“I didn’t.” Bobby raised a finger to his mouth and shushed her. Then he pointed to their parents.

“Oh.” Sylvia scrunched up her face. “So why was she so mad?”

“Shit, Syl, I don’t know, because I went out without her, and got drunk, and came home and puked. Do we really need to talk about this right now?”

“We’re not listening,” Franny said from the front seat.

Bobby rolled his eyes. “Great.”

They were close—the air was saltier. Sylvia decided to let it drop. It was strange to see Bobby this much—when he came back to New York, he never stayed more than a few days at a time, and even then he was always running around with his friends from high school. They never saw each other for more than a meal. She wondered if he’d always been this surly and defensive, or whether something had changed—those looming dollar signs—more recently. There was no way to know. She’d always thought that siblings were pretty much the same people in differently shaped bodies, just shaken up slightly, so that the molecules rearranged themselves, but now she wasn’t sure. She would have told Carmen the truth. As it was, Sylvia felt the information starting to rot inside her, like a dead rat on the subway tracks.

Jim parked in a slanted spot on the side of the road, and Charles pulled in two spaces behind them. They all loaded up their arms with Franny’s supplies and humped the lot of it down a steep set of stairs to the sand, walking past a barrier of narrow pine trees.

Gemma was right—the beach was glorious. Once they were through the trees, the beach opened up like an unfolded map, with more and more clean, bright sand in both directions. There were several clusters of people—umbrellaed colonies here and there—but on the whole the beach was quiet, and the water was nearly empty. The water! Franny wanted to run toward it with her hands clasping open and closed like a lobster’s claws, to hold on to it, a shimmery dream. The Mediterranean was richly blue, with tiny waves lapping in and out. One woman stood some ten feet out, her legs submerged up to her knees and her hands on her hips, elbows winging out to the sides. There was no music playing, no beach volleyball. These were serious sunbathers, the early risers, and dedicated swimmers. Franny led the troops halfway down to the water, and carefully set down her bounty. She flapped out her towel and unfolded an umbrella. She lathered herself with a low-SPF sunscreen—what was the point of coming to a beach and not leaving with a bit of a tan, after all?—and looked around, satisfied. There was sweat on her upper lip, and she wiped it away with a finger.

“I’m going in!” she announced, and peeled off her gauzy cover-up. She dropped it onto her towel and turned away, hoping no one was looking at her thighs. There was a pitter-patter of running feet behind her, and before Franny knew it, Carmen was in the water, sloshing through with high knees until it was deep enough for her to dive, and then she was gone.

Sylvia curled up like a sleeping dog in the narrow and shifting shade offered by the umbrella.

“You know that the sun will not actually set you on fire, right?” Bobby said. He was lying on his back, with his T-shirt thrown over his face.

“I’m a delicate flower,” Sylvia said. She stuck out her tongue for emphasis, but Bobby was no longer looking. On her other side, Charles and Lawrence had set up shop on an impressive scale—magazines, chairs, their shoulder bags weighing down the corners of the beach towels. They were both reading novels, and Charles had his camera in his lap, in case he saw anyone he’d like to paint. Lawrence had also brought his laptop on the off chance that the beach had Wi-Fi, which it didn’t. There was a large hotel just up the road, and he planned to duck away at some point to send some e-mails, or really just to hit the refresh button in hopes that the agency had written again with some news, asking them to call. The beach was too lovely to ignore, though, and Lawrence was more than happy to loll around for a few hours. The water was warm enough to swim in but brisk enough to be refreshing, and so they took turns splashing around and then baking on the sand.

Franny stood in the water and tried to look as European as possible. She wasn’t going to take her top off, but she could do the rest—sunglasses, a simple suit, an air of nonchalance. Carmen was swimming laps again, the current bringing her farther from the shore, but she seemed determined, and Franny doubted that she would need to be rescued. She had a good, strong stroke, dragging the water underneath her with every motion.

“Maybe she’ll drown,” Jim said, appearing next to Franny. “Would that make things better or worse?” He was wearing a thin cotton polo, which the wind pushed against his lanky torso. Jim’s resolute refusal to gain weight like a normal middle-aged person was always high on the list of things that drove her crazy. Bobby and Sylvia both seemed to have been born with this gene, which made Franny wish that it were possible to give such things in reverse, though she’d long held on to the idea that being chubby gave one character. Being thin led to nothing but cockiness. Maybe that’s why Bobby was in this pickle. If he’d been an overweight child, perhaps it could have been avoided.

“Oh, stop,” Franny said. She crossed her arms over her soft middle, pushing together her breasts. It felt absurd to still be conscious of her body in front of her husband, but after that girl, that girl, Franny had reverted to the behavior of a bulimic teenager, minus the purging—eating a second helping of dinner after Jim had gone upstairs for the evening, or when he wasn’t looking. Sneaking in an ice cream cone when she ran errands. Putting on her Spanx in the bathroom, with the door closed.

“So it sounds like Bobby did more than get too drunk the other night,” Jim said.

Franny quickly looked over her shoulder at her kids, some twenty feet away. Bobby was sitting up and staring at the water, his elbows resting on his knees. “I couldn’t tell what happened, could you?”

“Didn’t sound good.”

Bobby stood up, dusted off his bottom, and walked slowly into the sand. He nodded at his parents when he passed them, but kept going. Franny and Jim watched him wade slowly into the sea before he inelegantly dropped to his knees. He flipped onto his back and began to float, his body just a few inches above the sand and bits of seashells. Franny watched her son bob for a few minutes before his whole body began to thrash around as if he were being attacked by an invisible shark.

“Fuck!” Bobby said. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” He struggled to stand up, and began to hobble back to his towel. The other beach patrons turned to look. “I think something bit me.” He was clutching his calf, just above his right ankle. Carmen had heard the commotion and swum closer, her head and shoulders above the surface.

Jim hustled to his son’s side. “Here?” he asked, pointing to where Bobby was clutching his leg. The skin was raised and turning red, in a lacy pattern. Bobby lost about twenty-five years immediately, his face as open and expressionless as a baby’s right after its very first shot—that wide surprise. Growing up in the city meant little exposure to stings and bites of the natural variety, unless they were ornery pit bulls walking down Broadway. Franny pushed Jim out of the way, and knelt in the sand next to Bobby.

“Sweetie, are you okay?” She reached out for his leg but then withdrew her hand. “Can I touch it?”

Sylvia had rolled onto her side and was watching with some amusement. “Did karma bite you, Bobby?”

“Sylvia!” Franny shouted. They never yelled at the children—it just wasn’t in their nature. They cajoled, they teased, they wheedled, but they never yelled. Sylvia recoiled as if she were the one who’d been stung, and hid underneath her umbrella.