Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Beach Shack smelled like hot grease and ocean salt, which Stella had learned was actually a good sign. “If you can’t smell the grill, something’s wrong with the grill,” Joey had told her on her first day. Words to live by, apparently.
Today the grill was working fine. Joey, on the other hand, was having some kind of breakdown.
“Okay, so the napkin station.” He stood in front of the metal dispenser like a surgeon preparing for an operation. “This is critical. Forty-five degree angle on the fan. Not forty. Not fifty. Forty-five.”
“You’ve told me this.”
“I’m telling you again.” Joey pulled out a napkin and demonstrated the fold with the intensity of someone defusing a bomb. “See how it catches the light? That’s how you know it’s right.”
Stella leaned against the counter. “And if it doesn’t catch the light?”
“Disaster.” He wasn’t joking. That was the thing about Joey—he was dramatic, but he meant every word. “Customers sense weakness. They can tell when the napkin station has been compromised.”
“Right. Compromised napkins. Got it.”
From his corner booth, Bernie looked up from his tablet. “She’s humoring you, son.”
“She’s learning, Bernie. There’s a difference.”
Bernie caught Stella’s eye and winked. She bit back a smile.
The morning rush hadn’t started yet, which was why Joey had declared this a “training intensive.” Joey held a thin folder like it mattered more than it probably should have.
“You made this?” Stella had asked when he’d handed her the packet.
She flipped through Joey’s laminated pages while he reorganized the condiment station for the third time. Ketchup bottles arranged by fullness. Mustard aligned with military precision. Hot sauce in a perfect diagonal that he kept adjusting by millimeters.
“Joey.” Stella set down the folder. “You’re going to school twenty minutes away.”
“Twenty-three, depending on traffic.”
“You’re acting like you’re shipping off to war.”
Joey stopped adjusting the hot sauce. His shoulders dropped slightly, and for a moment, he looked less like the Shack’s self-appointed excellence coach and more like what he actually was: a nineteen-year-old kid who was scared.
“What if something happens?” he said quietly. “What if the grill breaks again and nobody knows the trick with the pilot light?
“We’ll call you,” she said. “If the napkin station gets compromised or whatever.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
Joey exhaled. Then he straightened, adjusting his apron, and the nervous energy crept back in.
“You’re still humoring me.”
“Little bit.”
Bernie laughed from his booth, a dry chuckle that made Joey spin around.
“Something funny, Bernie?”
“Just remembering when Margo trained me on the napkin station.” Bernie tapped something on his tablet. “She was exactly this intense. You come by it honestly.”
“Margo trained you?”
“Long ago. I was between jobs, she needed help, I learned the sacred art of the forty-five-degree fold.” Bernie smiled, his weathered face creasing. “Course, she also made Tyler rebuild my newsstand that same summer. After he backed her truck into it.”
“I remember hearing about that.”
“Demolished it. He was young, thought he knew how to drive. Margo made him spend the whole summer rebuilding it board by board.” Bernie shook his head. “That’s why he drives like a grandmother now. Traumatized.”
Stella filed this away. She’d heard that it happened, but not about the traumatized part. Ammunition for later.
The front door opened, and Bea breezed in, still wearing what Stella recognized as her “communing with dairy” outfit—paint-stained jeans and an oversized flannel that had belonged to Sam Walsh, apparently.
“Morning, everyone. Joey, your car is blocking the delivery zone again.”
“It’s not blocking, it’s adjacent.”
“It’s adjacent in a blocking way.” Bea slid onto a stool at the counter. “What’d I miss?”
“Joey’s teaching me about napkins. Again,” Stella said. “And Bernie told the story about when Tyler destroyed Bernie’s newsstand when he was our age.”
“Oh, the newsstand story!” Bea lit up. “Mom used to tell that one all the time. She said Uncle Tyler cried when Margo made him rebuild it.”
“I did not cry,” Tyler said from the kitchen doorway. He was carrying a crate of avocados, looking mildly horrified. “I had sawdust in my eyes.”
“For three months?” Bernie asked.
“It was a lot of sawdust.”
Tyler set down the avocados and surveyed the scene—Joey’s laminated folders, the obsessively arranged condiments, Stella and Bea grinning at him.
“I see training is going well.”
“Joey’s preparing us for his departure,” Stella said.
Margo appeared from the back office, reading glasses perched on her head, a sheaf of invoices in her hand. She took in the scene with the expression Stella had learned meant she was cataloging everything for later analysis.
“Joey, your car is blocking the delivery zone.”
“It’s adjacent—”
“Move it.” Margo’s tone was mild but absolute. “And then come see me. I want to talk to you about something before you start school.”
Joey’s face flickered—nervous, hopeful, uncertain. “Good something or bad something?”
“Just something.” Margo disappeared back into the office.
Joey looked at Stella. “What does that mean?”
“No idea. But you should probably move your car first.”
He handed her the folder. “Quiz yourself on the grill startup sequence. Page twelve. I’ll be right back.”
After Joey scrambled out the front door, Bernie waved Stella over to his booth.
“Sit for a minute.”
She slid in across from him. His tablet was open to some kind of spreadsheet, but he closed it before she could see what he was tracking.
“You know about the scholarship?” Bernie asked. “The one Joey got?”
“The Laguna Promise thing? Yeah, he mentioned it.”
“Did he mention Luke got one too? Years ago?”
Stella shook her head.
“Margo’s husband started it. Richard. Back in the seventies.” Bernie’s voice softened the way it always did when he talked about the old days. “Quiet thing. No fanfare. Just helping local kids who needed a break. Joey, Luke, probably a dozen others over the years.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
Bernie studied her with those sharp eyes that saw too much. “Because you’re a Walsh now. Whether you’ve got the paperwork or not. And Walshes should know what this place means to people.”
Stella took a deep breath. She looked around the Shack—the sun-faded booths, the shells clustered on the ceiling, the ancient soda machine that Joey had trained her to bang in just the right spot.
“It’s just a restaurant,” she said, but she didn’t mean it.
“Yeah.” Bernie smiled. “And the ocean’s just water.”
The front door banged open again—Joey returning, slightly out of breath.
“Okay, car’s moved. What did Margo want? Did she say? Is it about the schedule?”
“She wanted you,” Stella said. “Back office.”
Joey smoothed his apron, ran a hand through his hair, and headed toward the back like a man walking to his execution. Or his graduation. Sometimes with Joey it was hard to tell.
Bea appeared at Stella’s elbow. “What was that about? With Bernie?”
“Walsh history lesson.” Stella watched Joey disappear into the office. “Did you know Luke got a scholarship from here too?”
“The Promise Foundation? Yeah. Mom says that’s part of why he stuck around. Felt like he owed Laguna something.” Bea stole a pickle from the prep station. “You okay?”
“Yeah. Just...” Stella gestured vaguely at the Shack, the ceiling, all of it. “A lot.”
“Good lot or bad lot?”
Stella thought about it. About the laminated folders and the napkin angles and Bernie’s quiet history lessons. About Joey’s anxiety that wasn’t really about napkins at all, and the scholarship that connected people to this place in ways she was only starting to understand.
“Good lot,” she decided. “Weird. But good.”
The kitchen timer beeped—first prep of the day. Stella grabbed her apron from the hook and tied it on.
She had a grill startup sequence to memorize.