Nadia was going to keep working on her deck. She and Art would perhaps get down to the beach later, with Sax and his guests. For the morning the kids were to be in the care of Aunt Maya. They were so excited by this prospect they couldn’t sit still; they squirmed, they bolted around the table like young dogs.

So Ann, it seemed, was needed to go to the beach with Maya and the kids. Maya could use the help. All of them eyed Ann warily. Are you up to it, Aunt Ann? She nodded. They would take the tram.

• • •

So she was off to the beach with Maya and the kids. She and Francesca and Nanao and Tati were crowded in the first seat behind the driver, with Tati on Ann’s lap. Boone and Maya were sitting together in the seat behind. Maya came in this way every day; she lived on the far side of Nadia and Art’s village, in a detached cottage of her own, on bluffs over the beach. She went in most days to work for her co-op, and stayed in many evenings to work with her theater group. She was also a habitué of the café scene, and, apparently, these kids’ most regular baby-sitter.

Now she was engaged in a ferocious tickle fight with Boone, the two of them groping each other hard and giggling unabashedly. Something else to add to the day’s store of erotic knowledge: that there could be such a sensuous encounter between a five-year-old boy and a two-hundred-and-thirty-year-old woman, the play of two humans both very experienced in the pleasures of the body. Ann and the other kids fell silent, slightly embarrassed to witness such a scene.

“What’s the matter,” Maya demanded of them in a breathless break, “cat got your tongue?”

Nanao stared up at Ann, appalled. “A cat got your tongue?”

“No,” Ann said.

Maya and Boone shrieked with laughter. People on the tram looked up at them, some grinning, some glowering. Francesca had Nadia’s curious flecked eyes, Ann saw. It was all of Nadia to be seen in her, she looked more like Art, but not much like either. A beauty.

• • •

They came to the beach stop: a little tram station, a rain shelter and kiosk, a restaurant, a parking lot for bikes, some country roads leading inland, and a broad path cutting through grassy dunes, down to the beach. They got off the tram, Maya and Ann laden with bags full of towels and toys.