The Summer Girls Read Free Page B

sky, she felt ashamed. She didn’t deserve a warm welcome. She’d visited a handful of times in the past eighteen years—two funerals, a wedding, and a couple of holidays. She’d made too many excuses. Her cheeks flamed as she realized how selfish it was of her to assume that Mamaw would always be here, waiting for her. She swallowed hard,facing the truth that she likely wouldn’t even have come now except that she was broke and had nowhere else to go.
    Her breath hitched as the front door opened and a woman stepped out onto the porch. She stood in the golden light, straight-backed and regal. In the glow, her wispy white hair created a halo around her head.
    Carson’s eyes filled as she stepped from the car.
    Mamaw lifted her arm in a wave.
    Carson felt the tug of connection as she dragged her suitcase in the gravel toward the porch. As she drew near, Mamaw’s blue eyes shone bright and welcoming. Carson let go of her baggage and ran up the stairs into Mamaw’s open arms. She pressed her cheek against Mamaw’s, was enveloped in her scent, and all at once she was four years old again, motherless and afraid, her arms tight around Mamaw’s waist.
    “Well now,” Mamaw said against her cheek. “You’re home at last. What took you so long?”

CHAPTER TWO

    M arietta Muir hated birthdays. In a few days she was turning eighty years old. She shuddered.
    She stood on the rooftop porch of her beach house overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, which was serene this morning and caressing the shoreline like an old friend. How many summers had she spent in the embrace of that body of water? she wondered. Never enough.
    Marietta’s fingers tapped the porch railing. There was no point in fussing about her birthday now. After all, she herself had made the party arrangements and invited her granddaughters to Sullivan’s Island. But what choice did she have but to make her eightieth birthday an event? How many times over the years had she invited her granddaughters to her island house, and how many times had they replied with excuses? Marietta thought of the letters she’d received, each written in a script as different in personalityand style from the others as the girls themselves, yet each filled with the same excuses. Oh, Mamaw! I’m so sorry! I’d love to come, but . . . The exclamation marks at the ends of the excuses made the apologies feel all the more insincere. How else could she wrangle three recalcitrant young women from all over the country to travel to South Carolina to visit?
    When they were young they loved coming to Sea Breeze. Once adolescence was over, however, they all became too engrossed in their grown-up lives. Dora got married and became, quite frankly, overwhelmed with all the demands of her son and husband. Carson’s ambition had her flying all over the world with her camera. And Harper . . . Who knew? She had slipped away into her mother’s camp, ignoring letters, sending perfunctory thank-you notes for gifts received, never calling. The simple truth was that since the girls had become women, they rarely visited their grandmother.
    Marietta’s fingertips tapped along the porch railing. Well, at least they were all coming this time, even if it was perhaps her subtle promise of loot that had lured them in. The little pirates . . . It was well known that the founding father of the celebrated line of sea captains in the family’s long and illustrious history was, in fact, a pirate. It was never talked about in polite society, but it was quietly understood that the family’s subsequent wealth sprang from the seed of that buccaneer’s bounty.
    Her thinning lips pursed in worry. What she had not mentioned in her letter was that she would also be unearthing family secrets, especially about their father. In her longlife she’d learned that those dark and musty facts always had a way of leaching out and fouling lives. Best to air them out, while she still had time.
    Time—that was at the crux of her