Chapter 36
Anna knew something was up when Stella asked if they could use the house.
Not the Shack. The house. For a dinner, she said, a family dinner, everybody, and she’d said everybody with a weight on it that Anna felt but couldn’t place, and then Stella and Joey had shown up in the middle of the afternoon and taken over the kitchen and told Anna, with great and suspicious politeness, that she was not allowed in it.
So Anna sat on her own patio with a glass of wine she hadn’t planned to have yet and watched her family arrive one confused carload at a time.
“Do you know what this is about?” Meg asked, coming through the side gate with Luke behind her carrying a folding chair nobody’d asked him to bring. “Because Stella texted me are you free this week it’s important don’t worry and those last two words have been ruining my week.”
“I don’t know anything.” Which was true, and which was starting to bother Anna, because she was a person who knew things, and there was a whole operation going on in her kitchen that she’d been locked out of.
“Margo?” Meg turned. “Do you know?”
“I know a great many things,” Margo said, settling into the good chair with Bernie lowering himself into the one beside her, the two of them a unit now, settled into each other, “and I’ve found that saying so in advance mostly spoils the evening.
” She accepted a glass from Tyler. “Sit down, Meg. Let the children have their night.”
Which told Anna that Margo knew exactly what this was, and had known for a while, and wasn’t going to say a word, and Anna looked at her grandmother’s serene face and thought, You’re in on it.
They came out with the pizza first.
Anna had braced for the kids to have cooked—she’d smelled ambition on them when they arrived, seen the cookbook open on the counter before she was banished—and instead here came Joey with a stack of pizza boxes and the particular pride of a person who has made a wise executive decision.
“We were going to cook,” Stella said, setting down plates. “We had a whole plan. There was going to be a chicken thing.”
“There was going to be a chicken thing,” Joey said, “and then we did a realistic assessment of our skills and the time available and we pivoted.” He started opening boxes, and here was the part Anna didn’t expect.
“Meg, yours is the jalapeno and tomato, extra tomato, no onion. Luke, Hawaiian, which is a crime, but you’re consistent about it.
Anna, the white one with the arugula you pretend is a salad.
Tyler, meat, all of it, the one that voids the warranty. Margo—”
“Margo doesn’t eat pizza,” Meg said.
“Margo eats one slice of plain cheese and complains about it,” Joey said, sliding a small separate box in front of her, “so we got you your own so nobody’s grease touches yours.
” He straightened. “Bernie, sausage and peppers, and I got the peppers on the side because last time you said they slide off and you’re not a child. ”
There was a small silence at the table, the silence of eight people realizing they’d each just been handed, without discussion, the exact thing they’d have ordered for themselves.
“He remembered everyone’s—” Luke started.
“Just. Eat. Please. We’ll talk after,” Stella said, glancing at Joey.
So they ate, and it was a good dinner even though nobody had cooked it.
Then Stella and Joey went back inside, and came out again carrying a tart between them like it was made of glass, and set it in the middle of the table, and Anna’s whole chest went still.
She knew it before anyone said it. Quince—the deep amber of it, the lattice, the smell of it coming across the table—the exact thing the grandmother from Greece had asked for and never gotten, the thing that had sunk the party, the failure Meg had carried out to a patio and apologized for while a lovely old woman patted Meg’s hand and said it was no trouble.
Here it was. Made right.
“We owed you this one,” Stella said. Quiet.
Not a speech. She was looking at Anna and Meg, the two who’d put their heads down on the table that day, and Joey stood beside her with his hands folded and his chin down.
“We couldn’t make it for her. We looked—Meg, we actually tracked down the woman’s daughter, she moved to Arizona, we sent her one, it’s a whole thing.
But we couldn’t fix that day. So we made it for you.
Because we’re the reason it went wrong and we never—we never actually said we were sorry.
Out loud. To you. So.” She swallowed. “We’re sorry.
It should never have happened, and it happened because of us, and we know it. ”
Nobody said anything for a moment. Meg had her hand over her mouth.
“Cut the tart, Stella,” Margo said, handing somebody a task.
Stella cut the tart, and it was, Anna would think later, one of the best things she had ever eaten, tart and honeyed and exactly what that grandmother should have had, and the eating of it did something to the table that no amount of talking could have done.
Which, Anna understood a beat too late, was the point.
“Okay,” Tyler said, when the plates were pushed back. “You’ve fed us our favorites and apologized with pastry and you’ve got Michael sitting here in a collared shirt on a weeknight. Somebody tell us what this is.”
So they told them.
Bea, who had known for weeks and nearly died of it, sat on her hands and let them.
Stella did most of it, and Joey did the parts with numbers, and Michael—who had indeed worn a collar, and who sat with his two pens and a folder squared to the table edge—did the parts where the numbers had to be believed.
They laid it out plainly—Bernie’s newsstand, the baking, the window that closed the licensing problem, Stella’s wages, Joey’s scholarship redirected, a real plan, a real thing.
And Anna, listening, felt the funniest sequence of things happen in her chest, one after another, as each worry she’d been carrying got picked up and set down answered before she could even raise it.
They’ll run themselves into the ground like Meg did—and there was Meg, of all people, leaning forward and saying “who’s watching your labor hours, you can’t do this on eighteen-year-old adrenaline,” and Michael saying “I am, it’s built into the plan, look at page four,” and Meg actually looking at page four and going quiet in the specific way Meg went quiet when something was done correctly.
The ordering, the supply, the thing that broke the party—and there was Joey explaining the separate ordering system, the pars, the fail-safes, the thing that meant a quince would never again get sent back because nobody knew whose it was, and Anna realized he’d built the whole system around the exact hole they’d fallen through, that the disaster had become the blueprint.
Stella said, “and it’s attached, that’s the whole point, it’s not somewhere else, there’s a door, we’ll be right there, we’ll be more there, not less,” and Anna felt that one land in her own throat and had to look at her wine.
Bernie spoke once. He waited until the numbers were done, and then he said, into a pause, “The building’s mine.
Free and clear, has been since before any of you were born.
I’m not asking anybody at this table to buy anything or fund anything.
I’m giving it. That part’s already decided, it was decided in my kitchen, and the only reason we’re all sitting here is that these two have too much respect for this family to take something that touches the Shack without asking the family first.” He looked around the table.
“Which is the whole reason they should have it. Kids who’d ask. ”
Luke’s voice came rough. “Bernie, can I say something?” Anna looked over, and Luke was turning his fork over in his hands. He looked at Joey. “You put your scholarship into it. The fund. Richard’s fund.”
“Yeah,” Joey said.
“That fund put me through school.” Luke said it to the table, plain.
“Everybody here knows it, it’s not a secret, but I don’t say it enough.
I was a kid with nothing and that fund and this family decided I was worth a bet, and I’m—” He gestured at his whole life, Meg beside him, the chair he’d carried in.
“I’m this now. Because of a bet somebody made when I couldn’t have paid it back.
” He stopped for a moment and cleared his throat.
“You redirecting it isn’t wasting it.” He looked at Joey.
“I never met the man. I know him from what his fund did for me, and from the way all of you still talk about him, all these years. And from that—it’s the most Richard thing you could do with it.
Passing the bet on.” He paused and looked at Margo. “That’s not nothing.”
And it was Tyler, of all people, who turned to Bernie then and said, “Speaking of Richard—isn’t this how you got the newsstand in the first place? Didn’t he—wasn’t there some story about a horse, or a—”
“There’s a whole story,” Bernie said, “and it’s Richard’s more than mine, and it keeps. Tonight’s about these two.” And he folded his hands, and would not be moved, and let the horse go unmentioned.
Somewhere in there Michael said the thing Anna would remember longest, and he didn’t say it to the room, he said it low, to Anna, while the others were talking over the tart plates, because Anna was closest and because Anna was the one still holding back.
“I checked it three times,” Michael said, quiet, just to her.
“I wanted to find the thing that kills it. I always find it. It’s my whole job, finding it.
” He aligned his fork with the edge of his plate.
“I didn’t find it. And I want you to know—” the mask warmed, went honest—”I wouldn’t have told them it could work if I thought it would fail. ”
Nobody said yes right away.
That was the thing—by the end, everyone at the table wanted to, Anna could feel it.
“It’s Rick’s to approve,” Margo said. “Not because he owns a vote the rest of us don’t.
Because he keeps the books, and the fund is a legal thing with rules, and Joey’s redirect touches it, and if we do this we do it clean, on paper, the right way, so that nobody years from now can say we handed the family business to children on a summer night because the tart was good.
” She looked at Stella. “It was a very good tart. It is still Rick’s to confirm.
He’ll be back in a few days. We’ll bring it to him, all of it, and I expect he’ll say yes, because I raised him and he’s not a fool.
” A pause. “But we’ll do it right. You did this right—you asked. We’re not going to answer you sloppy.”
“So that’s—” Stella looked around. “That’s not a no?”
“That’s a let us do this properly,” Meg said, “which in this family is basically a marriage proposal.”
“We’ll get back to you,” Margo said. “Soon. Properly. Now somebody cut me another sliver of that tart, a small one, and don’t tell me how many I’ve had.”
And Anna sat back in her chair on her own patio with her family loud and warm around her and two nervous kids finally letting their shoulders down, and understood that she’d walked out here an hour ago braced for the whole thing to be too much, and somewhere between the pizza and the quince she’d started, without deciding to, to hope.