moment. Besides, I promised to have you back by four so you could sell tee-shirts, and I don’t want you to have to race the clock.”
She looked down at her watch and was startled to see it was ten past two. If they had been sitting on the rock and making out for only five or ten minutes, how was that possible? She came to the reluctant but rather marvellous conclusion that it wasn’t. They had been here for half an hour at least, maybe closer to forty-five minutes.
“Come on,” he said, sliding off the rock. He grimaced as the soles of his feet splashed into the cold water, and she caught just a glimpse of the bulge in his pants before he turned away. I did that, she thought, and was astonished at the feelings which came with the thought: pleasure, amusement, even a slight smugness.
She slipped off the rock next to him and was holding his hand in hers before she realized she had taken it. “Okay; what now?”
“How about a little walk before we start back? Cool off.”
“All right, but let’s stay away from the foxes. I don’t want to disturb them again.”
Her, she thought, I don’t want to disturb her again.
“All right. We’ll walk south.”
He started to turn away. She squeezed his hand to make him turn back again and when he did, Rosie stepped into his arms and slipped her own arms around his neck. The hardness below his waist wasn’t gone entirely, not yet, and she was glad. She’d had no idea until today that there was something in that hardness a woman could really like—she’d honestly thought it a fiction of those magazines whose main job it was to sell clothes and makeup and hair-care products. Now she knew a little more, perhaps. She pressed herself firmly against that hard place and looked into his eyes.
“Do you mind if I say something my mother taught me to say when I went to my first birthday party? I was four or five, I think.”
“Go ahead,” he said, smiling.
“Thank you for a lovely time, Bill. Thank you for the most lovely day I’ve had since I grew up. Thank you for asking me.”
Bill kissed her. “It’s been nice for me too, Rosie. It’s been years since I felt this happy. Come on, let’s walk.”
They went south along the shore this time, walking hand in hand. He led her up another path and into a long, narrow hayfield that looked as if it hadn’t been touched in years. The afternoon light lay across it in dusty beams, and butterflies skittered through the timothy grass, weaving aimless courses. Bees droned, and off to their left, a woodpecker tack-hammered a tree relentlessly. He showed her flowers, naming most of them. She thought he got a couple wrong but didn’t tell him. Rosie pointed out a cluster of fungi around the base of an oak at the edge of the field, and told him they were toadstools, but not too dangerous because they were bitter. It was the ones that didn’t taste bitter that could get you in trouble, or get you killed.
By the time they got back to the picnic area, the college kids Bill had spoken of had arrived—a van and a four-wheel-drive Scout full of them. They were amiable but noisy as they went about carrying coolers filled with beer into the shade and then setting up their volleyball net. A boy of about nineteen was carrying his girlfriend, clad in khaki shorts and a bikini top, around on his shoulders. When he broke into a trot, she began to scream happily and beat the top of his crewcut head with the palms of her hands. As she watched them, Rosie found herself wondering if the girl’s screams carried to the vixen in her clearing, and supposed they did. She could almost see her lying there with her brush curled over her sleeping, milk-stuffed kits, listening to the human screams from down the beach, her ears cocked, her eyes bright and crafty and all too capable of madness.
It knocks the dogs down quick, but a vixen can carry it a
long time, Rosie thought, and then recalled the toadstools she’d spotted on the edge of the overgrown meadow, growing in the shadows where it was damp. Spider toadstools, her grandmother had called them when she pointed them out to Rosie one summer, and while that was a name that must have been special to Gramma Weeks—certainly it