Margo opened her eyes. “Good.”
“Yeah.”
They sat in the quiet for a moment — Bernie in his apartment, Margo in her kitchen, the phone line holding them together the way it had a thousand times before.
“You could have come over and told me this in person,” she said.
“My knee didn’t like that idea.”
“When are you going to get it fixed?”
“When they invent a surgery that doesn’t involve sitting still for six weeks.”
“You sit still every day. Five hours in a booth.”
“That’s voluntary sitting. Medical sitting is different. Medical sitting has physical therapy and ice packs and someone telling you to do ankle circles. I’m not doing ankle circles, Margo.”
“You’re impossible.”
“I’m consistent. There’s a difference.”
“There really isn’t.”
She heard him shift in his chair—the creak of the old recliner he refused to replace, the one that listed slightly to the left and had a coffee stain on the armrest from 2011 that he considered “character.” “She’ll be fine. Anna. She’s a Walsh.”
“She’s stubborn.”
“Same thing, with your family.”
Margo smiled. She didn’t know she was going to, and then she was. “Same time tomorrow? At the Shack?”
“My booth’s not going anywhere.”
“Neither are you, apparently. Get the knee fixed, Bernard.”
“Goodnight, Margo.”
“Goodnight.”
She hung up and sat in the kitchen for a moment. The house was still quiet, but it was a different quiet now.
Her phone buzzed. Anna, texting a photo of the day’s lunch rush — three tables full, Tyler at the grill, a blurred hand that was probably Joey reaching for something. The caption read: Quiet day. All good here.
All good. The Shack was running without her. That was the whole point. She’d stepped back so they could step forward, and they had, and it was right, and she was proud.
She looked at the photo for a long time.
Then she put the phone down and went to the studio, picked up the brush, and tried the foreground again. The place where the Shack would go. She got the roofline right this time—the angle of it, the way it sat against the cliff. But the windows wouldn’t come. Windows needed light inside them, and she couldn’t decide what kind of light the Shack held at that hour. She used to know. She used to know without thinking.
She set the brush down and cleaned her hands and made dinner—soup from the freezer, bread she’d bought at the market that wasn’t as good as what came out of the Shack’s oven but was perfectly adequate.
Perfectly adequate.
She ate at the kitchen table with the Schedule propped against the salt shaker. Tomorrow was Wednesday. Watercolor with Diane. Pelicans.
Margo washed her bowl, turned off the kitchen light, and went to bed.
CHAPTER EIGHT
