Read That Summer Place for Free Online

awful. It’s rustic and quaint,” Catherine told her, trying to keep her voice light but not feeling light at all.
    Dana snorted.
    “Follow me.” She could hear the girls whispering behind her and Harold began to whine. She didn’t really blame them. She had a bad feeling about this. She opened the screen door and held it with her shoulder while she pulled the rental envelope with the key out of her pocket and unlocked the front door.
    Please, she thought, please let the inside be better than the outside.
     
    Better was a relative term.
    The inside wasn’t the Four Seasons. Catherine looked around the room. It was clean and neat and furnished in an odd mishmash of styles. There was an eastlake style sofa upholstered in a brown and red western print with bronco-riding cowboys, red and black lariats, and a smattering of green horseshoes. There were throw pillows scattered across it—one was yellow gingham, one was needlepoint bulldogs, and the other was black and white and shaped like a soccer ball. A Blackwatch plaid stadium blanket with the Mariners emblem embroidered in the corner was thrown over the edge of a brown recliner. Next to it was a white French provincial chair that looked exactly like one her grandmother had in front of her bedroom dressing table.
    The coffee table was a huge wooden piece with burned edges, something you see in a roadside stand next to the velvet paintings of Elvis. In the center of the table was a monkeypod bowl with a silver nut cracker and a chrome and black leather ashtray. The end tables weren’t end tables at all, but small dressers. One was painted aqua and the other canary yellow. The aqua dresser had a white milkglass lamp with a beige ruffled shade. The only other light in the room was a red and orange lava lamp.
    “Who decorated this place?” Dana said with a disgusted voice.
    “Dale Evans and Barbara Cartland,” Catherine said as she set down the bags.
    “Who?”
    “James Bond and the Monkees?”
    “James Bond and the Monkees?” Aly repeated. “Was that a rock group in the olden days?”
    “Hey, hey, we’re the mon-kees,” Catherine sang, bopping her head as she did the Pony across the linoleum in the kitchen.
    Her daughters looked at each other and rolled their eyes. She sighed. Her children had their father’s sense of humor.
    “Yes, the Monkees were a rock group and surely you know who James Bond is.”
    “Oh yeah. I forgot. Pierce Brosnan, huh?”
    “Sean Connery.”
    “The old guy? Uh-uh,” Aly shook her head. “He was Indiana Jones’s dad.”
    Catherine felt ancient.
    Aly dropped the grocery bags on a rag rug and plopped down on the cowboy sofa. She switched on the lamp. “I love lava lamps.” She rested her chin in her hands and watched the lamp bubble.
    Catherine watched her youngest daughter and was overcome with a sense of déjà vu. Aly was dressed in bell-bottomed jeans, a wide black belt, and a skinny turtleneck. She even had on a thick white headband and a flip hairdo like the Breck girl.
    “Can we get one, Mom?”
    “One what?”
    “A lava lamp.”
    Catherine hadn’t liked lava lamps back when they were new. To her they were in the same category as Chia pets and diet tablets that helped you lose ten pounds overnight.
    Aly was staring at her through the liquid of the lamp.
    “We’ll see.”
    “Where’s the TV?” Dana looked at her and popped her gum.
    Here it comes, Catherine thought. She opened the refrigerator and started putting things inside. When she had her head sufficiently hidden behind the door she said, “There is no TV.”
    It took a few minutes before she could get a word in between their melodramatic protests. Aly was going to miss “Nick at Night” and Dana just plain hated the island and wanted to go home, where “it was normal.” And she wanted to go now.
    “You need to give this place a chance. And even if I was willing to leave—which I’m not—there’s no boat until Thursday.”
    Catherine crossed the