Summer Rental (29 page)

“She is, though,” Julia said. “Sunday night, when we were at Cadillac Jack’s? That whole ‘I’ve got cabin fever, let’s us girls go out on the town?’
All a ploy. She knew he was working there that night. She only dragged me along so it wouldn’t look like she was stalking him. You should have seen Ty’s face when he caught sight of her, Dorie. There were all these hoochie mamas and pretty young things hanging around the bar, hoping he’d give them a glance, but when he saw Ellis, it was like he’d just been handed the biggest lollipop in the store.” She sighed. “So, so, sweet. And of course, Ellis was all nervous and tingly. Dorie, did you know she hasn’t, like, been with anybody since whatsisname?”

“Doesn’t surprise me,” Dorie said. “After whatsisname, I didn’t think she’d ever allow herself to fall for another man.”

“She tried, though,” Julia said. “She was doing online dating! Do you believe that?”

“I know a lot of girls who’ve met their husbands online,” Dorie said. “But I am a little surprised that our Ellis got up the nerve to try it. And that she admitted it to you.”

“I swore not to tell,” Julia said. “But she had to know I’d tell you.”

Dorie patted Julia’s hand. “That’s all right. You’re great at keeping your own secrets, but everybody else’s? Not so much.” She yawned again. “God, I feel like I can never get enough sleep. I’m going to bed. Maybe by tomorrow, things won’t look so bad to Ellis. Maybe this was just a little tiff. Or something. I want this for Ellis.”

Julia cocked her head and studied Dorie. Her strawberry blond hair was gathered into pigtails, and her face was pink from the sun and just a little fuller than usual. It was hard to believe her old friend, who looked barely out of her teens, would be a mother in a few months.

“What do you want for Ellis?” Julia asked. “A good lay? God knows, she’s due. It’s been twelve years or something. Who knows, she might have forgotten how.”

Dorie rolled her eyes. “No, not just a good lay. Stop being such a cynic. Ellis deserves everything. True love, a husband, children, all of it. I don’t care what you say, Julia Capelli, I think that’s what all of us really want. You just think it’s not cool to admit it.”

“I do?”

“Absolutely. You had a great career, and I know you say that’s all over, but it still looks pretty fabulous from where I’m sitting. And you’ve got this great guy, Booker, who loves you and wants to marry you and give you whatever you want. And you’re just too stinkin’ cool to say yes.”

Julia pushed her chair away from the table. “Thanks for the cut-rate analysis, Eudora. Now, let me ask you something. Are you telling me that after all you’ve been through with Stephen, who has essentially left you for another man—while you are carrying his child—that you still believe in that happy-ever-after fairy tale stuff? Can you tell me that, straight-faced, with your own screwed-up family history, you buy that crap?”

Dorie leaned forward, her green eyes glittering with intensity.

“Look at me, Julia. I am telling you, yes. Yes, with absolute sincerity, despite Stephen, despite my parents’ shitty marital history, despite all evidence to the contrary, that yes, I do still buy what you call ‘that crap’. I have to believe Stephen really did love me, and that I loved him, and that we will love this baby I’m carrying. I’m furious and sad about what happened with us, but that doesn’t make me believe that what we had wasn’t real. And it doesn’t make me believe that I won’t find something that real again. I may be looking at being a single mother, at having to m
ove in with my mom again, at working my ass off teaching school for peanuts, but you’re the one I feel sorry for, Julia. Because you do have it all, but you don’t believe it, and you don’t appreciate it. And that’s the saddest thing of all.”

*   *   *

Ellis kicked off the high-heeled sandals and peeled herself out of Julia’s clothes. She climbed into her cupcake pajamas and went into the bathroom, where she brushed her teeth until they bled, and scrubbed off every trace of the face Dorie had so carefully painted on her only a few hours earlier.

“Idiot,” she said, scowling into the mirror at the real Ellis Sullivan.

Back in her bedroom, she got out her cell phone, and erased each and every duplicitous e-mail she’d sent or received from [email protected].

When she was done, she padded back and forth in her bedroom, stopping every so often to glare out the window in the direction
of the garage apartment. The lights were all on, but she couldn’t see Ty. Wait. As she watched, he came down the stairs from the apartment and went over to the Bronco. A moment later, the headlights flashed on, and he was backing out and down the driveway. Well, it was only 9:30, after all. Maybe he had another date. Maybe he was heading over to Cadillac Jack’s, to hook up with one of the willing women who’d flocked around him at the bar there. She didn’t care, Ellis told herself.

Screw him.

But the thing was, she did care. She’d let down her guard, let herself believe somebody like Ty Bazemore could care about her, let herself believe that she could ever be with somebody like him. Which was a joke, right? And she was the punch line.

Eventually, she heard footsteps on the stairs, light ones that must have been Dorie, barefoot, going to bed early. Maybe half an hour later, she heard the soft flapping of leather-soled sandals—those would be Julia’s. She heard their bedroom doors close, thankful that neither of her best friends had knocked on her own door to enquire about her “big date.”

What a laugh.

She tried to read her paperback, but gave up after realizing she’d reread the same chapter three times. Ellis settled back into the pillows on her bed, staring up at the ceiling fan whirring overhead. She studied all the cracks in the plaster ceiling, the watermarks on the faded flowery wallpaper. The air conditioner wedged into the window by the bed wheezed and rattled the window glass in a futile attempt to cool temperatures that were probably in the eighties. The place really was a dump. She’d been so happy to finally be here with her friends, so full of anticipation of the month, she’
d glossed over the truly deplorable condition of Ebbtide.

It had been a grand old house at one time, she could tell. Large, square, high-ceilinged rooms, generous windows with amazing views of the ocean and dunes. Ryan, that guy at the restaurant, had mentioned that the house had belonged to Ty’s family. And that the house was about to be foreclosed on.

Served him right, Ellis tried to tell herself.

But it didn’t wash. Ty had told her he was a day trader,
trying to recoup his losses in the stock market. The reality was that he was trying desperately to keep from losing his family home. Which explained why he rented out the big house and lived in the garage apartment. But it still didn’t explain why he couldn’t have just told her, after their first encounter on the beach, that
he
was Mr. Culpepper.

Not that it mattered. He didn’t owe her anything. She was just another pain-in-the-ass summer renter.

With only two weeks left at the beach.

Screw it, Ellis thought.

She jumped out of bed and padded barefoot down the stairs, and out through the kitchen. She wasn’t worried about encountering Ty Bazemore again, as she had last time. He was out tomcatting around Nags Head.

Ellis found the deck of cards the girls had abandoned on the kitchen table. She dealt herself a hand of solitaire, but gave up on it after fifteen minutes. She couldn’t even beat herself at cards, she thought, slapping the cards down in disgust. It was hot in the kitchen too—suffocating, really. She wet a paper towel and dabbed her forehead and wrists to cool herself down.

A walk on the beach, she decided, might be the only thing to calm herself down. Upstairs, she pulled on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. She picked up the sandals Madison had loaned her only a few hours earlier, and tiptoed upstairs. She paused outside Madison’s door. The light was on, but she heard no movement from inside. She was probably reading. Ellis thought about knocking, about blurting out the truth of her whole, awful evening to a pair of neutral ears, but decided against it. Madison wasn’t the kind of girl who wanted to hear about somebody else’s drama. Instead, Ellis set the
shoes carefully on the floor and left.

She let herself out the kitchen door and sped over the boardwalk and down to the beach. A slight breeze ruffled the sea oats, but otherwise, it was quiet. She left her flip-flops on the soft sand at the base of the steps and hurried out to the water’s edge, not stopping until her toes were licked by the cool wavelets. The moon was still near full, shining brightly on the gleaming silvery beach.

Better. She took a deep breath and started walking on the hard-packed wet sand. She wove her way up the beach, side stepping t
he incoming tide, although occasionally a wave caught her, slapping water up as high as her thigh. She kept walking. The farther south she went, the closer together houses were packed. Lights were on in some of the houses, and occasionally she heard a drift of music, or laughter, but the beach was otherwise deserted.

Ellis stopped occasionally, bent over and picked up a seashell, but dropped the ones that were crushed or broken. At one point, she found a perfect, white, palm-sized sand dollar at the water’s edge. With her fingertip, she traced the indentations in the brittle surface of the shell, trying to remember what Sister Marguerite, her biology teacher back at Our Lady of Angels, had told her the indentations meant. Something about the cross, and the trials of Jesus. Carefully, Ellis tucked the sand dollar into the pocket of her shorts and kept walking.

At some point, the wind picked up, and the waves began crashing harder into the sand, the tide creeping up. Ellis stopped, turned around, and stared up at the cluster of unfamiliar buildings at the edge of the dunes. She shivered and crossed her arms over her chest. Just how far had she come?

Time to turn back. The encroaching tide had driven her closer to the dunes. She tried walking faster, struggling as her feet sank into the powdery soft sand. Each time she came to a set of stairs leading up and over the dunes, she looked up, trying to decide if it was her stairway, leading back to Ebbtide.

But now, in the dark, all the dunes and stairways looked alike. She felt her heart racing, and told herself this was silly. She wasn’t lost. Couldn’t be. After two weeks, she knew her own stretch of beach perfectly. There was a faded, pale yellow catamaran pushed into the beach rosemary and sea oats below Ebbtide. The battered red metal trash barrel bolted to a piling near their house was crisscrossed with painted-on graffiti: “
TIGERS RULE
,
COCKS SUCK
” and “
RENE LOVES BUSTER
.”

And her shoes! Her lime green flip-flops. She’d left them right at the base of the steps. All she had to do was find those flip-flops. She powered onwards, squinting in the dark, looking for the catamaran and the red trash barrel. After another thirty minutes, her calf muscles burned, and she was nearly out of breath. The tide kept inching closer, until it was lapping right at the base of the dunes, and still there were no familiar signs.

Finally, exhausted, she stopped and sat on a worn wooden step. The water swirled around her ankles, and she realized it would have swept her flip-flops away. What should she do? She stepped into the water and craned her neck to look up. These steps led up to a boardwalk similar to the one at Ebbtide, and a house that looked nothing like Ebbtide. Should she climb up, cross the boardwalk, and find her way to the road?

And then what? Walk barefoot on the asphalt for who knows how far, with cars whizzing past and God-knows-who looking at her in her soggy shorts and windblown hair, not to mention the fact that she was braless?

No. She’d stick to the beach. She stood and started trudging. Ten minutes later, she heaved a sigh of relief when she spotted the yellow catamaran. Thank God! She almost felt like kissing the paint-spattered red trash barrel. Almost. Instead, she grabbed the handrail of the staircase and heaved herself up the steep first step.

It wasn’t until she’d reached the top step that she smelled it. Cigar smoke. In the darkness, she saw the glowing red tip first, and then the outline of the beach chair. And Ty Bazemore, beer in hand.

29

He’d been sitting on the deck for at least an hour, smoking a cigar, nursing a Heineken. After the disastrous aborted date, he’d gone up to the garage, shed the jacket and khakis, and tried to forget about it and just get some work done. He’d been reading about a small agribiz company in Kentucky that had recently patented a new kind of grass seed with promising drought-tolerant qualities. But he was glassy-eyed from reading all the technical reports, not to mention the company’s P&L statements.

Ty’s heart wasn’t in it, anyhow. He’d tried to shake off the depression that was settling over him like a thick woolen blanket, but didn’t have much luck. And anyway, he was seriously starving. So he’d jumped in the Bronco and hit the drive-through at the burger joint up the road.

Sometimes, a good greasy cheeseburger and fries were the only antidote to misery. He’d eaten the burger and half the fries, and lit up the last of his good cigars, but he wasn’t feeling that much better about life. He was, however, developing a bad case of heartburn.

The wind had picked up, and the surf was pounding away at the beach below. And suddenly, he looked up, and there she was, climbing up the last stair.

Cinderella was gone, and in her place the old Ellis Sullivan seemed to have washed ashore. The carefully arranged hairdo had been blown all to hell. She was barefoot, her baggy pink shorts were soggy, and her damp T-shirt clung to her body. It was apparent, even from where he sat in the darkness, that she’d been crying.

“Oh,” she said when she spotted him. “It’s you.”

“I live here,” Ty said. He stubbed out the last of his cigar on the top of the beer can. “Are you all right?”

She looked down at her sandy legs, wiped her nose with the sleeve of her T-shirt, and nodded. “I think the tide took my shoes. Other than that, I’m just peachy. I thought you were gone.”