“Good. Want me to shoot you for the series?”
His face lit up. “For the series? I should prepare. What angle works best? I’ve been told my left side is more photogenic, but I think that’s subjective?—”
“Joey. Just be normal.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“I know.” Stella smiled. “That’s why you’re interesting.”
He beamed, adjusted a napkin on table four that was apparently at an unacceptable angle, and was gone, the door swinging shut behind him. The Shack settled back into its afternoon quiet.
Stella opened her calc textbook and tried to focus on derivatives. Failed. Tried again. The numbers blurred.
She picked up her camera instead and looked through the viewfinder at Bernie’s booth. He’d set his coffee down. Picked up his tablet. Scrolled something. Smiled at whatever he was reading.
Then his eyes drifted. Left. Away from the tablet, away from the coffee, toward the counter. Toward the spot where Margo always stood when she was working—the section between the register and the grill where she’d spent fifty years directing traffic.
Margo wasn’t there. Hadn’t been since this morning. Was probably at Eleanor’s right now, suffering through petunias.
But Bernie’s eyes went to that spot anyway.
Stella raised the camera slowly, adjusted the focus.
Click.
CHAPTER FOUR
He was early.
Anna had the grill heating and the cheese unwrapped and the coffee brewing when a man in pressed khaki pants and a collared shirt appeared on the other side of the front windows. He checked his watch, looked at the door, looked at his watch again, and stood there. Waiting. It was barely eight o’clock and the Shack didn’t open for two hours.
She watched him through the glass while she diced onions. He held a leather briefcase in one hand and a phone in the other, reading something on the screen. His spine was a straight line. His shoulders sat square and level—the posture of someone who had never once in his life leaned against anything. His shirt was tucked in. His shoes looked like they’d been polished that morning. Possibly that hour.
Anna looked down at her apron, which had a smear of butter across the hip and what might have been yesterday’s pesto near the pocket. She looked back at the man on the boardwalk.
“Must be the auditor,” she said to the onions.
The front door was unlocked—Roberto’s back-up tomato delivery was due any minute and she’d stopped bothering with the lock during prep. The man appeared to realize this at thesame moment she did, because he reached for the handle, paused, and looked through the glass at her.
Anna wiped her hands on a towel and crossed to the door. “Michael Torres?”
“Yes. Rick sent me. I realize you’re not open?—”
“We don’t open until ten. But come in.” She stepped aside. “Coffee’s ready if you want it.”
“Black. Thank you.” He shifted the briefcase to his left hand and extended his right. “Anna Walsh?”
She shook his hand—firm, brief, rehearsed through a thousand client meetings—and led him inside. He looked around the Shack the way someone inventories a room. Ceiling to floor, left to right, pausing on the menu board, the register, the row of hooks by the kitchen door where aprons hung with names on masking tape labels. Joey’s was the most elaborate. Joey had used a label maker.
He did not look at the ocean.
“Rick mentioned a back office?”
“Down the hall, past the walk-in. It’s small. There might be a chair.”
“A chair would be sufficient.”
Anna waited for something else—a pleasantry, a comment about the view that stopped most people mid-sentence, something about the shells on the ceiling that everyone asked about on their first visit. He picked up his briefcase and walked toward the hallway.
