But she looked at it for a long time before she closed the door and went to bed.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
The first time Stella saw Margo in the sweatshirt, she almost dropped her camera.
The tournament was in the second round and Bernie had been texting Joey bracket updates from his kitchen table all week, which Joey had at some point become resolved to. Stella was at the Shack clearing the prep station when Margo came through the front door—not the kitchen, the front—wearing a navy blue Michigan sweatshirt that was two sizes too big and looked like it had never been worn by anyone before in its life.
Anna saw it first. Her hand stopped on the coffee pot.
Tyler, at the grill, looked up and spotted the sweatshirt. Looked at Stella. His ears went pink.
Joey came around the pass with a ticket in his hand. He stopped. He looked at the sweatshirt. He looked at Margo’s face, which was daring anyone in the room to say a single word about it.
Nobody said a word about it.
Margo walked to the booth where Bernie was sitting with his tablet and his coffee at its two-o’clock angle. She sat down across from him. He looked at the sweatshirt.
“It fits,” he said.
“Bernard, it’s enormous.”
He held his hands out. “I had to guess the size.”
She looked down and tugged at the hem. “You guessed large.”
“I erred on the side of comfort.”
“You erred on the side of a tent.” She pulled the sleeves up past her wrists. “But thank you.”
He smiled and scooted over in the booth, and she slid in beside him.
“Game’s at five,” he said. “I made chili.”
“You did?”
“Don’t sound so surprised. I can make chili.”
“Ah. You can make tea and chili. Your range is expanding.”
“I’m a man of hidden depths.”
Margo picked up the menu she didn’t need and opened it, and Bernie picked up his tablet and went back to his article, and they sat in the booth in the afternoon light like two people who had been doing this forever, which they had, just not from the same side of the counter.
That evening Stella stopped by Bernie’s on her way home from the darkroom. She hadn’t planned to — she’d planned to go straight home and eat whatever Tyler had burned for dinner. But she saw the light on in the living room and the blue glow of the TV through the window and she pulled over.
She didn’t knock. She stood on the sidewalk and looked through the window.
The soundbar was doing its job—she could hear the game from outside, the crowd, the squeak of sneakers on hardwood, a commentator’s voice rising on a fast break. Through the window she could see the couch. Margo on one end in the Michigan sweatshirt, her feet tucked under her. Bernie on the other end, a bowl of something in his lap — the chili, probably. The Sanders jar was on the coffee table between them, lid off, two spoons.
Margo said something Stella couldn’t hear. Bernie laughed. Margo pointed at the screen—pointing the way she pointed at things that mattered, with her whole hand, her whole arm. Bernie shook his head and said something back and Margo turned to him and her mouth was doing the thing Stella had caught in the photograph, the thing Margo didn’t know her face did.
Their hands were on the couch between them. Not quite touching. Then touching. Then his fingers closed around hers and neither of them looked down.
Stella stood on the sidewalk in the dark and watched two people who had spent fifty years three feet apart finally close the distance, and she thought about Wednesdays and hot fudge and a soundbar that cost a hundred and fifty dollars and changed everything.
She didn’t take a photograph. She didn’t even reach for her camera.
She got back in the car and drove home. Tyler was in the kitchen. The toast was burnt.
