“God did not intend you to raise children,” I said. “You have other uses.”
She laughed. “Ha! You’re right. I can gossip like nobody’s business. Say, speaking of which, did you hear Budgie’s opening up her parents’ old place this summer?”
A wave rose up from the ocean, stronger than the others. I watched it build and build, balancing atop itself, until it fell at last in a foaming white arc, from right to left. The crash hit my ears an instant later. I reached for Aunt Julie’s cigarette and stole a long and furtive drag, then figured What the hell and reached for the pack myself.
“They’re arriving next week, your mother says. He’ll come down on weekends, of course, but she’ll be here all summer.” Aunt Julie tilted her face upward and gave her hair a shake. It shone golden in the sun, without a single gray hair that I could detect. Mother insisted she dyed it, but no hair dye known to man could replicate that sun-kissed texture. It was as if God himself were abetting Aunt Julie in her chosen style of life.
Down at the shoreline, Kiki waited for the wave to wash up on the sand and dipped her bucket. The water swirled around her legs, making her jump and dance. She looked back at me, accusingly, and I shrugged my told-you-so shoulders.
“Nothing to say?”
“I’m looking forward to seeing her again. It’s been years.”
“Well, she’s got the money now. She might as well spruce up the old place. You should have seen the wedding, Lily.” She whistled. Aunt Julie had gone to the wedding, of course. No party of any kind among a certain segment of society would be considered a success without an appearance by Julie van der Wahl, née Schuyler—known to the New York dailies simply as “Julie”—and her current plus-one.
“I read all about it in the papers, thanks.” I blew out a wide cloud of smoke.
Aunt Julie nudged me with her toe. “Bygones, darling. Everything works out for the best. Haven’t I been trying to teach you that for the past six years? There’s nothing in the world you can count on except yourself and your family, and sometimes not even them. God, isn’t it a glorious day? I could live forever like this. Just give me sunshine and a sandy beach, and I’m as happy as a clam.” She stubbed out her cigarette in the sand and lay back on the blanket. “You don’t have a whiskey or something in that basket of yours, do you?”
“No.”
“Thought not.”
Kiki staggered back toward us with her pail full of water, sloshing over the sides. Thank God for Kiki. Budgie might have had everything in the world, but at least she didn’t have Kiki, all dark hair and spindly limbs and squinting eyes as she judged the distance back to the blanket.
Aunt Julie rose back up on her elbows. “Now, what are you thinking about? I can hear the racket in your brain all the way over here.”
“Just watching Kiki.”
“Watching Kiki. That’s your trouble.” She lay back down and crossed her arm over her face. “You’re letting that child do all the living for you. Look at you. It’s disgraceful, the way you’ve let yourself go. Look at that hair of yours. I’d shave mine off before I let it look like that.”
“Tactful as ever, I see.” I stubbed out my half-finished cigarette and opened up my arms to receive Kiki, who set her pail down in the sand and flung herself at me. Her body was sun-warmed, smelling of the sea, smooth and wriggling. I buried my face in her dark hair and inhaled her childish scent. Why didn’t adults smell so sweet?
“You have to help me.” Kiki detached herself from me, grabbed her bucket, and spilled the water thoroughly over the sand. Last summer, we built an archipelago of castles all over this beach, an ambitious program of construction that ended in triumph at the annual Seaview Labor Day Sand Castle Extravaganza.
I’ll tell you, the things we got up to in Seaview.
I let Kiki pull me up from the blanket and knelt with her on the sand. She handed me a shovel and told me to start digging, Lily, digging, because this was going to be a real moat.
“We can’t have a real moat this far from the water,” I said.
Kiki said, “Let the child have her fun.”
“And what is that thing you’re wearing, that abomination? Don’t you have a bathing suit?” asked Aunt Julie.
“This is my bathing suit.”
“Lord preserve us. You’re going to let Budgie Byrne see you in that?”
I dug my shovel ferociously into the moat. “She’s not a Byrne anymore, is she?”
“Ah. So you are holding it against her.”
I stopped digging and rested my hands on my knees, which were covered by the thick cotton of my black bathing suit. “Why shouldn’t Budgie get married? Why shouldn’t anybody get married, if she wants to?”
“Oh, I see. We’re back to bygones again. Where are those cigarettes? I could use another cigarette.”
“The child can hear you,” Kiki reminded us. She turned her pail over and withdrew it to reveal a perfect castle turret.
“That’s lovely, darling.” I shoveled sand upward from the moat excavation to form a wall next to the tower. For an instant I paused, wondering if I was angry enough to shape it into battlements.
Aunt Julie rummaged through the basket, looking for the Chesterfields. “Did I tell you to bury yourself with your corpse of a mother for the past six years? No, I did not. Live a little, I told you. Make something of yourself.”
“Kiki needed me.”
“Your mother could have looked after her just fine.”
Kiki and I both stared at Aunt Julie. She had found the cigarettes and held one now between her crimson lips as she fumbled for the lighter. “What?” she asked, looking first at me and then at Kiki. “All right, all right,” she conceded, holding the flame up to the cigarette. “But you could have hired a nanny.”
“The child does not wish to be raised by a nanny,” said Kiki.
“Mother has enough to do, with all her charity projects,” I said.
“Charity projects,” Aunt Julie said, as if it were an obscenity. “If you ask me, which you never do, it’s a bad sign when a woman spends more time looking after orphans than her own family.”
“She looks after Daddy,” I said.
“You don’t see her looking after him now, do you?”
“It’s summer. We always come to Seaview in the summer. It’s how Daddy would want it.”
Aunt Julie snorted. “Has anybody asked him?”
I thought of my father in his pristine room, staring at the wall of books that used to give him such pleasure. “That’s not nice, Aunt Julie.”
“Life’s
