Chapter 37
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Stella had called her mother the night before the pitch—late in Laguna, lunchtime in Sydney—and her mother had cried the good way and sworn secrecy without being asked. Now all that was left was for Rick to give his blessing.
He came after close, which they knew meant it was official, because Rick did birthdays and holidays like a normal person but he did business after close, with the doors locked and the chairs still down.
He had the briefcase.
Stella had never once cared about a briefcase in her life and now she watched this one come across the Shack floor like it had her whole future zipped inside it, which, more or less, it did.
“Evening,” Rick said. To all of them, to none of them. He set the briefcase on the counter and looked at Margo. “Back patio?”
“Back patio,” Margo said.
And the adults got up—all of them, Margo and Bernie and Tyler and Anna and Meg and Luke and Michael, the whole grown wall of them—and went out through the back, and the door clicked, and Stella and Joey and Bea were left standing in the closed restaurant with nothing to do but not die.
They lasted about as long as you’d expect.
“I can see them,” Bea said, already at the side window, the one that looked onto the corner of the patio through the gap in the bougainvillea. “I can see part of them. I can see Michael’s shoulder and half of Uncle Rick.”
“What are they doing?” Joey was behind her. “What’s the body language?”
“Michael’s got the folder open. Rick’s—okay, Rick’s nodding, that’s good, nodding’s good—”
“Nodding could be I understand the concern,” Joey said. “Nodding is not a yes. Nodding is data intake. Don’t score the nod.”
“Now he’s not nodding.”
“That’s worse.”
Stella made herself sit down on a stool and not look, which lasted until Bea said “oh,” in a low voice, and then Stella was at the window too, all three of them stacked at the eight-inch gap in the bougainvillea like the world’s worst detectives.
Rick was talking. You couldn’t hear it. He had one hand flat on the table and he was saying something to the whole group, unhurried, and Margo was listening with her chin up, and Tyler had his arms crossed, and you could not read a single thing on any of them because they were a family that had spent a lifetime learning to keep their faces still behind a counter.
“Meg just put her hand over her mouth,” Bea reported.
“Good or bad hand over the mouth.”
“There’s a good one?”
“There’s a surprised one and there’s a bad news one and I can’t—Bea, move your head.”
They watched Meg’s hand over her mouth mean nothing decipherable for what felt like a year.
They watched Luke look at the ground. They watched Michael turn a page.
Joey had gone quiet in a way Stella didn’t like, the way he went right before he talked himself into the worst version of something, and she reached over without looking and put her hand on his arm, and he let it stay.
“Whatever it is,” Stella said, low, “we did it right. Bernie said. We asked. Even if it’s—”
“Don’t,” Joey said. “Don’t do the speech where you get us ready for no. I’ll cry and I categorically do not cry.”
“That’s your uncle’s line.”
“It’s a family line.”
The patio door opened.
They scattered from the window so fast Bea knocked a menu off the stand, and by the time the adults came back through they were arranged around the counter in poses of tremendous casualness, three teenagers who had absolutely not been pressed against the glass, and Rick came first with the briefcase, and he stopped in front of Stella and Joey.
He looked at them for a second.
He nodded. Once. To each of them.
And then he picked up his briefcase and said “goodnight, all” to the room and walked out the front, and the bell over the door did its small ordinary sound, and he was gone.
Nobody had said anything.
“That’s it?” Bea asked, to the room. “That’s—what was that. What does the nod mean. Uncle Rick. Come back and use words.”
“He’s gone.” Joey’s voice had gone thin. “He nodded and he left. What does the nod—Stella, was that a yes nod or a ‘nice try’ nod, I can’t, I don’t have enough data on his nods—”
“Come out to the patio,” Margo said.
She said it from the back door. She’d waited a beat before she said it, let the nod sit there a moment longer.
The three of them went out to the patio where the whole family was standing around the long table in the blue end of the light, and there was, in the middle of the table, a small potted tree.
A lemon tree. Young. A few hard green lemons on it and one gone yellow.
“Sit,” Margo said, and they sat, and Margo did not sit, Margo stood at the head with her hand resting on the pot of the little tree.
“Rick says the numbers are clean,” she said.
“He says the redirect is legal, the window solves the license, and the plan is sound. He says—and I’m quoting my son, who does not hand out compliments—that it’s a better plan than most grown adults bring him.
” A pause. “So there’s nothing standing in the way of it. Legally. On paper. Nothing.”
Stella’s ears were ringing.
“Which means it’s just us now,” Margo said. “The family. Deciding. And we decided out there in about ninety seconds, which I’ll admit we stretched to fifteen minutes so your Uncle Rick could feel thorough.” She looked at them. “It’s yes. It was always going to be yes. You have your bakery.”
Stella didn’t hear the next part right away because Bea screamed and Joey made a sound she’d never heard him make and the family came in around them all at once, loud, Tyler’s hand on the back of her neck, Meg crying, Luke shaking Joey’s hand and then giving up and hugging him, and it was a while before the noise came down enough for Margo to knock her ring against the table for quiet.
“One more thing,” Margo said. “Then you can go back to falling apart.”
She put her hand on the little tree.
“This is yours. Not the Shack’s—yours, the two of you, for the new place.
It’s a Meyer, same as mine.” She turned a hard green lemon between her fingers without picking it.
“I told Stella something on my porch a while back about a tree that makes lemons whether anybody bakes or not. I stand by it. But I’ve been thinking you shouldn’t have to keep coming up my hill to borrow mine.
” She paused for a moment. “Plant your own. That’s the whole of what I know.
You plant your own, and you tend it, and it does the rest.
A year ago she’d come off a plane with a bag she wouldn’t unpack and then filled her camera with other people’s plans. The tree was small and the lemons were mostly green and she wanted it more than anything she had ever photographed.
Stella couldn’t say anything. She put her hand on the pot next to her great-grandmother’s and left it there.
Later—after the noise, after Meg’s second round of crying, after Tyler took approximately four hundred pictures and Bea planned the entire mural twice—it was full dark and the family had drifted into the loose end of a good night, and Bea came and sat on the table by the lemon tree with a fork and the last of somebody’s pie.
“So,” she said. “I still can’t paint the sign.”
“Bea, no.” Stella already knew where this was going.
“I’m serious, I have the whole thing, I have the peach color and the lettering and the little painting in the corner and I still cannot paint it because you two still have not—” she pointed the fork at them—”named your baby.
I have been so patient. I have kept a secret, which nearly killed me.
Name it. Right now. Tonight. While everyone we love is here and slightly emotional and won’t argue. ”
Stella looked at Joey. Joey looked at the little tree.
“It’s attached to the Shack,” Joey said. “That’s the whole thing, right, that’s why it works. It’s not its own separate thing out on its own. It’s—” he moved his hand, the door through the wall, the two buildings leaning. “It’s the Shack. Just. The sweet part.”
“The sweet part of the Shack,” Bea said.
“The Sugar Shack,” Stella said.
She hadn’t planned to say it. It had just been there, sitting under everything since Bernie’s dusty room and the day he asked her if she wanted it, and now it was out on the table, and nobody moved for a second.
“The Sugar Shack,” Joey said, trying it.
Bea had gone still, which never happened. “Say it again.”
“The Sugar Shack.”
“That’s it.” Bea was already somewhere else, already seeing it in her peach color over the little window. “That’s the sign. That’s been the sign this whole time and you were sitting on it.” She looked furious about it and completely happy at the same time. “The Sugar Shack.”
Across the patio Margo had gone quiet by the tree. Stella caught a look on her great-grandmother’s face that Stella had never once managed to catch with a camera.
Margo just reached over and picked the one yellow lemon off the little tree, the only ripe one, and held it in her hand, and looked at the three of them arguing already about the lettering, and put it in her cardigan pocket to take home.