Margo laughed. “Sounds like your brother’s habit of naming animals after family members is not new.”
The next frame she already knew. The Laguna newsstand from the early eighties, Bernie in an apron in front of it, holding a stack of papers. KLEIN’S NEWSSTAND on the awning above him.
“I remember that awning,” she said.
“You remember Tyler driving into it?”
“Tyler was sixteen and had his license for three days.”
“He took out the entire front panel. The newspaper rack. And a sandwich board I’d had since 1978.” Bernie looked at the photograph. “You made him come back the next day with lumber and nails and rebuild the rack himself.”
“He needed to learn consequences.”
“He built the worst newspaper rack in the history of Laguna Beach. It leaned eleven degrees to the left. Papers fell out every time someone opened it.”
“But he built it.”
“He built it.” Bernie touched the frame. “I kept that rack for six years. Customers thought the lean was intentional. An artistic statement.”
“Tyler’s first artistic statement.”
“Unintentional. Which is the best kind.”
The last frame on the wall was a photograph Margo hadn’t looked at closely before. Two men at a table—outside, somewhere bright, a striped umbrella in the background. One was Bernie, younger, thinner, his hair still dark. The other was a man Margo recognized from a place so deep in her memory that seeing him here, in Bernie’s hallway, made her hands go still at her sides.
“That’s Richard,” she said.
“Seventy-seven. We’d gone to the track in Del Mar. He bet on a horse called Kitchen Sink because he said any horse with that name had a sense of humor. It came in fourth.”
“That sounds like Richard.”
“He was a terrible gambler and a good friend.” Bernie looked at the photograph. “We used to eat lunch at the newsstand on Fridays. He’d bring sandwiches from the Shack and we’d sit on the step and argue about baseball.”
“He never told me that.”
“Men don’t tell their wives about lunch.”
Margo looked at Richard’s face in the photograph. Young, laughing, alive. The man who’d found the first sand dollar and put it above the door. The man who’d called her “always the artist” when she rearranged the shells to match the constellations. The man who’d died too young and left her with the Shack and two children and a life she’d built out of grilled cheese and stubbornness.
“I’m glad you were friends,” she said.
Bernie nodded. “Forty years. Until he died.”
“And then you kept coming to the Shack.”
“Every day.”
Margo looked at him. Bernie looked at the photograph of Richard.
They stood in the hallway. The photos on the wall. The afternoon light from the kitchen behind them. Richard at the track with his friend, laughing about a horse called Kitchen Sink.
“Why didn’t you ever marry?” Margo said.
He looked at her. Then at the photograph of Richard.
“Never found a reason to stop coming to the Shack,” he said.
Margo pressed her lips together. The hallway was narrow and they were standing close and the light was behind them andRichard was laughing about a horse at the track and Bernie was looking at her.
