Her mother said, the angels will see it on your First Communion, and took the slip and ironed out all the wrinkles and put it back in its tissue paper. Well, the next morning her mother went in to wake her up and there was the little girl sleeping in the white slip again (Daisy laughed, as if to say, I like this kid), and her mother was just about to scold her when she realized that the little girl wasn’t asleep at all but dead. She really had worn the slip to show it to the angels.
Daisy frowned and pulled back her chin, squinting at me in the sun. A wave crashed with what sounded like a clap of thunder.
I laughed.
“I don’t believe it, either,” I said. Flora, impatient, began to raise her white dress over her head, showing her plump thighs and her belly button and her ruffled diaper cover.
“I want to swim,” she said. I reached up and pulled her into my lap to unlace her shoes.
Carefully, thoughtfully, perhaps, Daisy sat down beside us.
“Bernadette knows another story like that,” she said.
“She told me once. Only it wasn’t a slip, it was something else. White Communion shoes, I think.”
“It must be a story they teach them in nun school,” I said. I pulled off Flora’s shoes and socks and stood her up again.
“If I had been the little girl,” I said, “I’d have shown up in heaven in a red Gypsy skirt from Halloween. Not exactly angelic.” I tapped the toe of Daisy’s pink shoe.
“And I suppose you’d be wearing these.”
“Jewels,” Flora said, leaning to put her finger on them, too.
“Daisy has jewels on her shoes.”
I lifted one of the beach towels and draped it over Flora’s head—it was our routine—and then joined her under it to slip off her dress and her diaper and pull her skirted bathing suit up over her chubby legs and baby belly while her hands gripped my hair so she could keep her balance. When we emerged, I pulled Daisy’s suit out of the bag and told her she was next. But she looked around shyly and shook her head.
“Someone might see me,” she whispered. I noticed that she had taken off the pink shoes but still had her white socks on.
There was a faint blush rising into her cheeks.
“No, they won’t,” I said. I picked up another beach towel and held both of them together.
“I’ll make an envelope, see,” I told her, holding out the length of the two towels.
“You scoot under and come up inside.”
This she did, laughing, her head popping up just over the towels, between my arms. I closed my eyes and turned my head away.
“Now no one can see you but the seagulls.” I felt her moving against the blanket, pulling the dress up over her head, bending to step into her suit. Cautiously, I looked to see how she was doing. Her bare back was bent, I could see the sharp thin line of her spine as if it had been picked out by the sun, but there was a place, too, low on her back, just over her hip that because of the sun or my half-shut eyes or the shadow of the beach towels seemed bruised or mottled. I might have asked her about it then, but as soon as she stepped out from behind the towel—she did it with a flourish, like a diva taking a curtain call—we saw Tony and Petey heading toward us, their bikes thrown into the sand just behind them like some useless and discarded things.
“Where’ve you been?” Tony demanded as Petey said, in the same tone, “What took you so long?”
As they squinted up at me, skeptically, it seemed, I explained that Flora had taken an early nap and we’d had to wait for her. I sat down on the quilt.
“Did you find the movie star?”
I asked, and they shook their heads no, falling on their knees in the sand beside us.
“We saw what house they went into, though,” Tony offered.
“We were going to do a stakeout, but baby June wouldn’t be quiet.”
The two brothers exchanged a look from under their pale white brows, and then Petey of the blackened eye said, “Rags is back. We tied him up to your fence so my grandpa won’t see him.” He turned to Daisy.
“My grandpa shoots stray dogs,” he said.
And I said, “No, he doesn’t,” although, given Mr. Moran’s personality, it didn’t seem unlikely.
“He said he’d shoot Rags,” Tony argued.
“He said Rags tried to bite him.”
“Rags doesn’t bite,” I said, and took away the sandy Popsicle stick Petey had just handed Flora.
“Where’s baby June now?” I asked, because the look the two brothers had exchanged had had a kind of snag in it. They exchanged the same look again.
“At home, I guess,” Tony said into the sand.
“With Judy?” I asked.
“Judy and Janey got to go horseback riding with their dad,” Petey said with some indignation.
“Is this your hat?” He picked up Flora’s mother’s hat from the quilt where I’d placed it and stuck it on the back of his head. Then he pulled the brim down over his ears and said in a high voice, “Ain’t I pretty.”
“Is your mother home?” I said, and with the hat still pulled down and his two palms against his cheeks, Petey shook his head.
“So who’s minding June?” I asked them. Hands on his knees, Tony sat up a bit to look back over his shoulder toward the parking lot. Petey said, from under the shadow of the hat, “She’s coming. She was right behind us.”
I lifted Flora and the beach bag and the towel and slipped my dress over Daisy’s suit. I asked her to pick up the quilt and her shoes. Walking up the beach behind us, Tony and Petey promised that baby June would probably be here any minute, she was just really, really slow. She was right behind them the last time they looked.
I put a startled Flora into the stroller, and with Daisy scraping along in her pink shoes, trying to keep up, and Petey and Tony protesting at my side, I walked quickly down to the road.
No sign of baby June.
“Which way did you come?” I asked them, and squinting up at me, they pointed left, toward home.
“When was the last time you saw her?”
Tony pointed again.
“Just past the movie star’s house,” he said.
“What’s the big deal?”
We came upon her a few minutes later, sitting, like a baby in a fairy tale, at the edge of a brown potato field, her face streaked with tears and dirt, her hands filthy, her clothes—a pilly and too tight cotton sun suit—dirtier still. I walked over the cool, lumpy dirt in my bare feet and snatched her up. She smelled like the earth, like a freshly dug potato, as if she had just rolled up out of the jumbled ground.
“You guys,” I said, turning to the two boys, who seemed nonplussed by the whole ordeal—she had been, after all, pretty much where they’d expected, just behind them.
“You guys should never leave her like that. Do you know what could have happened to her?”
“Well, she’s too slow,” Petey said.
And I said, my voice growing louder, “She could have been hit by a car, Petey. She could have been kidnapped. Stolen.”
“No one would steal her” Tony said, and the two of them laughed at the joke.
“She could have been run over,” I said again, louder this time.
“I can’t believe you guys did this—you’re idiots. Perfect idiots.”
Suddenly Petey’s face changed. He stepped closer, his fists clenched.
“Well, we kept looking for you,” he said, squinting, matching his angry voice to mine.
“Yeah,” Tony said indignantly.
“Where the hell were you?”
Petey stepped forward again.
“Yeah, where were you?” He was right under my nose and his dirty baby sister was staring down at him from my arms. He was all open mouth under Flora’s mother’s wide straw hat, and his blackened eye was half closed. His voice was loud enough to hurt my ears.
“We kept going back to the beach and you weren’t there.” He gestured wildly, like an adult. There was spit forming at the corners of his mouth.
“You weren’t where you were supposed to be.” He jabbed a finger at me.
“You’re the idiot.”
Softly, staring him down, I said, “You two left your baby sister alone in the road. It’s about the stupidest thing you’ve ever done.”
First I saw the tears come into his pale eyes and then I saw his fist. I turned to protect baby June’s knee and he hit me solidly on the forearm.
“Well, to hell with you,” he cried, sounding for all the world like his grandpa. And then he turned, skidding down the incline of dirt that separated the road and the field, and, as if for good measure, punched Daisy, too, on the shoulder, hard enough to make her step back, her face filled with surprise and pain. Then he ran, Tony at his heels.
With June still in my arms, I went to Daisy, who was holding her shoulder and whispering, “Ow, ow, ow,” but not crying.
A girl with brothers. I put my free arm around her.
“Go get your bikes, idiots,” I called after the boys.
“And bring me back that hat.” But Tony just turned and thumbed his nose, and stuck out his tongue, and the two of them kept running.
I held Daisy tighter, and little June reached down to pat her head. In her stroller Flora began to cry, but I hushed her.
“Daisy’s okay,” I told her.
“You’re okay, aren’t you, Daisy Mae?”
She nodded, being brave.
“It’s okay, Flora Dora,” she said.
“I’m all right.”
I told them we would forget the beach for today. I gave Daisy one more pat on the head and then with my free hand turned Flora’s stroller around.
“Margaret Mary,” I said, “do you think you can push the stroller while I carry baby June?
Something tells me she’s done enough walking.”
Daisy said sure, and then had some trouble keeping the stroller straight. I put my hand on it briefly to guide her, and then let her go on her own. It took some effort, I could tell, the smooth soles of her pink shoes slipping and sliding against the macadam, but she put all her legs and her sore shoulder into it, all of that tiny body, muscle and bone.
“What would I do without you, Daisy Mae?” I said.
“One day here and already you’re indispensable.”
Back at my house, Rags was tied to the side fence with a short bit of clothesline. He barked viciously as we approached, even growled—as if the few hours he’d spent on the property had made him responsible for the security of the house. I told the girls to stay where they were—I could see them drawing back anyway, and then I approached him and said, “What are you growling at, you silly dog?” At the sound of my voice he immediately cowered a bit and thumped his tail, whining an apology. He was a sweet but odd mutt, mostly collie, I think, by turns skittish and friendly and shy, schizophrenic, I supposed.
And stupid. He came and went, a stray for the most part, probably left behind by some summer people who didn’t want the year-round responsibility of a pet; occasionally—those times when we didn’t see him for weeks—adopted by another summer family who made him theirs for whatever time they were out here. The Moran kids weren’t allowed to keep him, but they dragged him back to me whenever he came around. Rags, being stupid, tolerated them for the most part, although I’d seen him nip their fingers once or twice. Now he rolled over in joyful submission as I petted him and talked him into calming down. I then let the girls bring him some water and dog biscuits.
With Rags still tied to the fence but happily subdued, I stripped off baby June’s dirty clothes in the yard and washed her off with my father’s garden hose. Then I wrapped her in a beach towel and carried her into the bathroom, where I filled the tub with water and shampoo and let June and Flora both play in the bubbles. Daisy laughed, watching them, but didn’t want to join in, not even in her bathing suit. Out on the lawn again, in what were now the long shadows of the afternoon, I gave everybody cookies and fruit punch. Judy and Janey wandered over to take Rags for a walk, but there was no sign of the boys. I turned baby June over to her sisters and asked Daisy if she might possibly want to get out of her bathing suit, and maybe even change her shoes for the afternoon walk. To my surprise, she nodded and went into the house, coming out a few minutes later not in her new sneakers but in the old saddle shoes she had worn on the train.
“They look comfortable,” I said, mostly because she seemed so disappointed to be wearing them again.
We got Flora into her stroller and walked her home, singing loudly most of the way—“Barnacle Bill the Sailor,” a song that came to me as we passed Mr. Moran, standing, swaying, shirtless in his driveway, mumbling to himself. We were trying to keep Flora from falling asleep before she had her dinner.
The lights were still on in her father’s painting place, but there was no sign of him, or Ana either, which was just as well, since I didn’t have the straw hat. Inside, there was the familiar smell of the place: her perfume, his cigar, something new and complicated riding on the scent now. The cook was in the kitchen, just taking a single baked potato out of the oven, and when I told her Flora had already been bathed, back at my house, she reached up and ran her hand over my hair. She was a lady who went to our church, a vague friend of my mother’s, fat and grandmotherly but not, I now realized, unaware.
“Thank you, dear,” she said.