Chapter 31
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The key was under the mat, exactly where Bernie said it would be. Stella had never heard of anything less secure in her life, or funnier.
“He told you it’s under the mat,” Joey said, lifting the corner of it with his toe like it might be booby-trapped. “The actual key. To the actual building. Under the actual mat. The first place a person looks. The place the word for hiding a key is.”
“He ran a newsstand on this bluff most of his life and nobody ever robbed him.” Stella picked the key up. It was warm from the concrete. “I don’t think Bernie’s worried about crime.”
“That’s because his security through obscurity was so total that—” Joey caught Bea looking at him. “It’s a bad system. That’s all I’m saying. When this is ours I’m putting in a real lock.”
“When this is ours.” Bea said it back to him, delighted, and grabbed the words out of the air like she was going to keep them. “Listen to you. When.”
Joey went pink and didn’t correct it, and didn’t take it back, and that was answer enough. Stella noticed. Joey, who had spent the entire summer saying if and we’ll see and there’s a lot we don’t know, had just said when like it had always been when, with no spreadsheet under it.
She unlocked the door and they went in.
In the daylight, with the shutter cranked halfway up, the room was less of a cave than it had been the morning Bernie showed them.
Dust still hung and turned in the light, but you could see the whole of it now, the honest bones of the place, the crooked wall, the long counter, the racks.
It smelled like old paper and cold cement and, faintly, under everything, like the ghost of all the newsprint and gum the years had soaked into it.
Bea walked into the middle of it and turned all the way around with her arms out, once, like she was measuring it with her body.
“Okay,” she said. “It’s disgusting and I love it.
” She pointed at the front. “The window’s the whole thing.
That’s the face. Whatever we do, we do it around that window—that’s where people meet us, so that’s where the personality goes.
” She was already somewhere else, already seeing it, her hands making frames in the air.
“Warm. Not cute-warm, not gingham, I’ll die before gingham.
Real color. Something that looks like the inside of a peach when the afternoon hits it. And the sign—”
She stopped and looked at them.
“What do we call it?”
And there it was, dropped in the middle of the dusty floor, the question none of them had said out loud, because saying it made it something with a name, and something with a name was real in a way that a thing you were scared to want was not.
“I don’t know,” Stella said.
“You don’t—” Bea looked between them. “You’ve been planning this for weeks. In secret. And you don’t have a name?”
“We’ve been planning whether we could,” Joey said. “Not what to call it. Those are different work streams.”
“Those are not—okay. Okay, we’ll figure it out.” Bea started pacing the length of the counter, and Stella could see the sign taking shape behind her eyes even with the blank in the middle of it.
“You two have to decide. I can’t paint a sign with a blank on it, that’s not a sign, that’s a permit application.
” She jabbed a finger at each of them. “Homework. Name. I’ll do everything else, the color, the lettering, the little painting in the corner—I already know I want a little painting in the corner—but the word is on you.
I refuse to name your baby. That’s how you end up resented at holidays. ”
“Noted,” Stella said.
“I mean it. I have opinions but I will not choose. It has to come from you.” She said it lightly, but she meant it, and Stella understood that Bea, who had opinions about literally everything, was giving them the one thing that had to be theirs, and doing it by pretending it was about the sign.
They spent an hour in there doing nothing that mattered and all of it mattering.
Joey paced off the back where the oven would go, heel to toe, counting under his breath, and then stood in the empty square he’d measured and just looked at it, and didn’t price it, didn’t run it, didn’t flinch—just stood in the place where the oven would be and let it be there.
Stella watched him do it. She’d known him a long time now and she had never once seen him stand still inside a plan instead of taking it apart.
It undid her. The old Joey would have had three columns going by now.
This one was just standing in his imaginary kitchen with his hat pushed back.
Stella went and stood at the pass-window and looked out of it at the street. From here you’d hand a person a box and see their whole face when they took it. She stood there longer than the looking needed.
Bea found a cabinet under the counter that looked like it hadn’t been opened in decades and pulled out of it, in order—a curled-up girlie calendar that made her shriek and Joey turn interesting colors, a coffee can full of rusted screws, and a single petrified stick of Juicy Fruit that she threatened to chew until Stella physically took it away from her.
They argued about where the counter went.
They argued about whether you needed a second sink.
They argued about who was in charge, which started as a joke and got briefly real—“I’m oldest,” Bea said, and Stella said “Barely, and you’re not even in this,” and Joey said “I’m the only one who can read a P&L,” and Stella said “I’m the one whose family owns the building it’s attached to,” and there was a beat where all three of them heard how much they suddenly cared about something that didn’t exist yet, and then Bea started laughing, and it broke, and they were fine.
“We’re going to be a nightmare to work with,” Bea said, grinning, sitting up on the counter and swinging her feet. “The three of us. Can you imagine. We’re going to fight about everything.”
“Constantly,” Joey said, from the oven square.
“Every single day,” Stella said.
They locked up when the light started to go. Stella put the key back under the mat, and Joey watched her do it and physically restrained himself, she could see the restraint, the whole-body effort of a man not fixing a security flaw because it wasn’t his to fix yet.
Out on the bluff the evening was coming in off the water and the Shack was closing down behind them, the family inside doing the last of the day, none of them knowing that three feet away their whole summer had a name it hadn’t found yet and a peach-colored future Bea was already painting in her head.
That was the next part. Telling them. Standing up in front of all of them—Anna and Meg and Tyler and Margo—and saying it out loud and letting them say their piece, the way Margo had promised they’d have to. The hard part was still the hard part. It hadn’t moved.