Summer Rental Read Free Page A

BlackBerry. After a brief moment of panic, she’d remembered that the bank had repossessed it, along with her former identity. Then, groaning, she settled back into the bed, realizing she really had no pressing need to get up.

    What followed was a week of bereavement. She went two days without bathing, lived in grungy yoga pants and sweatshirts, subsisted on a steady diet of cold cereal and daytime television because she couldn’t bear leaving the town house. Anyway, where would she go? After seven straight days of therapy courtesy of Dr. Phil reruns, she’d forced herself to go out and buy the iPhone. She even bought a perky pink rubber jacket for the thing.
    Since she’d never had any e-mail address other than her BancAtlantic one, she set herself up with a Hotmail account and e-mailed everybody she could think of that she had a new e-mail. There had been the inevitable flurry of replies from friends wanting to know what was up.
    She couldn’t stand the idea of anybody pitying her, especially since she already had enough self-pity to go around, so she made up a peppy reply: “Midlife career adjustment! Time to stop and smell the roses! Details to follow.”
    But there were no details. Not yet. This trip with the girls, which she’d been plotting since April, when they’d all been together down in Savannah for Julia’s mother’s funeral, was the only thing that had kept her going since she’d lost her job. A small, insistent voice in the back of her head kept telling her she should have canceled the trip, should have saved her money, should have put herself right back out there on the job market.
    And she’d replied to that small, insistent voice. Shut. The. Hell. Up.
    It was almost August. No way was she canceling this beach trip.
    So here she was, sitting in a restaurant in Nags Head, North Carolina, and two weeks’ worth of her severance package had already been eaten up. She didn’t care. In the past five years, she’d taken exactly one week of vacation per year, spending Christmas with her mother and aunt at the condo down in Sarasota, listening to her mother bicker with Aunt Claudia.
    In April, Ellis had sat next to Julia in the front row of Blessed Sacrament Church in Savannah. Dorie sat on the other side of Julia, and Willa sat beside Dorie. Booker, Julia’s boyfriend of many years, couldn’t make the trip from London. All four of the girls clutched each other’s hands as a young priest none of them recognized, Father Tranh, said the Mass of Christian Burial for Catherine Donohue Capelli. Later, back at the Capelli house, after all the funeral-goers had finally cleared out, the girls had taken off their funeral dresses, climbed into pajamas, and sprawled out on the double bed in Julia’s old bedroom, just like they’d done all those Friday nights in the old days. Only this time, instead of sipping Pabst Blue Ribbon stolen from Mr. Capelli’s beer fridge in the garage, they’d gotten shit-faced on a pitcher of cosmos.
    And that’s when they’d hatched the plan. No more catching up at funerals. Ellis’s father had died two years earlier, and Mr. Capelli had been gone, what? Six years? No more of that, Julia had declared, waving the empty pitcher in the air.
    “We’re gonna go away together,” she announced. “To the beach. All of us.” She’d looked over at Dorie, the newlywed of the group, and added, meaningfully, “Just us girls.”
    The group had elected Ellis, the planner, the organizer, ruthlessly efficient Ellis, to put the trip together. And that’s what she’d done. And now here she was, jobless, but with the whole month of August to spend in a summer rental with her best friends. Plus Willa, Dorie’s sister, who’d invited herself along.
    She felt positively giddy at the prospect. The amber-hued summers of her girlhood had been the sweetest of her life. She and Dorie and Julia had been inseparable, spending weeks at a time at Julia’s grandmother’s rambling cottage on