Heat Wave Read Online Free PDF Page B

good suit on the bed, she pulled on jeans and a long-sleeved tee. She tied her sneakers, yanked on her parka, wool hat and gloves, and slammed out the door. She jogged down the dog-legged route past houses, cottages, and concession stands to the long stretch of Jetties Beach where the winter waves surged and spat like her thoughts.
    Her worries churned repetitively through her mind like the wheels of a train. What could she do? What could she do? How could she make money?
    She would call her father, first of all. He had offered, when he came up for the funeral, to help Carley financially. She would gladly take him up on that offer now. She had no intention of being dependent on him, but he could spare enough to get her through a few months while she found a solution.
    A solution. A job.
    What she wanted to be, fortunately—and now, perhaps unfortunately—was just what she was. A stay-at-home mom with a big house and lots of friends. Growing up, she’d never had a dream career—lawyer, nurse, pilot, belly dancer—so it had been a continuing delightful surprise, each day, that completely by accident she’d achieved a life that seemed exactly right for her.
    So, first, her father. Next—next, she would sit down with Vanessa and Maud and brainstorm ideas. They were bound to come up with something.
    Vanessa Hutchinson and Maud Parsons were Carley’s two best friends on the island. On the planet, actually. Maud and Vanessa were best friends, too, and for some inexplicable reason, their trio worked. They’d met thirteen years ago, when Carley had just married Gus and moved to the island. Their husbands were fishing, sailing, and football-watching buddies, so they were thrown together a lot, part of a larger young married gang who spent New Year’s Eve together, and sailed to Coatue for an all-day Fourth of July picnic, and turned out to cheer the local high school football team, where once Gus had been linebacker and Toby quarterback.
    Gus Winsted, Toby Hutchinson, and John Parsons had been born on the island and had grown up here. Gus’s best friend, Wyatt, was another island man who attended the picnics or football game parties, but he was single. Each time he brought a different knockout girlfriend who caused the three husbands to stare, suck in their guts, and straighten their shoulders.
    “Hey!” Vanessa would snap. “Down, boys!”
    “Yeah, you
pillars of the community
,” Maud would chip in.
    Then the three women would exchange glances sparked with mirth and mischief, because all three women secretly agreed that Wyatt Anderson was center-of-the-sun
hot
. When he came around, they stared at him as much as their husbands did at his dates. Wyatt had wavy brown hair and truly green eyes and no insidious flab creeping over his belt buckle. He was relaxed and good-natured, unlike their husbands, who were always stressed-out and cranky, or at least so it seemed. John Parsons taught English in the high school and worried constantly about not making enough money, and Toby was the local pediatrician. He didn’t worry about money, but he was always overwhelmed and hopeless at home.
    Carley, Maud, and Vanessa loved their husbands, but as the years passed, they were just naturally drawn into their own little trio by the need to discuss female matters. At least that was why, theyexplained to their husbands, they spent so much time on the phone with one another.
Yeast infections
, they’d murmur, or
PMS
, and their husbands would scurry away as if they had the flu. The three women served on many of the same committees, too, but really what bonded them was a similar sense of humor, a love of the sting of sarcasm, and a general sense that everyone should just
relax
. When cornered at a cocktail party by Beth Boxer, one of their extended group by virtue of her husband, and a savagely gossip-mongering little rat terrier of a woman, they would look at each other with deadpan faces and slowly twitch the left eyelid, their signal