Summer Rental (2 page)

The man was barefoot, deeply tanned, with unkempt sun-bleached brownish hair. A pair of baggy white boxer briefs hung low on his slim hips. He turned, faced the water, yawned and stretched. And then, while Ellis watched, slack-jawed with amazement and disgust, he quite casually proceeded to pee off the edge of the deck.

He took his own good time about it too. Ellis was rooted to the spot where she stood, her face crimson with embarrassment. When he was finally finished, he stretched and turned. And that’s when he spotted her, a lone figure in hot pink capris and a white T-shirt, her long dark hair blowing in the breeze coming off the beach.

The man gave her a nonchalant smile. His teeth were white and e
ven, and from here she could see the golden stubble of a days-old beard. He waved casually. “Hey,” he called. “How ya doin’?”

Ellis managed a strangled “Hey.” And then she fled down the stairs as fast as her flip-flop-shod feet would take her.

2

Ellis jumped in the Accord and backed out onto the roadway so quickly she nearly mowed over the Ebbtide mailbox. That’s what she got for trespassing, she thought. A bird’s-eye view of a pervert. She checked over her shoulder, back towards that garage apartment, to see if the man would reemerge from the deck to see where she’d gone. But there was no sign of him now.

Hopefully, she thought, he was the owner of that Bronco parked in the garage. Hopefully, he would be checking out of Ebbtide any time now, and he would be long gone by her check-in. Hopefully.

But what was she going to do with herself until then? There was an outlet mall down the road, but it probably didn’t open until ten. And she needed to get groceries, but she didn’t want her refrigerated goods to sit in her hot car for the hours until check-in.

She drove aimlessly down the road until she came to a restaurant whose marquee promised
BREAKFAST SERVED ALL DAY—EVERY DAY
. The parking lot was full. She even spotted a couple of UPS trucks, which, her father had told her years ago, meant the joint must be half decent.

The hostess showed her to a table near the window, and Ellis or
dered scrambled eggs, turkey sausage, and an English muffin. Unbuttered. No coffee. She was wide awake now. Instead, she asked for ice water and grapefruit juice.

When the food came, she ate slowly, willing the time to pass quickly. The restaurant was noisy with small children laughing and running between the tables and the excited chatter of vacationing families and friends. When she’d finished eating, Ellis took out her iPhone to check her e-mails.

The iPhone was new. All those years she’d worked at the bank, the BlackBerry clipped securely to the outside of her pocketbook had been her lifeline to her workday world. It was the first thing she touched every morning, weekends included—even before she brushed her teeth and showered—and it was the last thing she checked at night, before drifting off to sleep.

But two weeks ago, an e-mail on that BlackBerry had summoned her to a meeting with Phyllis K. Stone in human resources. Around the company, Ms. Stone was known as “the grim reaper” or “Stonehenge.” But she’d always been perfectly nice to Ellis on the rare occasions they’d had dealings. On that particular day, Ellis had assumed she was going to be given her new health-care packet. But the packet which Ms. Stone silently slid across her desk to Ellis had nothing to do with deductibles or co-pays. BancAtlantic, her employer for the past eleven years, was, Ms. Stone said blandly, being swallowed
up—no,
acquired
was the exact word—by CityGroup, Inc.

“Obviously, CityGroup has its own marketing department,” Ms. Stone went on. “And because their concern at this time is in cost savings and maximum efficiency as well as financial stability for our stockholders, the executive committee has decided that BancAtlantic’s marketing group will be extraneous.”

Ellis wasn’t sure she understood what Ms. Stone was saying. “Extraneous? Does that mean I’ll be transferred over to the CityGroup side?”

Ms. Stone slid the packet a millimeter closer to Ellis. “I’m afraid not.”

Ellis felt her mouth go dry and her palms begin to sweat. She liked her job, liked the people she worked with, loved the lifestyle it afforded her: the town house in a good neighborhood, business travel with a generous expense account, a new car every three years. “Then,” she said, her voice quavering
a little, “I’ll be offered another position within the bank? I mean, it’s not like I was born into marketing. My degree is in finance, and before I joined BancAtlantic…”

Ms. Stone’s lips pursed slightly. Her fuchsia lipstick had feathered into the deep creases in her upper lip. She had a mustache too. Ellis wondered why she didn’t wax it, or at least get it bleached.

Now Ms. Stone was tapping the file folder again. It had a glossy photograph of BancAtlantic’s granite-and-chrome headquarters building on it, and the words
TRANSITIONS FOR TOMORROW
were superimposed across the photo.

There was a clattering outside the window of Ms. Stone’s seventh-floor office. Ellis looked up and saw a window-washing apparatus glide slowly past. But the men on the apparatus were not window washers. They wore dark jumpsuits, and they were wrestling with a huge chrome logo, consisting of eight-foot-high letters: CG, in flowing script.

It occurred to Ellis that the bank’s new owners were not waiting until tomorrow for transitions.

“This is your separation package,” Ms. Stone said quietly. “You’ll find it’s quite generous. You’ll have your pension, of course. Your buyout will give you two weeks’ salary for every year of your service with the institution.”

“Institution?” Ellis said dully.

“BancAtlantic,” Ms. Stone reminded her. “Although,” she said, glancing down at the wristwatch strapped to her unnaturally narrow wrist, “as of three minutes ago, BancAtlantic ceased to exist. We’re CityGroup now. It’s an exciting time, isn’t it?”

Somehow, Ellis thought, she would not have chosen “exciting” as the adjective to describe this moment. She finally reached over and picked up the file folder which Ms. Stone had been inching towards her. She rifled through the contents. It contained legal forms and memos, and just looking at the fine print of the documents made a vein in her forehead throb. She had to get back to her office, read the documents, and try to process everything.

She stood up. “How long?” she asked. “I’ve got a big project I’ve been working on, and the report should be done by next week.”

Ms. Stone blinked. Ellis could have sworn she hadn’t seen the woman blink before. Ever.

“Oh,” Ms. Stone said. “I thought you understood. Your termination is immediate.”

“Like, right now?”

“I’m afraid so,” Ms. Stone said, holding out her hand, palm up, expectantly.

Ellis Sullivan was not normally a woman given to sarcasm. But somehow, the occasion seemed to cry out for … something.

“What?” Ellis said hotly. “It’s not enough you just
fired
me? You took my job, my career, eleven years of my life? And for that I get, what? Twenty-two weeks of pay? Are you
freakin
’ kidding me? What do you want now, lady? A kidney? My spleen maybe?”

Ms. Stone’s mustachioed upper lip twitched. “That’s entirely uncalled for,” she said, her voice tight. “This is purely a professional business decision made by the executive committee. Please don’t try to make it personal.”

“Not personal?” Ellis cried, fighting back tears.

“Not in the least,” Ms. Stone said. She stood up now. She was a good six inches shorter than Ellis. She was holding out her hand again. “I’m going to have to ask for your employee security badge.”

Ellis ripped the laminated badge from the beaded silk cord that hung around her neck, and flung it right in Ms. Stone’s face. The woman blinked again, and then ducked, but the badge glanced off her chin before falling onto the desktop.

“The cord’s mine,” Ellis said. “It’s not company property.”

“Fine,” Ms. Stone said. “Understood. And now I’ll need your BlackBerry. The company’s BlackBerry, that is.”

Ellis winced. “I don’t have it with me,” she admitted. “It’s in my office. I’ll drop it off here after I clean out my desk.”

Ms. Stone smirked. “Your desk has already been cleaned out.” She crossed to the door and opened it. A security guard in an unfamiliar charcoal gray uniform stood in the hallway, clutching a large cardboard c
arton. Sticking out of the top of the carton was a goofy red-plush stuffed bear wearing a T-shirt with the BancAtlantic logo stitched in green script. Ellis had won the bear two years ago at the department’s Christmas party. Her Louis Vuitton pocketbook, the one she’d splurged on after her last promotion, was draped across the security guard’s arm.

Ms. Stone jerked her head in the direction of the pocketbook. Ellis took it from the guard, reached inside, and unclipped the BlackBerry.

Ms. Stone ducked, but all the fight had suddenly drained from Ellis. She put the BlackBerry on the edge of the desk, turned and followed the waiting security guard down the hall and into the elevator.

There she held out her arms for the carton. “I can take it from here. Don’t worry. I won’t come running back upstairs with an Uzi or anything.”

The guard shrugged. “Sorry. I’ve gotta escort you all the way out of the building. It’s policy.”

She punched the “B” button on the control panel, and they rode the elevator down to the basement parking garage in silence. The guard followed her to the Accord. She opened the trunk and he put the carton inside it, handing her a slip of paper that had been lying on top of the contents.

“It’s an inventory of everything from your office,” he said apologetically. “If you could just initial it, you know?”

She scrawled her initials at the bottom of the page without even looking at the list and handed it back to him.

He nodded. “This really sucks, man. I hate this part.”

“Not your first termination of the day?”

“You’re my eleventh,” he said gloomily. “After lunch, we’ve got commercial loan. The whole stinkin’ department.”

Ellis nodded. It was no consolation to know that the rest of her company was being disassembled and discarded, one department at a time. “See ya,” she said, knowing she wouldn’t.

She hadn’t known what to do with herself for the first two days after what she’d come to think of as T-day. The first morning, she’d gotten up at her usual 6
A
.
M
. and groped in the dark for her BlackBerry. After a brief mome
nt of panic, she’d remembered that the bank had repossessed it, along with her former identity. Then, groaning, she settled back into the bed, realizing she really had no pressing need to get up.

What followed was a week of bereavement. She went two days without bathing, lived in grungy yoga pants and sweatshirts, subsisted on a steady diet of cold cereal and daytime television because she couldn’t bear leaving the town house. Anyway, where would she go? After seven straight days of therapy courtesy of Dr. Phil reruns, she’d forced herself to go out and buy the iPhone. She even bought a perky pink rubber jacket for the thing.

Since she’d never had any e-mail address other than her BancAtlantic one, she set herself up with a Hotmail account and e-mailed everybody she could think of that she had a new e-mail. There had been the inevitable flurry of replies from friends wanting to know what was up.

She couldn’t stand the idea of anybody pitying her, especially since she already had enough self-pity to go around, so she made up a peppy reply: “Midlife career adjustment! Time to stop and smell the roses! Details to follow.”

But there were no details. Not yet. This trip with the girls, which she’d been plotting since April, when they’d all been together down in Savannah for Julia’s mother’s funeral, was the only thing that had kept her going since she’d lost her job. A small, insistent voice in the back of her head kept telling her she should have canceled the trip, should have saved her money, should have put herself right back out there on the job market.

And she’d replied to that small, insistent voice. Shut. The. Hell. Up.

It was almost August. No way was she canceling this beach trip.

So here she was, sitting in a restaurant in Nags Head, North Carolina, and two weeks’ worth of her severance package had already been eaten up. She didn’t care. In the past five years, she’d taken exactly one week of vacation per year, spending Christmas with her mother and aunt at the condo down in Sarasota, listening to her mother bicker with Aunt Claudia.

In April, Ellis had sat next to Julia in the front row of Blessed Sacrament Church in Savannah. Dorie sat on the other side of Julia, and Willa sat beside Dorie. Booker, Julia’s boyfriend of many years, couldn’t make the trip from London. All four of the girls clutched each other’s hands as a young pr
iest none of them recognized, Father Tranh, said the Mass of Christian Burial for Catherine Donohue Capelli. Later, back at the Capelli house, after all the funeral-goers had finally cleared out, the girls had taken off their funeral dresses, climbed into pajamas, and sprawled out on the double bed in Julia’s old bedroom, just like they’d done all those Friday nights in the old days. Only this time, instead of sipping Pabst Blue Ribbon stolen from Mr. Capelli’s beer fridge in the garage, they’d gotten shit-faced on a pitcher of cosmos.

And that’s when they’d hatched the plan. No more catching up at funerals. Ellis’s father had died two years earlier, and Mr. Capelli had been gone, what? Six years? No more of that, Julia had declared, waving the empty pitcher in the air.

“We’re gonna go away together,” she announced. “To the beach. All of us.” She’d looked over at Dorie, the newlywed of the group, and added, meaningfully, “Just us girls.”

The group had elected Ellis, the planner, the organizer, ruthlessly efficient Ellis, to put the trip together. And that’s what she’d done. And now here she was, jobless, but with the whole month of August to spend in a summer rental with her best friends. Plus Willa, Dorie’s sister, who’d invited herself along.

She felt positively giddy at the prospect. The amber-hued summers of her girlhood had been the sweetest of her life. She and Dorie and Julia had been inseparable, spending weeks at a time at Julia’s grandmother’s rambling cottage on Tybee Island, lazing around the beach during the day, spending hours getting ready to go out in the evenings.