They went back to the kitchen and sat in their chairs.
“Now I want to tell you something,” she said. “The painting. The canvas that’s been on my easel since the night of your knee. I know what it is now.”
“What is it?”
“It’s you.”
He looked at her.
“It’s you in this kitchen. At this table. With the light on the wall behind you and the cards on the corner and the tally on the fridge.” She picked up her mug and held it. “I’ve been staring at a blank canvas for months because I couldn’t see what was in front of me. And now I can.”
Bernie didn’t say anything for a long time. He sat in his chair with the light moving across the kitchen and the photos in the hallway behind him—the brother, the nephew, Walter, the newsstand, Richard at the track.
“When?” he said.
She shrugged. “When I’m ready.”
“Take your time,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
They finished their tea. She gathered the flamingo cards and dealt. Two hands. She won both. She wrote the score on the tally and walked it to the fridge and centered it with the round black magnet.
At the door she stopped.
“Bernard?”
“Yes?”
“Fifty years of sitting in that booth. Every single day. That’s a lot of coffee.”
“It was never about the coffee, Margo.”
She let herself out and walked home in the last of the daylight, and the walk was four blocks and she knew every houseand every tree and every crack in the sidewalk, and she walked through them all feeling like she was seeing them for the first time.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Margo’s garden had string lights.
Stella hadn’t seen them before—they weren’t the Shack’s lights, which Anna had hung and declared temporary in November. These were new. Smaller. Wound through the trellis above the patio table and along the fence line, and someone had hung them with care because they followed the shape of the garden instead of cutting across it.
“Who hung the lights?” Stella said to Tyler as they came through the gate. Lindsey was behind them, carrying a bowl of something covered in foil.
“Not Margo.” Tyler shifted the wine to his other hand. “Margo doesn’t hang string lights.”
“Somebody hung string lights.”
“Somebody did.”
They came around the side of the house and into the garden and the table was set for eleven. Margo’s good plates—the white ones with the thin blue rim that came out for Thanksgiving and birthdays and apparently tonight. Cloth napkins. A centerpiece of lemons in a bowl, which was either decorative or ingredients that hadn’t been put away yet, and with Margo it could be either.
Bernie was at the grill.
Not the Shack grill—a small charcoal grill in the corner of the garden that Stella had never seen used. He had tongs in one hand and a dish towel over his shoulder and he was turning something that smelled like rosemary and lemon and garlic.
“Is that Bernie at the grill?” Tyler said.
“Looks like it,” Stella said.
“At Margo’s house.”
