Today's Reading
CHAPTER ONE
CORA
If any part of her day had gone according to plan, Cora Prestly wouldn't need a toothbrush right now. But it hadn't, so here she was.
She sat in her rental car and stared at the CVS entrance as rain came down with an intensity that matched Niagara Falls, because of course it did. That was the kind of day she was having.
She knew this trip would be a mistake.
In fact, if she recalled correctly—and she did—that was her exact response when her older sister Savannah pitched the absurd idea that the three Prestly sisters spend a month in Sunnyside, Florida, a small beach town in the Panhandle, to relive their childhood summers. Then Cora followed the statement with her answer: an emphatic "Absolutely not."
She didn't care what sort of optimistic spin Savannah put on it, the trip was a recipe for disaster. They were adults with jobs and responsibilities. Well, maybe not Bianca, the baby of the family, but that was a different problem. The point was, they couldn't just pause their lives and spend the summer at the beach like they did when they were kids.
And even if they could, Cora didn't want to.
The Prestly sisters didn't exactly have that kind of relationship anymore. Don't get her wrong, she (mostly) loved her sisters. But in light of everything that had gone down, they now had more of a get-together-for-a-long-weekend kind of relationship. There was a four-day max before things started to get ugly. And last time Cora checked, a month was a lot longer than four days.
"Next time I stick with no," she said to the steering wheel. Although to be fair, no wasn't exactly an option.
Savannah had pulled out an unbeatable trump card that forced Cora into coming. This trip wasn't about them. It was about fulfilling their mother's last wish.
Before she passed, Julie Prestly made her three daughters promise her that they would spend one more happy summer on the white sandy beaches of Sunnyside, the way they did every year when they were growing up. And since their mother had lost her battle with breast cancer almost a decade ago, granting her wish was long overdue.
Did Cora think the whole idea was ridiculous, even at the time her mother had requested it? Absolutely. There was no way they could recreate one of those fairy-tale summers because way too much life—and not the good kind—had passed since those blissful days. But what choice did she have? Cora loved and respected her mother too much to just ignore her final wish.
So, when Savannah had put the wheels in motion for the overdue summer trip, Cora had begrudgingly cleared her calendar for the month of July and booked a flight to meet her two sisters in the sleepy little beach town of Sunnyside, Florida.
And so far, her prediction of a disastrous summer had been spot-on. She was only twelve hours into the trip and everything that could've gone wrong had. Which was how she wound up here, in the CVS parking lot, trying to judge how wet she would get in the fifty-foot sprint from her car to the store just to get a dumb toothbrush at 9:30 p.m.
"I think we've hit a new low," she told the steering wheel, as if somehow it was involved in this situation. Then she counted down from three before she threw open the car door and made a mad dash to the entrance.
The answer to how soaked she would get during a fifty-foot run through a monsoon? Down to her underwear.
This was officially the worst vacation of all time.
She stopped just inside the door to wipe the rain off her face. The clerk, who was filing her nails behind the checkout counter, temporarily paused her task. With a judgmental eyebrow raised, she gave Cora a once-over.
"Toothbrushes?" Cora asked.
The clerk popped her gum and tilted her head toward the back of the store before returning to her nails.
"Thanks." Cora sloshed in the general direction the clerk had indicated.
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