The Weekenders

by Mary Kay Andrews

  “No!” Parrish tried to grab hold of the waist of Riley’s shorts, but her friend was too fast. She’d already wriggled all the way through the door.

  “I’m in,” Riley called, her voice muffled by the door. “Let me know if somebody comes, okay?”

  “Get out of there,” Parrish said. “If somebody comes I am not making your bail.”

  * * *

  Parrish crept along the side of the house, watching to see if anybody approached the house from the cul-de-sac. The rain fell softly, and her sandal-clad feet sank into the sandy soil. Hours passed. Mosquitoes swarmed, and she slapped frantically at her bare legs and arms. She had to pee, and she was terrified.

  “Hey!”

  Startled, Parrish whirled around to see Riley standing beside her.

  “You literally just scared the living piss out of me!” Parrish said. “What took you so long?”

  “It was only five minutes,” Riley started. “And it was totally worth it…”

  “Let’s go.” Parrish started around the corner of the house but quickly darted backward. “Hide!” she whispered. “Somebody’s coming. A cart just pulled up around front.”

  They backed quickly away from the rear of the house, squatting behind a huge clump of palmettos. They heard keys jingling, and the front door opening. Five minutes passed. “I’m getting eaten alive by mosquitoes,” Riley whispered.

  “Serves you right,” Parrish whispered back.

  They heard the sound of the back door sliding open, and then a familiar woman’s voice. “Come on Moosey. Come on boy, let’s go make poopeys.”

  Parrish flattened herself to the damp ground, but Riley peered through the palmettos, then did likewise.

  Parrish dared to look up. She could see what she knew were Andrea Payne’s feet, standing on the patio, holding one end of a leash, while a large golden retriever strained at the other end of the leash, its nose pointing directly at the shrub where they were hiding. She held her breath.

  “No, Moosey. We’re not chasing squirrels. We’re pooping, remember? Come on boy, Auntie Andrea wants to get in out of this rain.”

  The dog snuffled around, but finally, less than a foot away, Parrish saw it squat.

  “Good boy! Good Moosey. Let’s go inside and get a treat,” Andrea cooed.

  They heard the door sliding shut, and then the sound of a lock clicking. They waited five more minutes, and then heard the front door close, and finally, the soft whir of a golf cart rolling away from the house.

  * * *

  They waited another ten minutes before emerging from their hiding place and sprinting through the rain to their cart.

  “I thought you said there was no dog,” Parrish said, wiping the rain from her arms and legs with a beach towel she kept under the seat. “That looked a lot like a dog taking a dump less than a foot from where we were hiding back there.”

  “He was in a crate in the laundry room,” Riley said. “He must be, like, ninety in dog years. I was walking toward the bedroom and I heard this snuffing sound, and when I looked in the laundry room, there he was. His muzzle was totally white, and it looked to me like he had cataracts, poor baby. He just barely raised his head, looked at me like, ‘meh,’ and went back to his nap.”

  She took the towel her friend handed her and started drying herself off. “Anyway, guess what? It looks like Melody is getting ready to move.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. The house only has two small bedrooms. She’s using the guest room as a closet, and boy, were you right about her being a fashionista. The whole room was full of clothes, shoes, and handbags. She had all these plastic bins, and it looked like she’d started packing the shoes and bags in them. She had a bunch of those cardboard wardrobe moving boxes, and about half of them were packed with clothes. Same thing in her bedroom. Three or four suitcases on the floor, and they were all packed.”

  “Wonder where she’s going?” Parrish said. “And why?”

  “I don’t know, but I have an idea how we could find out,” Riley said. “I bet Melody’s best friend, the one who comes over every day to let her dog out for a potty stop, knows. Because, let’s face it—Belle Isle Barbie knows everything that happens on this island.”

  “Nooooo,” Parrish said. “Anything but that. You’ve put me through enough today. I bet I aged twenty years back there when that sliding-glass door opened.”

  “I can’t ask her, because I recently told her to fuck off,” Riley said, hugging her friend. “Pleaaase? Pretty please?”

  * * *

  Two hours later, Parrish was back.

  “You owe me,” she announced when she walked into the library at Shutters, where Riley was reading something on the Internet.

  “You did it!” Riley beamed. “But how’d you manage it this fast?”

  “I just got lucky,” Parrish admitted. “I was going to the Mercantile to find something quick for dinner tonight, and as I passed the nail salon I spotted Andrea in there, getting a pedicure. I walked in, but the girl said there was an hour wait. So I just found a magazine and sat there. And you know our Andrea. She just loooooves to chat. Of course, the main topic she wanted to discuss was you and Nate Milas.”

  “Of course.”

  “She doesn’t really think he’s your kind of people,” Parrish said. “She wanted to know where the two of you are going to be living. Surely not that horrible shack he bought.”

  Riley smiled. “The question is, what did you get out of her?”

  “She’s devastated that Melody is moving, but totally understands. New management at the bank doesn’t really appreciate Melody, and not only that, Melody’s elderly aunt, the one who lets her use the house here, has been moved to a nursing home in Wilmington. So Melody has bought a condo at Wrightsville Beach, and she’s moving, right after Labor Day, to be closer to her aunt.”

  “She volunteered all that?”

  “I’m a pretty skillful interrogator when I want to be,” Parrish said, preening a little. “I just primed the pump a little. Told her you’d gotten a new job in Raleigh, and how much I was going to miss you for the rest of the summer. Stuff like that.”

  “So she’s quit her job at the bank, and bought a condo at Wrightsville,” Riley said thoughtfully. “Wonder if the sheriff would be interested in that?”

  57

  Riley stood in front of the minuscule closet in her bedroom, trying to decide what to wear. Nate was due on the 6:15 ferry, and they were going to have dinner at his place. He’d promised to pick up groceries in town. Now she just needed to come up with a devastatingly adorable outfit.

  She really did need to clean out the closet. It was still packed with decades’ worth of her old clothes, along with her current clothes, all of them crammed in so closely together it was hard to discern the good from the bad from the ugly.

  The problem was, she decided, everything in this closet reminded her of her old life. She dug around, selecting and rejecting, until she found a bathing suit cover-up she’d forgotten about. It was a vaguely ethnic black-and-white geometric cotton print, with long bell sleeves and a drawstring neck. The price tag still hung from the sleeve.

  She pulled it off the wire hanger and slipped it over her head, then stepped in front of the mirror on the back of the closet door. Not bad, she thought. It was a little too skimpy as a dress, so she pulled on a pair of white calf-length leggings beneath it.

  The bedroom door opened and Maggy came in and flopped down on her bed.

  “Chantelle wants to know if you can bring me over for my sleepover tonight, and then stay and have sushi with us. Micki is going to be there, too. She said it would be cool to meet you, since me and Annabelle are so tight.”

  “I agree, and I enjoyed talking to her this week, but I’m just going to ask Chantelle for a rain check,” Riley said, putting on a pair of beaded tassel earrings.

  “What’s a rain check?”

  “It means I’ll ask her if we can have sushi another night, because I already
have plans for this evening,” Riley said.

  “Oh.” Maggy’s face twisted into her all-too-familiar scowl. “I guess you’re getting all fixed up for your boyfriend.”

  “I’m seeing Nate tonight,” Riley said carefully. She sat down at the dressing table and smoothed moisturizer over her cheeks and forehead. “Parrish and I are riding to the ferry together, but I’m sure we can drop you off at Annabelle’s first.”

  “Never mind,” Maggy said. “I’ll just ride my bike over there, since you’re way too busy worrying about your love life.”

  “I said I’d take you,” Riley said.

  “Don’t even bother pretending that you care about me, Mom. I know you only care about yourself. And you know what? I wish Dad was alive and you were the dead person.”

  Riley jumped up from the stool. Maggy had been surly all week, even more so since Wendell’s service, but it dawned on her that this kind of unusually outrageous behavior could be a symptom that her blood sugar was out of whack.

  She touched the back of her hand to her daughter’s cheek.

  “Maggy, when did you last eat? Did you take your insulin?”

  “Did you take your birth control?” Maggy asked in a singsongy voice.

  Riley sat down on the bed. “This isn’t funny,” she said sternly, grabbing her daughter’s wrist. “Tell me what time you ate, what you had, and when you last tested your blood sugar. Or else you won’t be spending the night at Annabelle’s. Tonight or ever.”

  “I had a sandwich and some carrots at two. And I took my insulin. And I had my snack and some apple juice a little while ago and checked my blood sugar.” She yanked away from her mother. “As if you care.”

  Riley stared down at this strange creature who’d taken over her sweet, fun-loving daughter’s body. “When did you turn into such a mean, hateful girl?”

  “Right around the same time you turned into a bitchy, slutty mom,” Maggy countered, hopping off the bed and heading for the bedroom door.

  “Nothing you can say to me is going to change the way I feel about Nate,” Riley said. “Where’s your backpack? Before you go to Annabelle’s, I want to make sure you’ve packed your kit and your juice boxes and cheese crackers.”

  She followed Maggy into her bedroom and her daughter flung the bag directly at her face. “Here!”

  She opened the backpack. Riley saw the purple nylon case holding Maggy’s supplies. She unzipped it and checked the cold pack, the insulin, the blood-testing supplies and syringes. She closed the case and replaced it in the bag, noting that along with her daughter’s clothes and iPod, there was a plastic bag packed with juice boxes and packages of cheese crackers.

  “Satisfied?” Maggy asked, snatching the bag out of Riley’s hands.

  “Margaret, don’t push your luck with me,” Riley said. “Or you might never leave this house for the rest of the summer.”

  “Whatever.”

  * * *

  She found Evelyn in the kitchen, warming up a plate of leftovers in the microwave. “Maggy just left to spend the night at Annabelle’s,” she reported. “I did talk to the mother this week. She sounds very nice. She knows all about Maggy’s diabetes. I checked Maggy’s bag, and she has her kit and everything she needs. I’m having dinner with Nate, and I don’t know what time I’ll be home.”

  Evelyn shrugged and turned back to the microwave.

  “Good night, Mama,” she said. She was standing on the porch waiting when Parrish pulled around on the golf cart.

  “You look cute,” her friend said.

  “I don’t feel cute,” Riley reported. “I’m exhausted from fighting with Maggy and getting the silent treatment from Mama. Earlier, I was so excited about the prospect of seeing Nate, I felt like a teenager getting ready for the prom but, right now, I honestly don’t know if I have the energy for all this drama.”

  “Hang in there, Riles,” Parrish said. “You can’t let those two wear you down. That’s what they want.”

  “I know, but…”

  “Stop right there,” Parrish commanded. “No more buts. And here’s a word of parenting advice. I know everybody thinks David was a saint, but I still remember what he was like as a middle-schooler. Let me tell you, as a mother, it was the worst time of my life. People think two-year-olds are bad? And teenagers are toxic? No. Tweens are absolutely the worst. And girl tweens are the worst of the worst. All you can do is try to stay sane and wait ’em out. In another year or so, we’ll have our dear sweet Maggy back again.”

  “God, I hope so,” Riley said. “But all this angsting has me wondering if I’m cut out for this single-mom dating thing.”

  “Don’t think of it as dating,” Parrish advised. “Think of it as sampling.”

  * * *

  She stood just outside the arrivals area trying not to look as nervous and apprehensive as she felt. Parrish squeezed her hand. “Butterflies?”

  “Huge butterflies,” Riley said. “My pulse is racing. I feel like I might throw up.”

  “Must be love,” Parrish said.

  “It’s so strange to be standing here, waiting for somebody who isn’t Wendell to get off the ferry,” Riley confided. “I must have stood right in this spot a couple hundred times, waiting for him to get here on Friday nights or Saturday mornings, and I can’t ever remember feeling this jumpy. Do you ever feel this way, waiting for Ed to arrive?”

  “Not in a while,” Parrish admitted. “But maybe it’s because I’ve been with Ed for so long, I know what to expect. I know he’ll kiss me, and no matter how I look, he’ll tell me I’m gorgeous.”

  “Wendell hadn’t told me anything like that in a long time,” Riley said sadly.

  “Then he’ll ask me how my week was, and tell me he missed me,” Parrish said.

  “Wendell just wanted to know what was for dinner and if I’d remembered to make his tee time at the club,” Riley said.

  Parrish pointed toward the horizon. The Carolina Queen was chugging toward them. “Don’t look now, but here comes your date.” She gave Riley a gentle shove. “Go on up and meet him at the gate. Give him a thrill.”

  * * *

  Nate was one of the first ones off the ferry. Maybe that was a perk of ownership, Riley told herself. But then she saw the broad smile on his face as he adjusted the strap of his carry-on bag and walked directly toward where she was standing, a few yards apart from the rest of the islanders waiting for their arrivals.

  “Hey, you!” Nate said. He dropped his bag to the ground and enveloped her in his arms, kissing her breathless. “God, I missed you,” he said when he finally released her.

  “I missed you, too,” she said simply.

  He tugged her by the hand. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Don’t you have groceries to collect?” she asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” Nate said. “Won’t be much of a dinner without that.” He dug in his pocket and brought out a key chain. “The cart’s parked over beside the Mercantile. Why don’t you bring it around here, and by that time the deckhands will have unloaded my cooler and stuff.”

  * * *

  On the way to his cabin, he filled her in on the progress he’d made during his business trip. “The UNC board of visitors had called a meeting and approved all the plans for the research center. I met with the architects and showed them some photos of similar centers run by the University of Florida at Cedar Key, and the University of Georgia at Skidaway Island. They’re gonna work up some sketches for me. The bankers are down with what I want to do, and it looks like I’ve got all the financing in place.”

  “That’s great,” Riley said. “What about the hotel people?”

  “I met with some folks in New York who recently left the Westin and started their own boutique brand. They do small luxury hotels in offbeat destinations. They were intrigued with the idea of putting one on Belle Isle, especially since the only access is by ferry. Each of their concepts is designed for the setting, with its own unique name, design, and branding. I’d be their
first franchisee in the South.”

  “You’d own the hotel?” Riley asked, surprised.

  “It’s the only way I can completely control what happens with that site,” Nate said. “Every other chain requires a certain number of rooms, parking, all of that. Their big thing is uniformity. But I don’t want that for Pirate’s Point.”

  “Do you know anything about running a hotel?” she asked.

  “Not one damn thing,” he said cheerfully. “But they do. And they’re really good at it. I stayed in their property in Brooklyn, which is in a converted shoe factory, and in a couple of weeks, I want you to go out to San Francisco with me, so we can check out their property there. It’s in an old municipal bus barn.”

  “That sounds like fun,” Riley said, hesitating. She hadn’t told him about her job offer yet, reasoning it would be better to wait until they were alone.

  He glanced over at her and pulled her closer to him. “Did I remember to tell you how beautiful you look? And how crazy I’ve been, wondering if you’d really be waiting for me when the ferry docked tonight?”

  “I was pretty nervous myself,” Riley admitted.

  “I forgot to ask you what you wanted to cook tonight,” he said, making the sharp turn onto the narrow path leading to Sandy Point. “I didn’t know if you’d like fish or meat or what, so I covered all my bets with some mahi steaks and a couple of little filets. I had Mom bring some stuff over from the Mercantile to stock the fridge, too.”

  “Does your mom know about us?” Riley asked shyly.

  “Of course.” He paused. “Wait. Was I not supposed to let Annie know?”

  “No, that’s fine,” Riley said. “Actually a lot of people on the island know about us now. Including Maggy and Evelyn.”

  “Oh yeah?” He pulled the cart up in front of the cabin. It was still daylight, but the front porch light was on.

  “Let’s unload your groceries and pour a drink,” Riley said grimly. “And then I’ll tell you what happened.”

  * * *

  They found a Mason jar full of sunflowers on the kitchen table and a chilled bottle of champagne in the refrigerator, along with a cheese and pâté plate and a baguette of French bread.