Folly Cove by Holly Robinson Page B

Her toenails were a satisfying, shocking orange. “My feet are clean as a whistle. Oh, except for the piss I stepped in when I went barefoot into the airplane bathroom. Some men can’t aim for shit.”
    â€œEw!” Kennedy said, laughing.
    â€œLanguage!” Laura said, though to Elly’s satisfaction, she was grinning.
    â€œWatch yourself, miss, or you will be the ruin of this family,” Elly said, pitching her voice high to imitate their mother.
    This made Laura snort. Kennedy fell all over herself howling. Elly laughed, too, and leaned over the seat to high-five her niece. She’d been right to come home. Her girls needed her to lighten things up in gray old New England.
    Laura wanted Elly to stay at her house, not at the inn. Elly was happy to oblige. “I’m glad I’m staying here,” she said after Laura had sent Kennedy to the den with a handful of cookies and a book. “I wasn’t too enthused about having Mom hover over me and quiz me about my singing career. Or about men. God, she’s probably going to ask me about boyfriends, isn’t she?”
    â€œProbably,” Laura said. “I think the older Mom gets, the fewer filters she has.”
    â€œI suppose we’ll be like that.”
    â€œI already am,” Laura said. “It’s like my thoughts roll straight out of my head onto my tongue and fall out of my mouth. I want to slap myself sometimes.”
    They were sitting at the kitchen table with cups of coffee. Jake wouldn’tbe home from work for at least another few hours, Laura said. “We never eat dinner before nine or ten,” she warned.
    â€œThat’s fine. It’s three hours earlier my time, remember.” Elly glanced out the window at the yard and the stables beyond it. Behind the stables was the pasture, hemmed by the thick woods of Dogtown. Their father used to take them hiking in Dogtown as children when the inn was busy, “to keep you out of your mother’s hair.”
    Dad loved Dogtown, an area of about thirty-six hundred acres between Gloucester and the far edge of Rockport. In the mid-1600s, these woods had been the site of the original Commons Settlement, the most prosperous area of Gloucester until after the Revolutionary War.
    After that people began moving out to the coastal areas, but some war widows and other loners remained, using guard dogs to protect them and earning this place its name. She and her sisters used to come here as children, terrifying each other with tales of what corpses might have been tossed into the icy depths of the reservoirs.
    Elly’s favorite hike in Dogtown was what her father called the “blueberry highway,” a narrow path through gnarled blueberry bushes. They’d pick berries until their mouths and hands were stained purple. Elly had loved seeing the old stone walls and cellar holes, and pretending with her sisters that it was still Colonial times.
    She wondered where her father was now, and shivered despite having added a sweater and socks. A few of the trees were already turning orange and gold and red, the leaves trembling against the pewter sky. She’d forgotten about autumn in New England, when everything looked like a high school yearbook page and the temperature fell twenty degrees the minute the sun started going down.
    â€œIs your heat broken or something?” she asked. “It’s freezing in here.”
    â€œWe never put the heat on before October thirty-first,” Laura said. “Do you know how much a tank of oil costs?”
    â€œOh, come on. You’re married to a friggin’
dentist
. I bet he makes bank.”
    â€œJake has dental school loans coming out his ears. You don’t even want to know how much debt we’re carrying.”
    â€œFine. Bring me a blanket, then. I’ll pretend I’m homeless.”
    â€œYou’ve got to be kidding,” Laura said. “It’s sixty-five degrees in