The children went back to their sand castle, chortling.

"Pull up a beach," said Rose, and Marlene sat. Rose noticed with a distinct shock that the woman was missing several joints of the small fingers gers of her left hand. Otherwise, she was remarkably beautiful, in a Mediterranean way. "He must be quite a handful," Rose said, "with that imagination. Is his brother the same?"

"Completely different in every respect. You can barely get a word out of him. Gianni, as you see, is an artist." Giancarlo was carving a delicate arch in a thin curtain of sand.

"I don't see how he gets it to stick together," said Rose. "It's marvelous."

"Oh, yes. Sometimes a little too marvelous for daily use. Zak never picks up a crayon. His thing is war, guns, blowing things up, taking things apart, heavy machinery. That's why he skipped the beach today. We're having a backhoe in to rip out and replace a water pipe to the kennels. Watching a backhoe is his idea of paradise."

"He should meet my husband. They'd have a lot to talk about."

"Your husband runs a backhoe?"

"A dragline. Or did. He's with the union now."

"Really? I'm not sure I know what a dragline is."

"It's an excavation machine. The bucket can take a hundred and fifty yards at a bite, three hundred tons or so. The powerhouse is the size of a small office building. They use them in open-pit mining."

"Presumably not on Long Island, though."

Rose laughed. "Oh, no. Robbens County, West Virginia. That's where we're from. Or that's where Ralph is from. I'm from next door. The big white house."

"There's a story there."

"Oh, yes. Oh, yes, indeed."

"I want to hear it. Let me get the beer."

So Marlene dragged her cooler over and they sat under the umbrella and slowly drank and rubbed the icy bottles against neck and forehead, watching the slow, remarkable extension of Giancarlo's sand palace, and talking. Rose talked, rather, and Marlene listened. She seemed good at it, professional even, and Rose was not surprised to learn that she had been a prosecuting attorney in New York and later a private detective.