Chapter 33
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Stella carried three grilled cheeses to table four sure, the whole way there, that Anna had her in view. The back of her neck prickled with it. She set the plates down, said enjoy, and turned around ready to be caught.
Anna hadn’t so much as glanced her way. Anna was at the rail reading a ticket, glasses pushed up in her hair. “Stella, table six has been waiting on their order since forever,” she said, without looking up. That was the entire extent of Anna’s interest in Stella that afternoon.
No one in the room was paying them any attention at all.
That was the part Stella couldn’t make herself believe.
They had the biggest secret in the history of the bluff riding around in their chests.
The lunch rush rolled right over the top of it, because to everyone else working it, it wasn’t there at all.
To the three of them it was the only thing in the room.
“Anna knows,” Joey said, low, passing her at the pickup window with a plate in each hand.
“Anna does not know.”
“She looked at me.”
“She looked at the plates. You’re holding the plates.”
“She looked at me holding the plates.” He said it like it clinched something.
They weren’t safe yet. That was what sat under the giddiness, keeping it from tipping all the way into fun.
Michael had said the numbers worked and he’d get back to them with a proper plan.
Bernie had left a key under a mat. But nobody had said yes yet—not the family, not the ones it actually belonged to.
Until they did, the whole shining thing was a soap bubble the three of them were carrying across a crowded room.
One wrong word to the wrong person before they’d pitched it right, and it was gone—popped, back to being something you were dumb enough to want out loud.
So they couldn’t say it. And not being able to say it was going to kill them.
Bea had appointed herself to a table by the window where she wasn’t working, because Bea didn’t work here.
Bea was leaving for CalArts in the fall and was present strictly as a civilian.
She’d ordered one iced tea two hours ago and was nursing it like a woman running a stakeout.
Every time Stella or Joey came within range, she lobbed a name.
“The Rolling Pin,” Bea said, as Stella went by with a bus tub.
“That’s a bowling alley.” Stella didn’t slow down.
“The Daily Loaf.”
“That’s a department. That’s a sign that says here’s where the bread part happens.” Joey, going the other way, didn’t even slow down. “Next.”
“Butter Side Up.”
“Getting closer and also no.”
“Klein’s,” Bea tried—a bad idea Stella had floated days ago that Bea had clearly kept. “People will think we sell newspapers,” Joey said, without being asked, and Bea wrote something on a napkin and crossed it out with her whole arm.
The name was homework. It was the one thing Bea wouldn’t do for them—she’d do everything else.
She’d already sketched a window and picked a color she described only as the inside of a peach, but she’d drawn a hard line on the name.
I refuse to name your baby, she’d said. That’s how you end up resented at holidays.
So she sat at her stakeout table and threw bad names at them all afternoon.
Not to solve it, Stella understood. Just to keep the thing alive in the room—a small flame she cupped her hands around between deliveries.
The trouble was Joey.
Joey couldn’t hold it. Stella had known this about him in the abstract, and now she watched it prove out in real time—the boy had no valve.
Everything in him ran straight to the surface.
With the biggest thing of his life dammed up behind his face, it came out sideways, at customers, in fragments that made no sense to anyone who wasn’t him.
“Enjoy these,” he told a man receiving a grilled cheese on sourdough. “It’s a good time to be eating here. Really. Historically.”
The man said thank you, slowly.
“Big things,” Joey told a woman with a bowl of soup, setting it down with a strange reverence. “Sometimes a place is about to be more than it is. That’s all I’ll say.”
Stella got to him at the coffee station and pinched the back of his arm hard enough to make it count.
“Ow.”
“You’re doing it again.”
“Doing what?”
“You told the focaccia woman the Shack has a destiny. She came in for a soup and bread, Joey. She doesn’t need to know about its destiny.” Stella refilled two waters that weren’t totally empty, for cover. “You have to act like a normal person who isn’t sitting on anything.”
“I am acting normal.”
“You told a man his grilled cheese was historic.”
“It might be.” Joey looked troubled by the possibility that it wasn’t. “We don’t know yet.”
She sent him to the far station to cut lemons, the job furthest from customers, and he went, wounded, and cut lemons very precisely, to show he’d been misunderstood.
The only other person in the room who knew—the only one besides the three of them—was Bernie, in his booth, crossword folded, coffee gone cold again, more interested in the room than in the puzzle.
He’d gotten the front-row seat by simple geography.
His booth looked straight down the floor, and for two hours he’d tracked three teenagers fail to contain themselves, settled and unhurried, like he was enjoying a very slow, very good movie.
He caught Stella’s eye once, over the top of the paper, right as she steered Joey away from a family of four he’d nearly said something ominous to.
Bernie didn’t smile, exactly—something happened around his eyes that was close to one.
He tipped his head a bit toward Joey, then back to her—him, that one, he’s going to give you away—and Stella had to bite the inside of her cheek and look at the floor.
It was the wink that nearly did it. He aimed it at his own crossword, private, careful never to look right at her—a man enjoying a joke alone.
Stella wouldn’t have thought twice about it, except Meg had drifted to the next table to clear plates, and she caught it.
Her eyes went from Bernie, to the crossword, to the general vicinity of the three of them, and narrowed, half a degree.
Stella’s stomach dropped. Meg had caught it. She’d caught Bernie knowing something.
But Meg just straightened, stacked her plates, and said, “Bernie, you want a warm-up on that coffee?”
“I want a great many things, young lady,” Bernie said, and Meg went to the kitchen. Whatever she’d filed, she’d filed it under Bernie, not under them.
The suspicion, such as it was, had landed on the one person who could carry it and give nothing away. They’d sweated the whole shift, and the only leak in the room was a man who’d been keeping this exact kind of secret since before any of them were born.
And they kept feeding the jar.
That was the part Stella couldn’t have explained to anybody.
Ruth’s jar sat by the register—the one Joey had tried to refuse, weeks ago, on the grounds that it collected for something that didn’t exist. Now, every time one of them got a tip, they crossed the whole floor to put it in that jar specifically, with a ceremony wildly out of proportion to the coins.
A dollar went in like a coronation. Joey fed it a handful of change once, holding eye contact with Stella the entire time—the two of them grinning at a jar, at a piece of glass, because they couldn’t say what the jar was actually for. So they said it to the jar instead.
“What is with you kids and that jar today,” Anna said, going past with an armload.
The three of them froze. It was the closest anyone had come all day.
“We like Ruth,” Stella said.
Anna looked at her for a second—one full second, in which Stella died several times—and then said, “Well, we all like Ruth,” and kept walking.
She had eleven tables and a fryer acting up, and precisely zero curiosity about why three teenagers were being weird about a tip jar.
Three teenagers being weird was the baseline condition of the Shack, and had always been.
They’d gotten away with it. Again. They kept getting away with it, all afternoon, for the simple reason that nobody was chasing them.
By the time the rush thinned, Stella had said when this is ours in her head so many times it had stopped being if. She caught Joey at the window between orders. He had that look again—the one from the empty building, where he stood still inside the plan instead of taking it apart.
“When it’s ours,” he said, quietly, just to her, “I’m still putting in a real lock. On Bernie’s door.”
“You’ve said.”
“I want it on the record that I’ve been consistent.” He wiped the window down. “It’s the only thing I’ve been sure about the whole time. The lock.” He almost smiled. “And now the whole rest of it, too. But the lock first.”
That was as close as Joey got to saying he wanted it. The lock first. Stella filed it next to everything else she kept.
Her phone buzzed in her apron.
She almost didn’t check it—hands full, Anna somewhere behind her. Then the name on the screen registered and her whole stomach dropped through the floor. It was Michael. Michael didn’t call to chat—never once.
She got Joey with two fingers on his sleeve and pulled him into the dead space by the walk-in, where the family couldn’t see.
Bea caught them going and abandoned her stakeout table so fast the iced tea rocked.
The three of them crowded into three square feet of cold air by the cooler.
Stella turned the phone so all three of them could watch it buzz—MICHAEL, lit up, insistent.
“Answer it,” Bea said, barely voicing it.
“I’m going to.”
“Answer it, Stella—”
“I’m going to—” Stella’s thumb wasn’t quite steady. Out on the floor the Shack ran on, oblivious. The family closed down the day with no idea. Three feet away, in the cold by the cooler.
She answered it.
“Michael,” she said. “Hi. Yeah—we’re all three of us, hang on.” She put it on speaker, low, and held it in the middle of them. Three heads bent down over one phone in the dark by the walk-in.
“Numbers check out,” Michael said, no preamble. “Every column. I ran it twice.”
Nobody breathed.
“That’s a yes,” Michael said, when nobody said anything. “From me. You’ll have a great plan to pitch the family.”
Bea’s hand found Stella’s arm and gripped it hard enough to leave a mark. Joey made a sound Stella had never heard before—something that had been sitting in him since October, finally let go. None of it was bad.
“Okay,” Stella said, to Michael, to the cooler, to the two of them crowded in with her in the cold. “Okay. Thank you.”
Out on the floor, Anna called an order, and the grill ticked, and the Shack ran on.