Chapter 38
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Joey had ironed the sheet.
Margo watched him and Tyler hang it across the front windows with a level and a difference of opinion, and did not ask why a bedsheet needed ironing to have pictures put on it, because Joey would have told her, at length, and the evening was young.
The chairs had come down off the tables and been arranged into rows that weren’t quite rows.
Anna moved through the room with a tray of shortbread ends, and Bea came through with tissue boxes and set one on the booth table on her way past. “Just in case,” she said, to nobody in particular.
Margo had the good seat without asking for it—her side of the booth, Bernie on his, the whole room laid out in front of her.
Meg and Luke took the window table. Michael sat on the wobbly stool with something dairy-free Joey had pressed on him at the door.
Lindsey came in last with her bag still on her shoulder, waved at everyone with a smile and sat down next to Tyler.
Stella stood at the back with her laptop and a projector with a speaker built in, and she did not make a speech.
She said, “Okay,” and turned off the lights, and the shells went dark overhead, and the sheet lit up, and the music started—the soundtrack, the one Bea had been promising the family since the graduation dinner.
“Told you,” Bea whispered, to everyone.
The sand dollar came up first, filling the whole sheet, the cracked plaster around it like rays.
Then the Shack went by the way Stella had turned it in—the hand-drawn menus, the bicentennial bunting, Richard at the grill mid-laugh and Margo coming down the counter with plates up both arms, younger than her own grandchildren were now.
Small captions sat under each in Stella’s plain hand.
Some of it the family had already held in their hands at a dinner table.
Most of the rest they’d walked past a thousand times without seeing—and none of them had seen it like this, whole, in order, with music under it.
Bernie’s newsstand came up, and Bernie in his booth with the pen hovering, and Bernie raised his coffee to himself.
The Klein’s photograph came up, wet paint and two young men squinting, and he looked at it the whole time it was on the sheet.
The menu came up with the tall hand and the small hand arguing across it.
Her hand found his on the seat between them, the slide changed, and neither of them gave it back.
The presentation ended where it had begun—the whole ceiling, every shell of it, filling the sheet. The caption underneath was the longest one she’d written in the entire project—every one of them carried in by somebody who thought a morning was worth keeping.
Margo read it twice. Stella had written that sentence before any of the rest of it happened, back when it was homework.
The room erupted into applause, and Stella stood and gave a theatrical bow by the light of the white sheet.
Then Tyler stood up, went to the laptop, and traded places with his daughter, who let him, looking baffled.
“One more thing,” Tyler said. “I gave it my best shot.” He waited for a second for a laugh and didn’t get one. “Pun intended.”
Bea groaned like a wounded animal. Stella, evicted to the back row next to her, asked, “Dad, what did you do?”
“Sit down,” Tyler said. “This is my version of showing your baby pictures. I don’t have any. So I made my own.”
The sheet lit up again, and it was a girl Margo remembered and had half forgotten—standing in Tyler’s kitchen that first week, holding her bag.
Then the bag again, weeks later, still packed, on a bedroom floor.
Then the girl with headphones on, head down, knees up, and nobody in the room shouted anything at those, because nobody had really known her then, and everybody knew her now, and the distance between those two facts was the whole point of the man standing quietly by the projector.
The next slide was Margo’s own face, mid-introduction, captured by somebody at an angle that suggested shock, and Margo looked at her own expression and laughed until she had to put her coffee down again.
The room shouted its way through the year after that, overlapping, correcting each other.
The high school office, and Lindsey pointed at herself and took a bow from her chair.
The empty parking lot, and Meg yelled “THE DRIVING LESSONS” and Stella yelled “I was a natural” and three people disagreed at once.
The first ice cream, cone and cup. Stella surfing at dawn, out ahead of all the boys, and Luke stood up—“I have witnesses”—and sat down.
Joey folding napkins beside a stack that had clearly been folded by somebody else entirely, and Joey said, “She improved,” and the room drowned him out.
Bea’s order ticket, solid emojis, and Bea took another bow.
Her tongue stuck out over a tray of grilled cheese when she caught Tyler taking her picture.
The eggs benedict aftermath, which got a moan of remembered grief from Tyler himself.
Michael’s two pens aligned beside a napkin, and half the room shouted “FOUR DOLLARS,” and Michael actually smiled.
Meg’s wedding—Stella and Bea dressed up and laughing at something outside the frame.
Margo and Bernie on Margo’s couch with the pie and the game and the two remotes, and Bernie said, “Who took that,” and Tyler said, “A professional,” and Bernie said, “It’s a good couch,” and squeezed Margo’s hand.
Then flour to her elbows. Then the specials board with Stella on one side and Joey on the other, both of them grinning at whoever held the camera, and nobody shouted at that one either, because everybody in the room had heard the pitch and knew they were looking at a portrait of the founders, taken before anyone knew it.
Then Stella at the mixer, so far into the work she plainly had no idea her father was standing there at all, let alone taking her picture and the room went quiet on its own.
A picture of Ruth came up, with the terrier, holding her card. Letty with hers. Mrs. Feldstein, formally. One at a time, the town’s grandmothers’ keepers, holding their handwriting up to Tyler’s lens.
Then Stella and Fiona, from the visit—the two of them on the patio at the end of the summer that had almost taken her home.
Margo looked at the mother who wasn’t in the room, whose yes had built all of this as much as Stella, and did not say anything, and neither did anybody else.
Across the room Michael’s arm went along the back of Anna’s chair and then over her shoulders, and Anna—who fed people, who moved, who had not once in her life been the one held—leaned into him and stayed there.
Then the graduation walk. Stella crossing the stage in the gown she’d hung in a closet, the tassel mid-swing, and Margo sat in a booth and watched it again the way she’d once sat in the fourth row and watched nobody, and found the second viewing considerably improved.
Somewhere in the dark Bea’s tissues started moving down the row without anybody asking, and Meg took one and pressed it under her eyes and reached over with her other hand and grabbed Luke’s, and Luke squeezed it and kissed her on the cheek and left his face there a second.
Then Margo was on the screen.
The fourth row, the good dress, watching Stella and Bea cross the stage.
Tyler had turned his camera around at his own daughter’s graduation, and nobody had known.
Margo looked at herself watching—sixty years of fourth rows, and finally somebody walking.
Her own eyes burned a little, which she put down to the projector light, an explanation she planned to keep.
Then the last slide, and it was three photographs side by side.
The Shack on its first morning, small and improbable on an empty bluff.
Richard and Margo beside a lemon tree no taller than the one in the pot on the patio right now.
And the Shack as it stood this summer—Anna’s ocean running down the wall in blues and greens, the whole front of it lit up gold and shameless, the little building up against it with its shutter down, waiting.
Over the last photograph, Tyler had added two crooked arrows in terrible handwriting.
THE SHACK pointed to the restaurant. THE SUGAR SHACK pointed to the little building beside it.
Stella laughed first.
Nobody supplied a caption. At the projector Tyler wiped at his eyes with the back of his hand, quick, like a man checking his watch.
Beside her Bernie had gone very still, and Margo handed him the tissue box without looking at him.
Then Meg started clapping, and then everybody joined—in a closed restaurant, at a bedsheet, at a building they saw every day of their lives.
The lights came up. The shells came back overhead.
The family got up and became a family again—chairs scraping, Anna cutting more shortbread, Joey coiling cables in an order only he understood, Bea narrating, Tyler getting his shoulder gripped by every man in the room in turn, Stella hugging her father hard enough that he had to put the laptop down, her face wet and nobody mentioning it.
Then Joey set down the cable he was coiling—set it down properly, even now—and, having visibly decided, hugged her too, and she hugged him back hard, the two of them there in front of the sheet where the whole thing had started and the whole thing was going.
Anna cut shortbread with wet eyes and did not mention that either.
Margo stayed in the booth a minute and let it all go on without her, which it did, beautifully, which was the point of everything.
A year ago this family had been holding still and calling it fine.
Then a girl got off a plane with a camera, and went through a trunk, and asked an old man eleven questions, and nobody had seen her coming.
Margo least of all, and Margo prided herself on seeing things coming.
It was all in good hands. She’d have said it out loud if anybody had asked her. All of it, every bit of it, in good hands.
Nobody asked her. She got up and went to see about the coffee.