by Cathy Holton
“Would you like me to wait?” he asked.
“No. Thank you.” She knew Michael would return later, drunk, and there’d be another row and she didn’t want Will to see it. She was embarrassed suddenly that he’d already seen so much of their dysfunctional relationship.
“All right. Good night.” He touched her briefly on the arm and a faint creep of color appeared along his brow. Ava realized then that he had a crush on her.
“Good night,” she said.
She never told Michael how she’d gotten home and he had never asked, but a few weeks later he mentioned rather casually that Will Fraser was engaged to a girl he’d gone to boarding school with. After that there was a wariness between Will and Ava whenever they met, something that Ava noted at first with a mild tinge of regret and later didn’t notice at all. By the time Will and Michael graduated a year later, the two had drifted apart and Ava rarely saw Will.
She saw him briefly at graduation. He was standing on the lawn among a small knot of friends and family. He’d grown very thin and pale and when she remarked on this to Michael he smiled unpleasantly and said it had something to do with the girlfriend. A broken engagement or something like that.
“You women are all alike,” Michael said in a crass attempt at humor. “You’re all pains in the asses.”
“You’ve got spinach in your teeth,” Ava said, and while he hurried off to check, she strolled over to congratulate Will.
He smiled when he saw her and introduced her to his family. His parents had died in a car accident when he was a child, and he’d been raised by two great-aunts, Fanny and Josephine. They smiled politely at Ava. They were both elegantly dressed, with pale skin and clear gray eyes. Very attractive, both of them, although they must have been in their seventies. The smaller one, Fanny, giggled and took Ava’s arm.
“So you’re Ava,” she said, blushing and then giggling again. She wore a silk dress tightly belted around her narrow waist and a short little jacket.
Josephine, the taller one, let her eyes flicker coolly over Ava. “Goodness, Fanny, let her go.” She was dressed in a gray suit that matched her eyes and she seemed rather reserved, like Will, only in him this reserve came across as shyness and in her it seemed cold and distant. “You’ll have to excuse my sister,” she said to Ava. Sistuh. “As you can see, she’s never met a stranger.”
It was an odd thing to say and yet spoken in that beautiful accent it sounded like music.
“What lovely hair you have,” Fanny said.
Ava smiled. “Thank you.” It was her best feature and she was inordinately proud of it. She’d left it down that day and it fell in red gold waves around her shoulders.
“Aren’t you chilly?” Josephine asked, noting her sleeveless dress.
Ava laughed. “After Chicago, this is nothing,” she said.
“So you’re from Chicago?”
“Pretty much.”
“Ah,” Josephine said in a tone that could have indicated surprise or disapproval or resignation.
A faint bloom of color appeared on Will’s pale cheeks. He raised his head and looked around anxiously. “What’s happened to Uncle Maitland?” he said.
…
Somewhere south of Owensboro the landscape changed, became more rolling and green. Great clouds of yellow pollen hung in the air. The light in Chicago had a sharp, clear quality but here it came in at odd angles, filtered by tall trees and masses of greenery lining the roadway.
They had thrown her a going away party at work, a Deliverance theme party, complete with dueling banjos and white trash martinis. Colleen, drunk, had stood up and given a nice little speech, ending with the warning, “And whatever you do, don’t get off the expressway! For Christ’s sake, stay on the expressway.” Everyone at work thought of the south as a place of hillbillies and moonshine, and Ava had to admit (although only to herself) that she felt the same way. Perhaps this was why she had gotten off the expressway just north of Louisville, and, buying a map, proceeded to drive bravely along curving picturesque county roads past small-frame farmhouses and tall-steepled churches and mobile homes with elaborately attached decks and discarded appliances rusting in the yards.
Beside her, buckled safely into the passenger seat, Clotilde rested quietly in her enameled urn like a genie waiting for someone to come and rub her lamp.
They passed a wide field and a weathered barn with see rock city painted on its sagging roof. There was something insubstantial and aerie about the shimmering light and the varying shades of green, like a landscape from a dream or a long-forgotten fairy tale.
“It’s so green,” Ava said to Clotilde.
A hawk circled lazily above the tree line. Far off in the distance a rim of blue mountains rose into the hazy sky.
The last time Will had called her and invited her to come south, Ava had reverted to old habits: she broke down and told him everything—about her mother, about Jacob, about her job that she detested. She unburdened herself like she once had about Michael, droning on and on while he listened quietly. It was the alcohol, she told herself later, that had made her so garrulous. That and the fact she wasn’t sleeping well.
“You can quit your job and move down here and work on your novel,” he had said when she’d finished, and she’d laughed disparagingly. He had continued in a placid voice as if trying to soothe a worrisome child. “No really. Woodburn is a sleepy little town. Nothing much ever happens around here. There are no distractions and you can stay with Josephine and Fanny. They live in an old house near the town square and you’d have a suite of rooms to yourself, you wouldn’t be disturbed. It’s a large house; I tease them they should turn it into a bed and breakfast one of these days.”
“Do you live with them?”
“No, I live at Longford.”
“Where’s that?”
“The family farm. Out from town. I’d ask you to stay with me but I’m renovating the house and it’s pretty primitive right now.”
“Shouldn’t you ask the aunts before you offer to move me in?”
“Actually, they were the ones who suggested it.”
“Really? Why?”
He had cleared his throat. “Well,” he had said, “they remembered you from that day at Bard, the day I graduated. ‘Your little friend Ava,’ Fanny calls you. ‘The one with the lovely hair.’ I told them you were looking for a quiet place to write your first novel and they said, ‘Oh, tell her to come down here. She can stay with us.’ ”
“That’s very generous of them.”
“You sound surprised.”
“It’s just that I got the feeling the stern aunt, the tall one …”
“Josephine?”
“Yes, Josephine. I got the feeling she didn’t like me.”
“That’s just her way. The Woodburns are Scottish and they have a tendency to be rather reserved.”
“And you’re a Woodburn?”
“Yes. On my mother’s side. My grandmother Celia was Josephine and Fanny’s sister.”
“I can’t just quit my job,” Ava had said. “I don’t have enough money in my checking account to take off and write.”
“It’s free room and board. Think of it as a writing retreat. One of those communes where artists spend the summer.”
Despite her gloomy mood, Ava had been flattered by his enthusiasm. He was kind and considerate, the sort of man she liked to imagine she might one day wind up with.
“I can’t afford to quit my job and start all over again.”
“What do you have to lose?” he had said.
Ahead the road rose slightly, following a low ridge. A line of pink-blossomed trees with fringelike leaves swayed in the breeze. On the other side of the highway trailing vines mounded over distant pines and telephone poles and dangled from utility lines, creating a series of undulating green hills. The whole landscape was lush and alien; Ava had the feeling that any seed tossed haphazardly from the window of a speeding car would take root in the rich soil and blossom to monst
rous proportions.
What do I have to lose? she thought. Nothing. Everything. She turned her head and glanced at the ceramic urn in the seat beside her.
“Isn’t that right, Mother?” she said.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CATHY HOLTON is the author of Revenge of the Kudzu Debutantes and The Secret Lives of the Kudzu Debutantes. She lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Beach Trip is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places,
and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination
or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales,
or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2009 by Cathy Holton
Excerpt from Summer in the South copyright © 2010 by Cathy Holton
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint
of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of
Random House, Inc., New York.
BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks
of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd. and to
Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA), Inc., for permission to use “Sanctuary,”
copyright 1931, renewed © 1959 by Dorothy Parker, and “Observation,” from
The Portable Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker, edited by Marion Meade, copyright 1928,
renewed © 1956 by Dorothy Parker. Used by permission of Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd.
and Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA), Inc.
This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming title Summer in the South by Cathy Holton. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Holton, Cathy.
Beach trip : a novel / Cathy Holton.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-345-51514-8
1. Female friendship—Fiction. 2. Reunions—Fiction. 3. Women college
graduates—Fiction. 4. Outer Banks (N.C.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3608.O494434B43 2009
813’.6—dcc22 2009005527
www.ballantinebooks.com
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