Eleanor’s brush stopped. “The Schedule says?—”
“I know what the Schedule says. The Schedule says Wednesday is watercolor with Diane. The Schedule says Thursday is wine tasting. The Schedule says Friday is Circle night.” Margo stood and untied her smock. “The Schedule has said a lot of things for two weeks and I’ve done all of them and I’m grateful and I’m done.”
The room went quiet. Even Nadine’s thermos paused.
“Not done with you,” Margo said. “Not done with Friday nights. Not done with any of this.” She looked at them—Eleanorwith her clipboard face, Vivian with her precise pelican, Nadine with her hat and her wine, Letty still painting quietly at the end. “Done with the framework. I appreciate what you’ve done. I know why you built it. You were scared I’d sit in my house and stare at a canvas I can’t finish and eat crackers over the sink.”
“Vivian saw the crackers,” Eleanor said.
“Vivian sees everything. That’s not the point.” Margo folded the smock over her arm. “The Shack needs me. Not the way it used to—Anna’s running it and she’s doing it well. But they’re stretched thin and the grill is hot and I belong there. Two days a week. On my terms.”
“That’s what makes sense,” Letty said. She added a stroke to her pelican. “Leaves the rest of the week for painting and us.”
Eleanor looked at her clipboard—she’d brought one, because Eleanor brought clipboards to everything — and then set it on the easel ledge. Slowly. The way you set something down when the argument is over and you know it.
“You’ll eat lunch,” Eleanor said.
“I’ll eat lunch.”
“And if your knees?—”
“My knees are my business.”
Eleanor pressed her lips together. Then she crossed the two easels between them and hugged Margo—brief, tight, the hug of a woman who’d been holding her friend’s schedule together with color-coded tabs and was learning to let go.
“You’re impossible,” Eleanor said.
“I’m consistent.”
“Those really are the same thing.”
Nadine raised her thermos. “To Margo. Back at the Shack.”
“To the Shack,” Vivian said.
Letty smiled from behind her easel and said nothing, because Letty’s silence was always louder than everyone else’s toasts.
Margo looked at her friends. Forty years. The Circle that held even when the person inside it refused to sit still.
“Tell Diane I’m sorry about the pelicans,” she said.
“Diane will survive,” Eleanor said. “She has eleven others.”
Margo walked out of the community center into the October sun.
She walked to the Shack. The lunch rush was on—she could see it through the windows. Tables full. Anna behind the counter. Tyler at the grill working the tail end of the breakfast holdovers. The sound of it reached her through the closed door—dishes, voices, the hum of a restaurant that was running the way it was supposed to run.
She stood outside for a few moments. She hadn’t been here in two weeks. She’d been everywhere buthere.
She opened the door and went inside.
Joey saw her first. He was behind the counter restocking muffins—his muffins, the lemon blueberry ones that had become the Shack’s breakfast anchor—and his face when he saw Margo split open into something so bright it made her chest ache.
“Margo.” He said it the way he said most things—like the word itself mattered, like her name was an event. “You’re here.”
“I’m here.” She picked up an apron from the hook—hers, MARGO in her own handwriting, permanent marker on masking tape from a decade ago—and tied it on. Her hands remembered the knot. Her shoulders remembered the weight.
Anna looked up from the register. “Margo. What about the?—”
