Summer Rental by Mary Kay Andrews Page B

of her eventually, not my brother. So yes, I worry. I guess if I had your life, I wouldn’t have to worry. But I don’t. So I worry a lot. But I’m trying not to let it ruin this month for us.”
    Julia walked on, three or four steps ahead of Ellis, who couldn’t catch up with her friend’s long-legged gait, no matter how hard she tried.
    Ellis was already regretting her outburst. It was tacky to talk about Julia’s money that way. It wasn’t like Julia went around flaunting the fact that she was semirich or the fact that Ellis and Dorie were semipoor.
    When they got to the paved road, Ellis trotted until she was right beside Julia. “You’re mad at me, aren’t you?”

    “Nope,” Julia said. “I’m not going to get mad at you for saying what you’re thinking. At least, I hope I won’t. It’s just that you don’t really have a clue what my life is like.”
    “I don’t?”
    “Not really,” Julia said. They’d reached the open-air ice cream shop. It was a concrete block affair, painted with circus-bright red-and-yellow stripes. A dozen people stood in line in front of them, waiting to order, and the picnic tables, located in the shade of the shop’s overhang, were full. Rock music blared from speakers mounted on wooden columns. Ellis and Julia crowded close together, seeking refuge from the searing ninety-plus heat.
    The song was Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark.” Without thinking, they started swaying their upper bodies to the music.
    “What’s this song remind you of?” Julia asked, reading the chalkboard menu.
    “Me?” Beneath two days’ tan, Ellis blushed.
    “I knew it!” Julia cackled. “Ellis and Mikey Cavanaugh, gettin’ jiggy at my fifteenth-birthday party.”
    “Would you please shut up?” Ellis said. “People can hear you.”
    “So what?” Julia twirled around, juking right and left, humming the song that had been their junior high anthem. “Oh, you were so hot for Mikey Cavanaugh back then. My mother saw you making out with him behind the garage, you know. She was gonna call your mama and tell her, but Daddy told her to mind her own business. Oooh, Ellis, you were a bad little girl back in the day.”
    “Shut up,” Ellis said, going pink with the delicious memory of kissing the cutest boy at the party.
    “Take your order?” The girl behind the counter was Hispanic, and she wore a pained expression and a ridiculous paper cap made to look like an ice cream cone. “Ma’am?” she said loudly, to the oblivious Julia.
    Ellis jostled Julia’s arm. “Come on. It’s your turn.”
    “Oh. Yeah. Let me see. All right. Do you have gelato?”
    “Julia! This is Nags Head, not Rome,” Ellis said. “It’s ice cream, all right?” She leaned into the counter. “She’ll have a single scoop of Rocky Road in a cup, and I’ll have a single coffee chocolate chip in a sugar cone. And two large cups of ice water, please.”
    Before Julia could stop her, Ellis handed over a five-dollar bill, and plunked the change in a tip jar displayed prominently on the counter.
    By mutual agreement, they perched at the end of a picnic bench at a table where a young mother busily spooned ice cream into her sandy toddler’s wailing mouth.
    “I can’t believe you remembered about the Rocky Road, and the cup, no cone, after all these years,” Julia said, dipping the tiny plastic spoon into the ice cream.
    “And I can’t believe you still won’t let me live Mikey Cavanaugh down—twenty years later,” Ellis said. “Did your mother really see us together, or are you just saying that to torture me?”
    “She really did!” Julia nodded vigorously. “You know, until the day she died, she still thought you were a bad influence on me.”
    “Me?” Ellis hooted. “I was the voice of reason. The sane one. If it weren’t for me, you would have gone to jail or hell, long ago.”
    “I know,” Julia said. “Ellis Sullivan, designated driver for life. Mama always thought I was the angel