Beach Trip by Cathy Holton

she said, pointing at a photo of a bride and her much-older groom, “didn’t we go to school with that guy?”
    Mel leaned over and peered at the photo. “Oh yeah,” she said “Bart. Sara used to date him.”
    “I never dated a Bart,” Sara said.
    “Sure you did.”
    “Well, okay, maybe once.” She shuddered at the memory, and Lola smiled brightly and said, “Sara’s never loved anyone but Tom.”
    There was a moment of silence, broken only by the gurgling of the coffee pot in the kitchen. Annie picked up the magazine and peered at the photograph. “Wow,” she said, holding it to Mel, “he must have robbed the cradle. She looks twenty years younger.”
    “Trophy wife,” Mel said. “I hope he drops dead of a heart attack on his honeymoon. It would serve him right.”
    Annie swiveled her head around to Mel. “As I recall, you like younger men yourself. What was the name of that bartender in London, the one with the curly hair?”
    “Let’s not go there,” Mel said.
    “Oh, let’s do,” Sara said. “I don’t think I’ve heard that story.”
    “Well, I think it’s sweet,” Lola said, obviously not following the conversation. “I think it’s sweet that Sara’s still in love with her own husband.” She tilted her head and gazed pensively at the TV. From time to time an air of melancholy drifted across her face, seeping through the cracks of her happy facade like smoke.
    “Lola, you’re a hopeless romantic,” Annie said.
    “Am I?” She seemed surprised by this.
    Mel looked up and then went back to glancing at the magazine.
    “Besides,” Sara said to Mel, trying to change the subject. “As I recall, it was you who had the thing for Bart.”
    “I never had a thing for him. I just slept with him.”
    “Yes, I remember.”
    Mel closed the magazine abruptly. She sat very still, watching Sara. “Do you really want to stroll down memory lane? Do you really want to go there?”
    “I’ll stroll if you will,” Sara said.
    “I thought we were talking about Bart and his child bride,” Annie said nervously.
    “We are,” Mel said quietly. Her eyes were brown and steady.
    Sara colored and turned her face to the TV. Outside the windows a gull hung motionless, riding the currents. Lola held a pillow against her chest as if she was cradling a child. Through the windows behind her the sea shimmered, a long line of whitecapped waves.
    Annie took the alumni magazine from Mel and tossed it on the table. “If we’re going down to the Beach Club pool, we’d better get going,” she said, rising. “If we wait any longer all the good chairs will be taken.”
    As children, Sara and Mel had been as different as two girls could be. Howard’s Mill in the 1960s and ’70s was a small but prosperous village of twenty-five thousand people clustered along the banks of the Tennessee River. Sara’s father taught history out at the high school, and they lived in a modest three-bedroom brick ranch house in a neighborhood of other modest three-bedroom brick ranch houses. Sara had two younger brothers and a pretty mother who stayed home to cook and clean just like June Cleaver, only on a tighter budget.
    Mel’s father owned the town’s only car dealership, and she lived out from town in a big columned house with a boot-shaped swimming pool out back. Mel’s mother, Juanita, was Leland Barclay’s second wife and was rumored to have been his housekeeper and, as if that wasn’t scandalous enough, Mel’s older half-brother, Junior, was the town’s first heroin addict. He had dropped out of high school and gone out to Haight-Ashbury for the Summer of Love, where he took Timothy Leary’s advice to “Turn On, Tune In, and Drop Out” to heart. He was eleven years older than Mel, and by the time she was twelve he was back home in Howard’s Mill living in the pool house, working in Leland’s Ford dealership, and trying unsuccessfully to go straight. Mel and Sara used to go out to the pool house to find him sleeping