She walked home. The house was quiet but it was a different quiet today—not empty, just resting. She’d been at the Shack. She’d held the spatula. She’d heard her granddaughter talkabout a man’s salsa the way people talk about things that matter more than food.
She went to the studio. Picked up the brush. Looked at the foreground — the place where the Shack would go, the windows she couldn’t paint because she couldn’t decide what kind of light they held.
She’d been there today. She’d seen the light.
She mixed the color and touched the brush to the canvas.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
She wasn’t normally at the Shack at two-thirty.
Most days Meg dropped the hollandaise before seven, checked in with Anna, and drove to San Clemente for client work. Sometimes she came back in the evening for dinner service. Every time she asked how things were going, Anna said the same thing.
“It’s fine.”
Tyler said, “We’re managing.”
The Shack at seven AM looked like the Shack—Anna behind the counter, Tyler at the grill, coffee on. Busy. Alive. Fine.
Today her afternoon meeting had canceled and she’d come home early, and the Shack she walked into at two-thirty was not fine.
Tyler was asleep on the prep counter.
Face-down on the cutting board, one arm dangling toward the floor, the other curled around his head. His apron was still tied. His hair had given up. A piece of onion skin was stuck to his cheek, and the vinegar pot from the morning sat unwashed by the sink, and the kitchen had the staleness of a room that had been running too hard for too long without anyone opening a window.
Meg set her bag on the counter and stood there.
She catalogued. She couldn’t help it—cataloguing was what she did, the way Tyler aimed cameras and Anna rearranged furniture. Tyler’s camera bag: in the corner, dusty, strap coiled on top. The grill off, but the grease trap needed cleaning. The muffin baskets empty, crumbs at the bottom. Dante’s apron on the hook, which meant he’d already left. Joey’s laminated prep sheet, version 4.2, taped to the register at an angle that would have given Joey a stroke.
And Tyler. Asleep. At two-thirty in the afternoon. On a cutting board.
She put her hand on his shoulder. “Tyler.”
Nothing. He slept the way exhausted people sleep—completely, like his body had made a decision his brain hadn’t approved.
“Tyler.”
He jerked upright. Eyes unfocused. Onion skin still on his cheek. He looked at Meg and blinked three times, and for a second he looked exactly like he had at fifteen when she’d caught him asleep in front of the TV at two AM on a school night.
“I’m resting my eyes,” he said.
“You’re drooling on food preparation surfaces.” Meg peeled the onion skin off his cheek. “When did you eat last?”
“I had some Canadian bacon.”
“A burned batch?”
“The inside was?—”
“If you say ‘the inside was fine,’ I am going to call Margo.”
Tyler closed his mouth.
The front door opened. Anna came in carrying a produce box and looking like she’d been awake for a calendar year. The shadows under her eyes matched Tyler’s. Her hair was pulled back in something that had probably started as a knot andevolved into a different kind of knot. She stopped when she saw Meg at the counter.
“Meg. What are you doing here?”
“My meeting canceled. I came home early.” Meg folded her arms. “How long has this been going on?”
