dust with the gold light coming through the shutter she’d had one.
She’d wanted it. Under the fear, plain as anything, she had wanted it, and she still did, sitting here, looking at it.
She didn’t say that part out loud. It was too new to touch.
What she said was, “If we did this. We’d be partners.”
Joey stopped drawing.
“Yeah,” he said. “We would.”
“Like—all the time. Every day. We’d have to work together for real, not just mess around like at the Shack.
Decisions. Money. Bad days.” She dug her heels into the sand.
“You’d have to put up with me being disorganized and I’d have to put up with you doing spreadsheets in the tide for the rest of our lives. ”
“That’s accurate.”
“Can you do that?” She was mostly joking. She was not entirely joking. “Can you actually do that? With me?”
Joey thought about it, really thought about it, because Joey didn’t answer a question like that with the easy thing.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Can you?”
“I don’t know either.” And that was the truest thing either of them had said all morning.
Stella put her arm across his shoulders, where it had gone a hundred times before, and he let it stay there, and he went back to building—not numbers this time, just sand, piling it up wet against his ankle into a mound, patting it smooth, his hands needing to be doing something and this being something they could do that cost nothing and proved nothing and was just for the doing of it.
Her phone buzzed. It was Bea. Three in a row.
where are you two
mom said you disappeared
what’s going on
Stella looked at it a while. Then she typed back.
beach. life-changing information. bring nothing, tell no one.
The three dots came up and went away and came up again.
I’m sorry WHAT
Just come
be there in nine seconds
She was there in closer to five minutes, which from the top of the hill was basically nine seconds, and they heard her before they saw her—“MOVE, seagull”—and then she came down the last of the sand at a controlled fall and dropped onto her knees beside them, breathless, shoes already gone somewhere, and grabbed Stella’s arm.
“What’s the emergency? Who died? Nobody died, you’d have led with that? What’s the—why do you both look like that.” She looked from one to the other. “You look like the day after Christmas and also like you’re going to throw up. What happened.”
So they told her.
And there was something in the telling Stella hadn’t expected—that saying it out loud, start to finish, to somebody who hadn’t been in the room, made it real in a way it hadn’t been ten minutes ago when it was just the two of them stunned at the waterline.
Bernie’s giving us the newsstand. She heard herself say it.
The words held. They didn’t dissolve when they hit the air.
Joey filled in the parts she left out, the oven, the door through the wall, Margo and the money, and Bea’s face went through about nine things in a row and landed, finally, on pure open joy, no fear anywhere in it, none of the too-good-to-be-true that had them both by the throat, just delight, because Bea had never in her life met a good thing she didn’t trust immediately.
“You’re getting a bakery.” She said it like she was informing them.
“You’re getting a whole—Stella. STELLA.” She grabbed both her hands.
“This is the best thing that has ever happened to anyone. Why do you look scared? Stop looking scared. This is—” She turned to Joey.
“Why does she look scared, this is incredible.”
“There’s a lot we don’t know yet,” Joey said.
“There’s a lot you never know. That’s not a reason.” Bea sat back on her heels, radiant, and then her face did one more thing, a narrowing, and she pointed a finger at the two of them. “Wait. Does anyone know? Mom? Tyler—does anyone know?”
“No,” Stella said. “And you can’t tell them. Bea. Look at me. You cannot tell anyone.”
“I can keep a secret.”
“You cannot keep a secret. You told the entire Shack about Meg’s surprise party in the parking lot before the party.”
“That was one time and the party was terrible and deserved to be spoiled.” But she put her hand up, solemn.
“I promise. I will not tell. This is too big to tell. I would never.” She lasted about four seconds.
“Can I at least be there when you tell everyone? I want to see Mom’s face.
And Aunt Meg’s, oh my—” She stopped herself, physically, a hand over her own mouth. “No. Secret. Sorry. Secret.”
Stella almost loved her too much to speak.
“But,” Bea said, through her fingers, and then took the hand down, and here was the thing nobody expected, because it came from Bea—“you two can’t do the money part.
You know that, right?” She looked at Joey’s wiped-smooth patch of sand, the ghost of his equation.
“You’ve been doing numbers in the dirt. You need a grown-up.
A real one. Not a parent, they’re too close.
You need somebody who does this for a job and won’t cry. ”
Stella and Joey looked at each other.
“Michael,” they said, at the same time.
Bea nodded, pleased with the whole idea. “He’s exactly annoying enough to be right about everything. Call Michael.”
Joey was already somewhere else, though, already thinking, and Stella watched the systems come back online behind his eyes, but softer now, pointed at something real instead of spiraling.
“He can’t eat dairy,” Joey said. “Michael. He’s got the thing.
The allergy. Your mom’s always reading labels for him.
” He looked up. “I could make him something. For helping. A dairy-free thing, a good one, not a sad one—I’ve been wanting to crack a decent dairy-free almond cake anyway, and he’d be the—” He caught Stella looking at him. “What?”
“You want to pay the accountant in cake.”
“Free.” Joey shrugged, like it was obvious, like it was the only currency that made sense.
“You don’t charge a man for helping you and then—you make him something.
That’s how it works.” And it was so completely him, the boy who couldn’t accept a kindness without answering it, already balancing a debt that hadn’t even been delivered, that Stella laughed out loud for the first time since the green kite string and the lock giving and the whole impossible morning.
Down the beach the day was starting, the first walkers, a dog. Behind them the Shack ran without them, and would notice soon that it was short two people, and they’d have to go back and be normal and carry this enormous quiet thing around inside the ordinary day.
But not yet. For another minute they sat, the three of them, in the wet sand, and Joey built his small pile higher, and Bea started helping him, packing the sides, and Stella kept her arm where it was across Joey’s shoulders and looked up the hill at the little building leaning into the big one, and let herself, just for that minute, want it all the way.