Summer Rental (45 page)

He turned and stared at Ellis. “Have you heard anything I’ve been telling you tonight? I want you to stay. Right here, with me. In Nags Head.”

“And do what?” the old, practical Ellis asked. “How would I make a living?”

“We could live on love,” Ty said, trying to sound like he meant to be funny, but she could tell he was serious.

“And do what when it comes time to pay the bills?” Ellis asked. She swung her legs around and pressed her knees up against Ty’s. “Your life here is a beautiful dream. You know how to make it work. You live by your wits, day trading, picking up shifts as a bartender, renting out the house in the season. And that works great for you. But it’s not me, Ty. I’ve always had a nine-to-five job. Not the most exciting or glamorous life, but it works for me. I’m a list-maker, a rule-follower.”

“You could find a job here,” Ty said, but he knew a
s soon as the words were out of his mouth that it was a lie. “Maybe not making as much money, but you could find one.”

“Or you could move to Seattle with me and find a job.” Ellis gave him a crooked smile. “It’s a different ocean, but it’s still the coast. Kinda.”

“I could give it a try,” Ty said. “If you wanted me to.”

“What was that you told me on that first awful dinner date? About never having another job in an office?”

“Yeah, well, I was just blowing off steam. I could do it, Ellis, if I had to.”

“That’s the point, Ty. I don’t want you to think you have to. You’d be miserable in an office job. And then I’d be miserable. Did you ever see any of those old Tarzan movies when you were a kid?”

“Huh? How many drinks did you guys have at dinner?”

“No, listen. When I was a little girl, my brother Baylor was obsessed with Tarzan. He read all the Edgar Rice Burroughs books, got my dad to go buy him the videos of the movies—these old black-and-white films from the early forties. We’d watch them Friday nights, which was my parent’s date night. Baylor’s favorite Tarzan was Buster Crabbe, he was a silent movie star. But I loved Johnny Weissmuller. Oh my God, he had a body, running around in that loincloth. I think he’d been an Olympic swimmer. And Jane was Maureen O’Sullivan, so glamorous. My favorite one of those movies was called
Tarzan’s New York Adventure.
I don’t remember all the details, but Boy gets kidnapped and taken to New York, and Tarzan and Jane get on a plane and go after him. And Jane has to civilize Tarzan, you know, to get him prepared for the big city. They go to a tailor and have him fitted for a suit, and he has to ride in a cab, and all this other stuff. And Tarzan, who is this action hero, is just so sad, so out of place in the city.…”

“And you’re saying if I were to move to Seattle to be with you, that I’d be like Tarzan—lost in New York? Ellis, this is Nags Head, North Carolina, not deepest, darkest Africa. And I’m no jungle savage. I have a college degree, two years of law school. I may not enjoy wearing a coat and tie, but I do wear shoes on a semiregular basis…”

Ellis pushed a strand of hair from her forehead. “You know that’s not what I’m getting at. I’m just saying you’ve figured out how you want
to live your life, and you’re doing that. And me dragging you off to Seattle, making you wear a tie…”

“Instead of a loincloth?”

She laughed in spite of herself. “I wouldn’t mind seeing you in a loincloth, now that you mention it. But I just don’t see how we could make it work. I’ve tried it before, with a man who was totally different. It was a disaster. You and I don’t even want the same things.”

“How do you know it would be a disaster this time?” Ty asked. “How do you know what I want? Or what you really want? Are you telling me you want to go back to a job in banking, like you had before?”

“No,” Ellis said. “Not exactly.”

“And Seattle? That’s the city of your dreams?”

“No!” Ellis said. “I’ve never even been to Seattle. But I’ve got to be practical. This job offer means something to me, Ty. It means I haven’t been wasting the last fifteen years of my life. It means somebody values what I do. I’ll have a profession, and a title at the bank. And yes, a paycheck and benefits and all those boring middle-class trappings you hate. So yes, I admit, I might have to compromise, move to a new city, go back into banking.”

“You’ll compromise for a crappy job you don’t even really want, but not on taking a chance that we could make things work together?” Ty pushed his chair back and away from hers.

“I’ve known you for less than a month,” Ellis said, her voice pleading. He stood at the deck railing, staring off at the water.

“A month is enough for me to know how I feel about you,” Ty said, his back to her. “A week was enough. You were such a pain in the ass with those e-mails of yours, pestering me to get into this house. And then I saw you come bopping up the driveway, in your little pink shorts … I knew I was a goner.”

She got up and stood beside him. The wind had picked up, and it was whipping her hair into her face. “I could come back out here, weekends, like that. Banks have lots of holidays. Columbus Day is what, six weeks away? You could come out there and visit. A long-distance relationship isn’t ideal, but lots of people do it. Look at Booker and Julia.”

“Booker and Julia are getting married. She’s moving to DC to be with him, isn’t that what you told me?”

Ellis bit her lip and wished she hadn’t brought it up. “They’ve been together for years and years. It’s different with us, Ty. You know it is.”

He looked at her steadily, at her dark hair blowing in the wind. She kept trying to brush it away from her face, control it. Maybe she was right, maybe he didn’t have any right to ask her to believe in him, to believe in them. But shouldn’t she believe in them too?

“Time’s got nothing to do with it,” he said finally. “Kendra and me? We’d known each other since grade school. Started dating in eighth grade. I thought I knew everything about her. She sure as hell knew everything about me, or so she thought.”

The wind had picked up more, he turned his back to the railing, and now he was looking at the apartment, thinking about his last night here, and how he wanted it to be. Through the kitchen window, he could see the bottle of wine he’d bought, sitting on the counter. And he was thinking about how he’d been planning this evening ever since Joe broke the news that they’d tear the place down come morning. Things were not going according to plan.

“Kendra and I were together, from the time we were, like, fourteen, ’til we split up in law school,” Ty said. “This apartment? I shouldn’t tell you this, but for some reason, I feel like I have to. We’d sneak over here in high school, you know, late at night. It was never locked.”

He saw the look of mild shock on Ellis’s face. “We were kids, still in high school. Kendra loved breaking the rules, loved the idea of pushing her daddy’s buttons. He’d have had me arrested if he knew what we were up to over here.”

“I don’t want to hear this,” Ellis said, stony faced. “I realize it was a long time ago, but I don’t want to hear about you sleeping with your girlfriend in the same place where we’ve been sleeping.”

“Not the same bed,” Ty said hastily. “God no. There wasn’t even a bed here, back then. Just an air mattress.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Ellis demanded. “You want to hurt me, because I’m being realistic? Because I won’t just throw my life away and
move in down here with you? Move in where? You won’t even have a place to live after tomorrow.”

“I’ve got a little cottage rented less than half a mile down the Beach Road,” Ty said. “Pelican Cottage. It sits right on the dunes. It’s rustic, but you’d love it. And then, when the movie people are gone, we could come right back to Ebbtide.”

“Not the point,” Ellis said.

“I’m telling you all this,” Ty said, “because I have a point to make. And that point is, it doesn’t matter how long you’ve known somebody. People change. Or you don’t really know them as well as you thought you did in the first place. You told me you made a huge mistake marrying a man you’d only known a short time. Well, I made a huge mistake too. Only I’d known Kendra most of my life. And it didn’t make any difference, because we ended up just as miserable as you were. We were kids back then, young and dumb. Not like now.”

Ellis was looking at the apartment too. It was tiny, cramped, barely two rooms. She’d fantasized about staying here with Ty, waking up with him, about moonlight showers and beach walks at sunrise. But it wasn’t until this moment that she realized all her fantasies were based on the one sun-splashed idyllic summer month they’d spent together. Summer.

September was a handful of days away. And then summer would be gone.

“You’re right,” she told Ty. “We’re not kids anymore. We’re old enough to recognize that some things are just … of the moment. Ephemeral. Like the shells you pick up at the beach. They’re so shiny and perfect and pearlescent when you pick them up, and then when you get them back home, they’re all bleached out and lifeless. I’m afraid that’s what we’d be like. Three months from now, six months from now, wondering what we saw in each other…”

Ty’s expression darkened. “Really, Ellis? That’s what I am to you? Just some hot guy you picked up at the beach? A fling?”

“No!” Ellis cried. “You know that’s not what I meant.”

“Sure you did,” Ty said quietly.

“You’re making this harder than it has to be,” Ellis pleaded.

He looked at her calmly. “Do you love me?”

“Yes! But that’s not the point.”

“Do you want to be with me?”

“You know I do. But it’s just not that simple.”

“It’s not that hard,” Ty said. “Not to me. I want to be with you, so I’ll do whatever it takes to make that happen. Apparently you don’t feel the same way.”

Ellis took a step backwards. Ty’s face was cold, impassive. If he could be that calm, so could she. She took a deep breath, and then another, willing herself not to cry or slobber or, God forbid, beg. “Where does that leave us?” she asked finally.

“I think it leaves me living here and you on your way to Seattle,” Ty said. “Alone.”

48

Ellis stared moodily down at her coffee cup. No truths there. Just inky, lukewarm, bitter blackness.

For once, she was glad to have the kitchen all to herself. If she were truthful, she’d have to admit that after a month together, much as she and Dorie and Julia loved one another, they were all probably getting on each other’s nerves.

Madison was wiser than any of them. It was time, Ellis thought, to go home. She was already devising a game plan for packing up: stripping all the beds, running a last load of laundry, disposing of the refrigerator’s contents, loading the car. What she would not think about, under any circumstances, was what she would be leaving behind.

She heard the low rumble of a diesel motor coming from the front of the house and ran to see what it was. A flatbed trailer was parked in the driveway, and a handful of men were waving and directing as a bright yellow bulldozer inched its way down a steel loading ramp.

When the operator had maneuvered the dozer off the ramp, a man
in an orange safety vest and a hard hat ran over, jumped into the cab, and conferred with the driver. A moment later, the hard hat guy was back in the driveway, waving and pointing at the garage—and Ty’s apartment. But there was no sign of Ty. His Bronco was gone, and the garage was empty.

Now Ellis noticed a huge jumble of stuff piled off to the side of the garage—its former contents: a three-legged ping-pong table; a stack of bald tires; a rusty barbecue grill; the skeletons of aluminum lawn chairs; even a small, wooden skiff with a rotted-out hull. And a surfboard. A faded yellow surfboard.

As she watched, the bulldozer lumbered purposefully towards the garage, aiming at the support beam that separated the two parking bays. She closed her eyes, and a moment later, she heard the sickening sound of boards snapping, beams tumbling to the ground, the garage sliding easily, effortlessly to the ground, with a thud she felt as well as heard.

She heard whistles and applause, and when she opened her eyes, a cloud of dust and sand still swirled in the air around the demolished garage.

Ellis felt a hand on her shoulder. She turned and saw Madison standing beside her.

“I saw the trucks coming from my bedroom window,” Madison said. “I came down because I had half an idea you might still be up there,” she jerked her head in the direction of where the apartment had stood, “with Ty.”

They heard the screen door open and slap shut behind them. Julia and Dorie joined them on the porch, barefoot, in their pajamas.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” Julia exclaimed, gaping at the remains of the garage. “I heard that crash and I thought somebody’d dropped a bomb on the place.”

“Wow,” Dorie said. “That didn’t take long.”

“Where’s Ty?” Julia asked. “How was your last night together in the love shack?”

Ellis stuck her hands in the pockets of her shorts. “I don’t know where Ty’s gone. I didn’t spend the night. We … had a fight. Not a fight, per se, but…”

“Oh Jesus,” Julia groaned. “Don’t tell me you guys broke up. Don’t tell me you actually want to take that stupid job at that stupid bank in Seattle.”

“I told Dana I’d get back to her Monday,” Ellis said. “You wouldn’t understand, but this is just too good an offer to pass up. Ty doesn’t understand either. So probably we just weren’t meant to be.”

Dorie gave her a hug. “Oh, Ellie-Belly. I’m so sorry. What happened?”

“Nothing,” Ellis said. “He wants me to stay here, to live on love and peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. It’s sweet, but it won’t work. One of us has to have a job, and benefits … and common sense.”

“Let me guess,” Julia drawled. “That someone would be you.”

“Don’t start,” Ellis warned. “I am not in the mood for relationship advice.”

*   *   *

By noon, the remains of the old garage had been scraped up and loaded onto a dump truck headed for the landfill. More lumber trucks and pickup trucks arrived, and even from the beach, the women could hear the whine of power saws and the sharp bursts of nail guns.

“One more day,” Julia said under her breath, glancing over at Ellis, who’d deliberately set up her beach chair and umbrella several yards away from Dorie, Julia, and Madison. “Our last full day at the beach, and she manages to screw it up for all of us.”