Summer Rental Read Online Free PDF Page A

at the back door earlier in the summer, which now contained his cleaning supplies.
    Not for the first time, Ty pondered the irony of his situation. Maybe his old man had been right. Maybe, if he’d stayed in law school, he’d be sitting pretty at some white-shoe law firm in Manhattan.
    Maybe he’d still be with Kendra too. Nah, probably not. But maybe he’d have a fatty mutual fund, maybe he’d be driving a Jag, wintering in Cabo, or at least Key West. Maybe he shouldn’t have sunk every last dime and mortgaged himself to the hilt trying to save Ebbtide. Told you not to buy that dump .
    Maybe, if he’d listened to his old man, he wouldn’t be living in a tiny garage apartment, staring at a computer screen all night ’til he was glassy-eyed and brain-dead. Maybe he wouldn’t be cleaning toilets by day and worrying that the next phone call or e-mail would mean the end of all of it.
    The clock was ticking. He had less than six weeks left to save Ebbtide. Otherwise, come September 15, the house would be auctioned off on the steps of the Dare County courthouse. He’d be out on the streets, jobless, homeless. And his old man would stand there, shaking his head. Kendra, his ex, and Ryan, her new husband, aka Fuckface, would be right there with his old man, oozing phony sympathy. They might not say it, but they’d all be thinking it. Told you so.
    Ty looked out the kitchen window. If he leaned out, he could see the waves rolling in on the beach. They had some size to them this morning. His stomach growled loudly. If he got this pigsty cleaned up, in say, three hours, he’d have just enough time to make it to Abigail’s before they ran out of the Saturday lunch special: mahi-mahi tacos.
    He pulled the grocery cart into the combined living/dining room at the front of the house and his eyes widened at the degree of destruction his tenants had wrought there. Armchairs, tables, and lamps were upended. The battered wooden floor wore a thick carpet of beach sand, and the sofa cushions were lined up end to end in front of the fireplace, where a trio of untwisted wire coat hangers suggested an impromptu wienie roast. Which would have been fine, if the fireplace damper had been opened, which it hadn’t. Fingers of greasy black soot marred the white mantel, which Ty hadrepainted in June. His grandfather’s huge, framed navigational map of Currituck Sound, which had hung over said mantel, was askew on its hanger, its glass shattered. Tufts of stuffing poked out of one of the sofa cushions, which had a baseball-sized hole burnt into it. The unmistakable odor of stale beer and cheap weed lingered in the air.
    “Christ,” he repeated. He yanked his iPhone from the pocket of his baggy board shorts and scrolled over to the last e-mail he’d gotten from his good buddy, ol’ Cooter.
    He typed rapidly, his fingertips flying over the tiny keyboard.
    “Hey Cooter,” he wrote. “Kiss your $500 security deposit goodbye. Asshole. Sincerely, Mr. Culpepper, manager, Ebbtide.com.”
    When he got the notification that the message had been sent, he looked down at his incoming message box and sighed. Another e-mail from another pain in the ass. The PITAs were the reason he always communicated with his tenants by e-mail and never gave out his phone number. As far as they knew, Mr. Culpepper was a cranky old bastard who resided somewhere in the Internet. They didn’t need to know that their landlord was actually theguy who lived over the garage, just a door knock away if the toilet didn’t flush or you couldn’t figure out how to use the remote control.

    This particular PITA’s name was Ellis Sullivan. He’d been peppering Ty with nit-picking questions for weeks now. From the tenor of the questions—should he bring his own linens, were there beach chairs, bicycles, a grill—Ty decided Ellis was undoubtedly gay. Straight guys, like ol’ Cooter, just wanted to know the location of the nearest liquor store.
    Ellis Sullivan and his friends