Free Beach Trip by Cathy Holton Page B

at all?”
    “I like Blake all right,” she said, lifting her face to his. “But Yeats! Now there’s a poet.”
    Sara swung around and plodded up the trail, trying to put as much distance as possible between her and them. A faint violet light bathed the eastern sky. Their voices became fainter. If they knew she was leaving them behind, they didn’t seem to care.



Chapter 4

MONDAY
    heir first morning at the beach they awoke to a breakfast of seafood crepes and fresh fruit. April, it seemed, was working her way through culinary school and had a notebook full of recipes she was dying to try out. She disappeared soon after they had gathered around the enormous breakfast bar, and reappeared a short while later dressed in a swimsuit and carrying a towel.
    “Just leave the dishes in the sink,” she told Lola. “I’ll get to them when I get back.”
    “Don’t worry about us,” Lola said. She was standing in a bright slash of sunlight looking sweet and cheerful, her thick-lensed glasses glinting in the sun.
    April went out the French doors on to the deck and they watched her walk along the boardwalk and disappear over the dunes. A few minutes later she reappeared, a tiny figure moving across the wide expanse of beach. Captain Mike, Mel noted, was nowhere to be seen.
    The women took their time eating breakfast, enjoying the opportunityto be lazy. They were all still dressed in their pajamas. Lola wore a pair of red silk pajamas that looked comfortable and expensive, but seemed strangely out of place with her heavy-rimmed glasses. Annie wore a nightgown with matching robe and slippers. Mel had on a camisole and sleep shorts covered in yellow ducks, and Sara wore a pair of sweat pants and a Carolina Law T-shirt.
    “Let’s stay in our jammies all day,” Sara said. “This is the most fun I’ve had in ages.”
    “You don’t get out much, do you,” Mel said.
    The kitchen and breakfast bar overlooked the cavernous great room and when they had finished eating they took their coffee into the great room and sat across from one another on two long sofas positioned on either side of the stone fireplace, Mel and Annie on one sofa and Sara and Lola on the other, their feet stretched out and resting on the big glass coffee table. Beyond the wall of soaring windows overlooking the beach, the Atlantic glittered in the sun. A blue haze hung over the distant horizon.
    Mel looked critically at her long legs stretched out on the table. “I need to get some sun on these bad boys,” she said, turning them this way and that. They were perfect legs and anyone looking at them could see that.
    “Do what I do and go down to one of those places where they spray the tan on,” Annie said, lifting her nightgown so they could see her own heavier, rather splotchy legs.
    Lola picked up a controller and punched a button, and the flat-screen TV slid out from behind a painting on the chimney breast. She scrolled aimlessly through a series of channels, stopping briefly on one of those entertainment shows that spread gossip about Hollywood stars.
    “This show is good,” Sara said.
    Mel picked up a magazine and thumbed through it slowly. “Since when do you have time to sit around watching daytime TV?”
    “I told you I was only working part-time right now.” Adam was settling into his third new school and she’d quit to spend more time with him, but Sara didn’t want to go into all of that. She picked up a magazine too. “Is this the Bedford alumni magazine?”
    “Briggs gets those,” Lola said quickly.
    Sara looked at Mel and Annie. “Do y’all get the alumni magazine?”
    “I get it but I never read it,” Mel said.
    “I don’t get it,” Annie said. “Or if I do, Mitchell throws it away before I see it.”
    “They must have lost my address.” Sara yawned and tossed the magazine on the table, where it opened to the center page, a glossy roundup of Bedford grads, past and present. Annie turned it around with her toes. “Hey,”