Ellis got herself a glass of orange juice and settled at the kitchen table. “Well, now that Stephen and Willa aren’t coming, I guess I’ll have to redo it, but I still don’t think it’ll be too much trouble, not if everybody pitches in.”
Julia stood and pointed at the first line of the chart with her half-eaten piece of toast. She read aloud in a high-pitched schoolmarm voice: “Monday: Julia cooks breakfast. Dorie does dishes. Willa sweeps sand from floors. Stephen takes out trash. Ellis does laundry.”
Dorie pressed her napkin to her lips to suppress a giggle, but after Ellis glared at her, she looked down innocently at her cereal bowl.
“Ellis, honey,” Julia said, nibbling at her toast. “I’m sorry. It’s ludicrous. It really is. This chart thing … what did they call it back in Girl Scouts?”
“A Kaper chart,” Ellis said quietly.
“Oh yes, Kaper.” Julia nodded. “Excellent for eight-year-olds who have to be reminded to scrub their teeth and gather wood for the campfire. But for the love of God! We’re grown women here. I’m thirty-five years old. I don’t need a chart to tell me to hang up a wet towel.”
Ellis felt her face go pink. “I just thought … well, I thought it might help the month go smoother, if things were sort of organized. Unlike you guys, I’m used to living alone and doing everything myself. I thought the chart would be kind of fun, but obviously I was wrong.” She pulled the whiteboard off the wall and walked rapidly out of the room, her back stiff. A moment later, she was back, but only to pick up her empty juice glass, rinse it out, and place it on the drainboard. Then she stalked out of the room. Dorie and Julia heard the screen door open and then slam shut.
* * *
“Shit.” Julia tossed the toast crust onto her plate. “I’d forgotten how prickly our girl can be. But really, Dorie, it had to be said.”
Dorie picked up both their plates and coffee cups and put them into the sink full of soapy water. “It could have been said nicer. Ellis isn’t like you, Julia. She didn’t grow up fighting and fussing with a bunch of brothers. You really hurt her feelings. And after all the work she did putting this together for all of us. It wouldn’t hurt to go along with her. At least for the first week or so.”
Julia sighed. “Now you’re gonna make me play nice, aren’t you?”
Dorie grinned. “Either that, or you pick up your Tinkertoys and go home.”
Dorie walked out to the front porch, with Julia trailing reluctantly behind. They stopped at the front door and peeked out. The whiteboard was poking out of the top of the trash can at the edge of the driveway, and its creator, Ellis, was sitting on one of the porch chairs, rocking rapidly to and fro, staring off into space. It was a gorgeous summer morning, sunny, not too humid, with banks of high, puffy white clouds overhead.
It was the second day of August, and already they’d started to bicker.
“Come on, Ellis,” Dorie coaxed. “Don’t be mad. Julia didn’t mean anything by it.” She turned and glared at Julia. “Did you, Julia?”
“Julia’s a bitch,” Julia whispered loudly, poking her head out the door. She tiptoed onto the porch and stood behind Ellis’s chair. “And just for that, Julia’s going to have to clean the latrines for the whole month, right, Dorie?”
Dorie sat down on the rocker next to Ellis’s. “Absolutely. And she gets no s’mores. Ever.”
Julia knelt down on the floor on the other side of Ellis. She wrapped her arms around her friend’s waist and laid her head on Ellis’s lap. “Julia’s sorry,” she said in a little tiny mouse voice. “She loves Ellie-Belly and doesn’t ever want to hurt her friend’s feelings.”
Ellis suppressed a smile. She patted Julia’s head and then gave it a sharp thump. “Get up, you nutjob. And don’t think you’re going to get out of cooking my dinner tonight, either.”
Julia groaned. “Thank God. My knees are killing me.” She flopped down into the other rocking chair. “So what should we do today? Our first whole day at the beach? Bike ride? Shopping? Hang gliding over at Jockey’s Ridge? I saw a brochure for the most marvelous-looking school where they actually teach you to hang glide. Remember that time we all went bungee jumping at Myrtle Beach?”
“You and Dorie went bungee jumping,” Ellis corrected. “I couldn’t even watch. I was petrified you’d be killed, and I’d have to explain to your mothers what happened.”
“Nah, you were just scared if we got killed you’d have to go home alone and drive over the Talmadge bridge all by yourself,” Julia taunted.
“True,” Ellis admitted.
“Why don’t we just hang at the beach here?” Dorie asked.
The others turned to look at her in surprise. Dorie had never been one to pass up an adventure.
“What?” she said innocently, catching their meaning. “Why do we have to do anything at all? I’m just enjoying being here, spending time with you guys. Anyway, hang gliding is expensive. You forget, I’m living on a schoolteacher’s salary. A private school too—which doesn’t pay diddly, I might add.”
Ellis jumped to her feet. “Dorie’s right,” she said. “This is perfect beach weather. I’m gonna go put on my suit. If nothing else, maybe the saltwater will heal my flea bites.”
Julia looked at Ellis’s outstretched legs. “Eww! Disgusting! Have you contacted our landlord?”
“Mr. Culpepper? Repeatedly,” Ellis said. “I sent him another e-mail just before I came downstairs. If I don’t hear from him by lunchtime, I’m going to just find an exterminator in the phone book and tell Culpepper I’m going to deduct it from the rest of our rent. And I told him how unhappy we are about the mildew and the ants.”
“And the crappy mattresses, I hope,” Julia added. “I haven’t slept on a bed that lumpy since I went hosteling in Belgium after high school. We’re paying enough rent for this dump that we should at least be able to expect a decent bed.”
“About the rent,” Dorie said hesitantly. “I really think Willa should offer to go ahead and pay her share, even though she did cancel.”
“Did she offer to reimuburse us?” Julia asked.
“Not yet,” Dorie admitted.
“Well, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for her to offer,” Julia said. “Even though good old Arthur is swimming in dough. It wouldn’t occur to darling Willa that the rest of us might be out-of-pocket because of her.”
“I could ask her,” Dorie volunteered. “But you know Willa.”
“We do,” Ellis said briskly. “So we won’t count on her chipping in. If she does, that would be great; if not, no biggie. Like I said, I’m seriously thinking of renegotiating our lease on Ebbtide. The place is totally not what he advertised.”
“I think it’s kinda sweet,” Dorie said. “Did you know, in the daylight, you can look through the cracks in the floorboards in that bathroom under the stairs and see little fiddler crabs crawling around in the sand under the house?”
“Sweet Jesus!” Julia said. “I am never using that bathroom again.”
“Oh, Julia, quit being so damned British,” Dorie said impishly. “You grew up in Savannah, Georgia, just like the rest of us. It’s not like you never saw a fiddler crab before. Or a cockroach or an ant.”
Julia stuck her tongue out at Dorie. “Screw you. I might have grown up living around creepy-crawlies, but that doesn’t mean I want to live with ’em as a grown-up.”
* * *
Ty had been watching the waves off and on since sunrise. They weren’t really that big, but it was a break—he’d been sitting at his computer for the past twenty-four hours, researching cholesterol and statin fighters in every online medical journal he could find. He was no scientist—hell, he’d barely passed high school chemistry—but this new drug Hodarthe had come up with sounded like it could be a winner.
He’d done well the previous day with a start-up company in California that was doing interesting things using recycled glass in commercial concrete applications, so he had some funds, and he was poised to take a position with Hodarthe. But damned if he hadn’t just received another e-mail from Ellis Sullivan.