Summer Rental by Mary Kay Andrews Page A

she’d be happy to pay for both their shares. Of course, she’d never mentioned the offer again.
    She shouldn’t have come, Dorie thought glumly. When Willahad canceled, she should have stayed home too. She had no business spending all this money for a month at the beach. Especially now.
    The waitress came over, and the woman next to her ordered a club sandwich and an iced tea. Dorie’s stomach growled. Suddenly she felt she would kill for a club sandwich. Even though she’d had a grilled-cheese sandwich for lunch back at the house, not to mention a mound of potato chips.
    Dorie turned back to her magazine and tried to concentrate on an article offering “Ten Tips to Save Money Now.” The article was a joke, advising readers to cut corners by giving up their Starbucks and doing their own nails. Dorie didn’t go to Starbucks. And she hadn’t had a professional manicure in years.
    A few moments later, the waitress was back with the woman’s food. “Can I get you anything else?” she heard the waitress ask.
    “Um, well,” the blond woman said, her voice low. “I’m looking for a motel room around here. Nothing fancy. It doesn’t have to be on the beach or anything. Just something clean and cheap, maybe with a little kitchenette. Would you have any suggestions?”
    “Cheap?” the waitress laughed. “Honey, this is high season at Nags Head. I guess that would depend on what you call cheap. My cousin and her kids stayed at a little place over on the inlet. Joint didn’t even have a pool. And they had to give close to two hundred bucks a night.”
    “Oh.” The blonde’s voice sounded tired, defeated even.
    “You might want to drive on down the road, check someplace like Elizabeth City. I think they got a Motel 6 over there.”
    “Thanks,” the blonde said. The waitress drifted away.
    “Excuse me.”
    Dorie looked up from her magazine.
    “Could you pass the pepper, please?” Maryn pointed at the pepper shaker directly in front of Dorie.
    “Here you go,” Dorie said, sliding the shaker over.
    Maryn deconstructed her club sandwich, carefully removing each layer of bread, and with a knife, scraping off the excess mayonnaise before sprinkling the thin slices of bloodred tomato with an avalanche of pepper.
    She caught Dorie watching her with interest. “I wish, just once, they’d ask before slathering mayo all over everything,” she said.

    “I know,” Dorie agreed. “I’m the same way with mustard. A little goes a long way, if you ask me. But that sure is a pretty tomato.”
    “Um-hmm,” the blonde said, restacking her sandwich. “We don’t get tomatoes this nice until really late in the season back home. But there’s nothing like a Jersey tomato.”
    Dorie laughed. “You haven’t tasted one out of my daddy’s garden. He grows these huge ones, he calls ’em Mortgage Lifters, I could eat ’em ’til I’m sick.”
    “Are you from around here?” the blonde asked.
    “Nope,” Dorie said. “I’m from Savannah, Georgia. How ’bout you?”
    “Jersey,” Maryn said, deliberately vague. She took a delicate bite of her sandwich and dabbed with her napkin at a bit of mayo on her lip.
    “My friends and I are here for the whole month,” Dorie volunteered.
    “Oh?” the blonde put the sandwich down. “At a motel? Isn’t that pretty expensive?”
    “We’ve got a house,” Dorie said proudly. “Right on the beach. There are three of us, and we share expenses, so it works out to be way cheaper than a motel. Of course,” she added ruefully, “it’s more expensive than we’d planned, because my sister canceled on us at the last minute.”
    “A house,” Maryn said thoughtfully. “How do you go about finding something like that?”
    Dorie laughed. “Ellis, one of my girlfriends? She’s a planning freak. She put this whole trip together. I think she found it on VRBO. Or maybe Craigslist.”
    “VRBO?”
    “Vacation Rentals by Owner. It’s like an international website for rental houses