“No.”
“You can wait here. Someone will come get you when he’s awake enough for visitors.”
Margo sat back down in the same chair she’d been sitting in for two and a half hours. She picked up the book again and opened it. She read the first sentence three times before she gave up and closed it.
The nurse came at nine-twenty.
“He’s awake. You can come back.”
Margo followed her through the door, down a hall where someone’s TV murmured through a half-open door, into a room that smelled like disinfectant and something faintly metallic underneath.
Bernie was on the bed with the blanket up to his waist, eyes closed. His left leg was wrapped in something white and bulky. His face was the wrong color—paler than usual, but with two patches of pink high on his cheekbones, like a child fresh from sleep.
“Bernard.”
He opened them slowly. Tracking around the room. Finding the ceiling first. Then the curtain. Then her.
When he found her, he smiled—wide, completely undefended, his whole face open. She had never seen him do that. Not in the booth. Not anywhere.
“You’re still here,” he said.
His voice was thick.
“Where else would I be?”
“Don’t know.” The smile didn’t fade. He looked at her like she was something he hadn’t expected to be in the room. “You’re still here.”
“Bernard. They gave you a lot of drugs. Go back to sleep.”
“Okay.”
His eyes closed. The smile stayed for another second. Then his expression softened back into the one she knew—the one he’d worn for decades—and he was asleep.
The monitor beeped steadily. The IV dripped. Outside the room a nurse said something to another nurse about Mr. Patel in 4B.
Margo moved to the chair beside the bed and sat down. The vinyl was cold through her slacks.
The drugs, she thought. The man just had surgery. The man was on enough painkillers to take down a horse. He’d have smiled at the curtain like that if the curtain had been the first thing he’d seen.
The monitor beeped. Bernie breathed. The light through the small high window was the color it had been a minute ago, and the minute before that, and the minute before that. Margo sat in the chair beside her oldest friend and watched him sleep and waited to be told she could go home.
CHAPTER NINE
The Saturday brunch crowd was the people who had given up on brunch everywhere else.
That was Anna’s theory and Stella had been collecting evidence for it since November. The Saturday brunch crowd at the Shack was older, quieter, more loyal. They came at nine. They sat at the same tables. They ordered the same things. They tipped well. Anna said it was because nobody under forty knew what eggs benedict were anymore—they thought brunch was a charcuterie board with a Bloody Mary garnish the size of a child—and so the people who actually wanted eggs benedict had migrated to the Shack and stayed.
Stella thought it was because the Shack was the Shack and people knew where to come.
She was at her prep station in the corner—parsley, lemon wheels, the things that needed small fingers—and her bag was on the chair beside her. She picked up the camera between tasks. Eggs benedict didn’t require small fingers. Lemons did.
Tyler was at the grill. He’d been at it since seven-thirty, the muffins browning on the griddle filling the kitchen with something warm and toasted. Anna was on the floor in the apron Margo had given her in October. Joey manned the counter,calling out tickets in his specific cadence—three syllables for eggs benedict, one for toast, a pause for coffee.
The bell over the door rang.
Margo.
She was in her good wool coat and the cream scarf Eleanor had given her years ago. She had her purse over her shoulder and an empty takeout container in her hand that she’d brought it with her.
