Judith Arnold - Right Place, Wrong Time

“You don’t have to do this,” she called down to him.

Viewing her from his ground-level perspective, he couldn’t imagine choosing his book over a few minutes with her—even if he had to pay for those minutes by digging in the sand with her niece. “I’ll see how it goes,” he said, refusing to commit to more than that.

“I’m dumping the water so Aunt Gina can get more,” Alicia announced before emptying the bucket of water into the trench.

“Maybe you should get the water and let your aunt sit for a minute,” he suggested, hoping Alicia and Gina wouldn’t interpret his words as anything other than an attempt to earn a fellow adult a few minute’s rest.

Alicia sprang to her feet. “Okay! You guys dig and I’ll get the water!” Before Gina could object, the kid had grabbed the bucket and was racing down to the sea.

Gina lowered herself onto the sand, not too close to Ethan. Her gaze remained on her niece. “She spills half the water,” she told Ethan. “That’s why we thought it would be better if I got it.”

“This doesn’t look anything like the Brooklyn Bridge,” he commented, scrutinizing the span constructed of damp, packed sand above the trench.

Gina chuckled but refused to shift her attention from the little girl at the water’s edge. “You’ve seen the Brooklyn Bridge?”

“I’m from Connecticut,” he told her. “And you’re from…Brooklyn?”

Still smiling, she shook her head. “Manhattan. I grew up in the Bronx.”

He knew midtown Manhattan, where all the Broadway theaters and famous restaurants and office towers were, and the downtown business district. The Bronx was just a borough he passed through—and the punch line of jokes.

“I live down in Chelsea now,” she told him. “You know the city?”

“Sort of.” He smiled sheepishly and hoped she wouldn’t quiz him. “I live in Arlington. That’s in the northwest corner of Connecticut.”

“Yeah. I know it.” She used the plastic shovel to dig the trench deeper. A murky puddle of water lingered at the bottom. “So where’s the rest of your group?”

“Shopping. I thought I’d come back and enjoy a little beach time.” He glanced toward the snorkeling gear by the palm tree. “Did you visit Coki Beach?”

“Not today. We just snorkeled around here. They rent equipment for the whole week. The guy at the cabana said we should try to get over to St. John. There’s this underwater snorkeling trail there. I can’t imagine snorkeling along an underwater trail.”

“It’s supposed to be amazing.” He wondered whether he’d be able to separate Kim from her Visa card long enough to take her snorkeling at Trunk Bay on St. John. Paul had told him he had to go there. He’d hate to go alone, though.

And he couldn’t go with Gina. Not when she looked the way she did in a swimsuit.

“I’m figuring we’ll try Coki Beach tomorrow. We saw some fish here. Not a lot, but Alicia was pretty excited.”

Ethan did a little desultory one-handed digging while he sipped his beer. “You want some?” he asked, extending the bottle to her.

She flickered a glance toward the bottle, then zeroed in on Alicia again. “Thanks,” she said, letting him place the bottle into her hand so she wouldn’t have to look away from her niece. “It’s hot out here. We brought some sodas down to the beach, but we finished them a while ago.”

“Beer is better,” he said. She smiled her agreement.

Down by the water, Alicia straightened up, clutching the rim of the bucket. Gina handed the bottle back to Ethan and watched her niece pick a path across the beach, sloshing water with each step. By the time she reached them, she looked upset. “I spilled too much of it,” she said, a sob making her voice wobbly.

“That’s okay, sweetie. Pour it in and I’ll get the next one.”

Ethan wanted to argue. He’d barely begun talking to her; he wasn’t ready for her to run off. And he definitely wasn’t ready to shoot the breeze with a little girl. But who would be the water carrier wasn’t his decision to make. Gina rose, lifted the pail from Alicia’s hands as soon as she’d emptied it into the trench, and stalked across the beach, her hips swaying as her heels sank into the sand.

Alicia threw herself back into the labor of digging. Ethan took another sip of beer and observed her. “We snorkeled today,” Alicia told him as she flung sand to one side.

“Your aunt told me. She said you saw some fish.”

“They were white. Kind of silvery. The color of angels,” Alicia told him. “I wanted to snorkel forever, but I swallowed some water and started coughing, and Aunt Gina said we had to take a break.”

“You’ve got a whole week,” Ethan pointed out. “You can go snorkeling again tomorrow.”

“Where’s the lady?” Alicia asked.

He assumed she meant Kim. “She’s in Charlotte Amalie. That’s the big town on the other side of the island.”

“Do they have snorkeling there?”

“No. What they have there is shopping.”

Alicia wrinkled her nose. She obviously didn’t think much of shopping. “Is she your girlfriend?”

“Yes,” Ethan said, feeling noble and virtuous for having gotten that established, even if he hadn’t established it with Gina. She’d surely figured it out. And now the kid knew, too.

“My daddy has a girlfriend,” Alicia said, bringing him up short.

“Does he?” Perhaps her mother was dead, or her parents were divorced.

Or perhaps they weren’t. “It makes my mommy very mad,” Alicia said.

“I would imagine,” he agreed faintly.

“I don’t think she’s as pretty as your girlfriend,” Alicia continued matter-of-factly. “I haven’t seen her, but the way my mommy talks about her…Sometimes my mommy uses bad words. I hate that.”

“I remember.” Ethan recalled Alicia’s howls yesterday when anyone uttered a damn or a hell. He toyed with the label on his bottle and searched the water for Gina, eager for her to return. Compared with this conversation, his political debates with Ross Hamilton had been a piece of cake.

“Aunt Gina is my mommy’s sister,” Alicia went on. “That’s what an aunt is—your mother’s sister. Or your father’s sister. Do you have any aunts?”

“Yes.” He spotted Gina straightening up, clutching the replenished bucket. Good. In less than a minute, she’d be back to rescue him.

“Are they as nice as Aunt Gina?”

“No. Aunt Gina seems extra nice.” Every step that carried her toward him made her seem even nicer.

“She is. Extra extra nice. Extra extra extra.” She greeted Gina’s arrival with a big smile. When Gina emptied the water into the trench, Alicia let out a whoop. “Look, Aunt Gina! It’s staying. We dug deep enough! The water isn’t all soaking in!”

Ethan rose onto his knees and peered into the trench. A nice pool of water stretched below the bridge. “Hey,” he said admiringly.

“All right!” Gina slapped Alicia’s hand in congratulations, then slapped Ethan’s, too. Her touch startled him. Her palm was slick and cool with water, her fingers slender, her wrist graceful. She wore a ring on her thumb, braided strands of silver in a pattern identical to the ring on her toe.

The brief contact obviously meant nothing. She was just celebrating their engineering feat. Because Ethan was there, she included him in the celebration. That was all.

Yet the cool texture of her skin and the exuberance behind her gesture stayed with him, long after she and Alicia had moved on to bolstering the bridge, decorating it with shells and strands of grass, analyzing the feasibility of importing some of those angel-colored fish to swim in their tiny version of New York Harbor.

Sipping his beer and listening to their bubbly chatter, Ethan felt the impact of Gina’s hand against his and contemplated the tide as it tugged the sand, shaped the shoreline and left beach reconfigured, rearranged—almost unrecognizable. Tides could be dangerous, he thought. Extra extra extra dangerous. He’d better be careful.