Beach Trip Read Free

guilty for preferring routine and discipline?
    She had once overheard one of the younger moms at her sons’ school refer to her as
that OCD room mother with the two-by-four stuck up her ass.
And this simply because Annie had sent home notes asking that all mothers send in homemade treats for snack time and not store-bought, cellophane-wrapped treats loaded with preservatives and carcinogenic food dyes. Also nothing with more than five grams of sugar per serving. Or peanut oil. Or any kind of tropical fruit. Or nuts.
    You’d have thought she’d asked for the still-beating hearts of their firstborn children for all the furor it caused. After that the other moms would watch her nervously when she came into the school. They called her Q-Tip.
Q-Tip’s in the house
, they’d say, giggling, or
You better run that by Q-Tip before you hand it out.
Although why they called her Q-Tip, Annie was unsure, unless it was because she had short, prematurely white hair and walked with the ramrod-straight posture Southern girls of her generation had been taught to use. Annie was pretty sure the nickname had a lot to do with that woman who’d first called her an
OCD room mother.
    She got even with her. She had her assigned to the calling-for-pledges committee for the annual school fund-raiser.
    Annie finished the second row and started in on the third. Mitchell was home recovering from his fifth kidney stone and she could hear him moving around in the den. The boys had always been sweet when they were sick and she had hovered over them anxiously, but Mitchell’s illnesses irritated her beyond words. Especially the kidney stones. There must be something he was eating or drinking, or not eating or drinking, that was causing them. Annie figured anyone else would have gone through that first kidney stone and then figured out some way to keep from getting another one.
    She sat back on her heels and looked around the gleaming kitchen. The boys were grown and away at college now, and it was just her and Mitchell rambling around in this big old house, but she wouldn’t have traded it for the world. Her dream house. As a girl she’d grown up in a small cottage in East Nashville, long before the area became fashionable with writers, artists, and musicians. On Sunday afternoons she would go for drives in the country with her parents to see the mansions and sprawling estates ofthe country-and-western stars, and pointing with a chubby finger she would say gravely, “I’m gonna have me a house like that one day” Her parents thought it was cute.
    And now here she was. True, the house wasn’t as big as their neighbor, Alan Jackson’s, and they only had fifty acres instead of several hundred, but there was a pool out back and a guest house, and more bedrooms than she and Mitchell and the boys had ever needed. Not that they were as wealthy as Lola and Briggs Furman, of course, but their Cluck-in-a-Bucket chicken franchise had done pretty well. They had stores all over the southeast, a Cluck-in-a-Bucket empire stretching from Miami to Little Rock, Arkansas.
    No, she’d done pretty well in life for an East Nashville girl. And she’d done it by careful planning and by setting her goals out clearly in front of herself. Once she set her sights on something, Annie never wavered. Except for that one transgression her senior year of college, the one she tried never to think about, she had never been a spontaneous person. At twelve she’d been dragged to a Wednesday night fish fry at church and had listened as a blond-haired, blue-eyed fourteen-year-old named Mitchell Stites belted out “Lord, You Are My Fortress in a Time of Trouble.” The following Wednesday night, she was waiting in the car when her parents came out to drive to church. “Why, Anne Louise,” her mother asked in surprise, “have you found religion?”
    “What she’s found,” her father said, winking, “is Preston Stites’s boy.”
    “The one with the harelip?”
    “No. The