Epilogue
The aprons were back on.
That was the first thing anybody who knew them would have noticed, coming into the Shack that morning—Stella and Joey behind the counter in their aprons again, Stella in Nana’s, the worn one with the ties gone soft, the one that had spent some time hanging on a hook while the two of them tried to talk themselves out of wanting anything.
It was back around her waist now, flour already on it, and she wasn’t taking it off again.
They weren’t open yet. The Sugar Shack was still mostly a door that hadn’t been cut and a window that hadn’t been scrubbed and a lemon tree in a pot on the patio putting out one stubborn yellow ball at a time.
But word had a way of moving through this town faster than anybody built anything, and it had started to move.
It moved through the counter like most things in this town did.
“You’re the one does the shortbread,” a woman said, not really a question, holding her coffee.
“My mother used to make something—a plum thing, we called it a roll but it wasn’t a roll—” A food had come up out of her childhood and she had nowhere to put it, and it was all there on her face. “I don’t suppose you’d ever—”
“Bring us the recipe,” Stella said. “We’re opening a place.
Soon. It’s called the Sugar Shack, it’s going right there—” she pointed at the wall, at the window on the other side of it—” and that’s the whole point of it.
Grandmothers’ things. Bring us the plum roll that isn’t a roll and we’ll figure it out. ”
The woman went out lit up, and by afternoon there was another one, and then somebody’s neighbor, because that was how it went now—somebody would ask if the kids could make the thing their family made, the thing nobody made anymore, and instead of we don’t have the room or someday the answer was soon, bring us the recipe, and you could watch the person decide to tell three other people on their way out the door.
It wasn’t going to stop. Stella was starting to understand that.
They had built something that fed itself.
By noon there were nine new cards on Bea’s board.
By the end of the day Bea had run out of pins.
The board had been Bea’s from the start, the wall by the specials board where the community’s recipes had been collecting all along—index cards and torn envelope backs and one written on the inside of a cracker box, a grandmother’s handwriting and then another grandmother’s handwriting, powdered sugar worked into one, a splash of something set into the paper of another.
It had been a nice small thing. Now it was filling up like a wall in a campaign office, cards going up faster than Bea could copy them, and Bea had stopped trying to make it neat and started just letting it happen, which for Bea was a kind of growth.
In the middle of it, where Bea had put it and refused to move it, was the napkin.
Framed now—Bea had done it herself, cheap frame, good glass—the paper soft and brown, the pencil faded but the lines still there if you knew to look—two boxes, one bigger than the other, a line beneath them that had to be the ocean.
It hung there in the middle of the grandmothers’ recipes like it was one of them, which, Stella supposed, it was—the first one, the one the whole place was drawn from. Nobody who didn’t know would look at it twice. Everybody who knew looked at it every time they passed.
Stella looked at it every time she passed.
The family came through the way it usually was at the Shack, all day, in and out of the edges of it.
Meg came by with a list of the permits they’d need and a walnut bread under foil—made properly, finally, the card off her counter and the loaf in her hands like she’d decided something—and the bread did not survive the afternoon.
Fiona had a framed photo of the board on her fridge in Sydney by the end of the week, which Stella knew because her mother sent a photo of the photo.
Margo walked down her hill in the middle of the afternoon and did not order anything, and when there was a lull she knocked her ring against the counter the way she did when she wanted the room, and the family drifted in from the edges—Anna from the grill, Meg with her permit list, Tyler, Bea, the kids wiping their hands.
“One thing, and then I’ll let you all get back to it,” Margo said.
She reached into her cardigan and took out a folded paper and set it on the counter.
“Bernie deeded the building over. Weeks ago. Before Rick, before the numbers—he did it the day after he offered it to you, quietly, so that nobody could ever change their mind.” She smoothed the fold flat.
“I’ve had it put into the family trust. Which means it’s protected.
Which means no bad year, no lean season, no clever person ten summers from now can sell it out from under you or talk anybody into anything.
It’s yours, and it’s held, and it stays held.
” She looked at Bernie. “That’s his doing.
He’ll tell you it’s nothing. It’s not nothing. ”
“It’s nothing,” Bernie said.
“It’s not nothing, Bernard.”
“It’s a building I wasn’t using.” But his voice wasn’t quite steady, and he looked out the window toward the little tree on the patio instead of at any of them.
Roberto came through the propped door with the produce, two crates, and stopped dead when he saw the board.
“What is—” He set the crates down. He came over to the counter and looked at the cards, and the napkin, and the little hand-lettered card Bea had pinned up top that just said COMING SOON with an arrow toward the wall.
“You’re doing it. The bakery. The real—” He turned around, his whole face a smile. “You’re doing it.”
“We’re actually doing it,” Joey said.
“When? What do you need? I’ve got a guy for used equipment, I’ve got a guy for—do you need a guy for anything, I have guys.
” Roberto was already reaching for his phone.
“Quince. You’re going to want quince. Real quince, not the—I know where the good quince is now, I’ve been thinking about it since—” He stopped.
He’d been thinking about it since the party, and everybody in earshot knew it, and it sat in the air for one second and then Roberto grinned, because it was fixed now, it had been fixed with a tart on a patio, and there was nothing left in it to be sorry about.
“I’ll get you the good quince. On the house, first order. For the opening.”
Stella smiled and looked at Joey. “Oh, that’s—”
“On the house. Don’t argue with me, I’m emotional.” He picked his crates back up and headed for the walk-in, and halfway there he called back over his shoulder, to nobody, to the whole room, “The Sugar Shack. Ha.” Like the name delighted him. Like he was going to go tell somebody.
He was definitely going to go tell somebody.
Bernie found Joey at the back door before he left for the day and put something in his hand without ceremony. A key, a new one, cut clean and bright, on a plain ring.
“For the front, when it’s yours,” Bernie said. “The real lock’s already on. I had it done.” He looked at Joey. “The mat’s retired. You were right about the mat.”
Joey turned the key over once, and didn’t say anything for a second, because what he wanted to say wasn’t something he could get out standing up.
“I was going to put in a real lock,” he said finally.
“I know. You told me four times.” Bernie was already moving toward the door. “I beat you to it. Consider it a housewarming gift. And you have the only key.”
Joey put the key in his pocket, and kept his hand on it a moment, the way you keep your hand on something you can’t believe is yours.
At closing time, the light came in low off the water and turned the front windows cool, and the Shack emptied out, and Stella was wiping down the counter when she noticed Joey standing at the register with the donation jar in his hands.
It was Ruth’s jar. The one Ruth had set out weeks ago with two folded bills in the bottom so it wouldn’t sit there empty—for a bakery that didn’t exist, that had no plan, that Joey had stood right here and refused to let them collect money on the grounds that it implied something that wasn’t real.
It had been sitting by the register the whole time.
People had been putting money in it the whole time. It was most of the way full.
He reached for the label maker, the way he reached for it for everything. Then he put it back in the drawer. Joey grabbed a marker.
He peeled off the old strip of tape, the blank one, the one he’d never let anybody write on.
He set it aside. He tore a fresh strip, and he flattened it on the counter, and he wrote on it in his small square all-caps hand, and he stuck it to the jar and set the jar back down by the register where it lived.
Stella came over and read it.
THIS IS ACTUALLY HAPPENING.
“It implied something that wasn’t real,” she said.
“It’s real now.” Joey squared the jar to the edge of the counter, the way he squared everything, and looked at it a second, and then pulled his apron off over his head and hung it on the hook by the walk-in for the night. “So I can write it.”
Stella left hers on a minute longer.
She stood in the emptying room with Nana’s apron still tied around her, the board behind her thick with the town’s grandmothers and Richard’s napkin holding the middle of it, the jar on the counter telling the plain truth in Joey’s handwriting, the little building on the other side of the wall.
She’d spent a year photographing the things other people kept.
Somewhere in there, without deciding to, she’d become one of the keepers, and the proof was pinned all over the wall in two dozen hands.
Then she untied the apron, and hung it next to Joey’s on the hook, where she’d be able to find it in the morning.
Thank for reading The Beach Shack Legacy, and I hope you enjoyed it.