Skinny Dipping by Connie Brockway Page B

become a water fight. People were dunking each other, the kids were splashing, and someone had broken into the Chez Ducky water pistol armory and pulled out the guns.
    Mimi had sunk down to her knees on the sand, her arms limp in her lap as she stared at the pontoon. Her shoulders slumped with relief. As Birgie watched, the handsome guy who’d stripped the sheet from Naomi came up to Mimi and said something. She smiled up at him. He reached his hand out and she took it. For a heartbeat they froze; then he was pulling her to her feet and letting go of her hand. It didn’t matter. Birgie, who’d had half a dozen lovers, knew what she’d seen.
    Sparks. Real sparks, too. Not just sex sparks—though God knew, those weren’t anything to turn your nose up at.
    “Will you look at that?” Naomi murmured. She was watching the pair, too.
    “Yup,” Birgie said. After being someone’s sister-in-law for fifty-some years, some communication didn’t need speech. “Know who he is?”
    “Johanna said Mimi was toting around some good-looking man named Joe.”
    “Joe,” Birgie said nostalgically. “I had a boyfriend named Joe once—”
    “That crazy old woman.”
    Birgie and Naomi looked around to see Naomi’s daughter-in-law Debbie stomping through the sand toward Naomi’s son, and Debbie’s husband, Bill. Little spits of sand punctuated each one of her angry steps.
    “She could have burned this place to the ground!” Debbie declared angrily. A few of those closest looked away uncomfortably. “You’ve got to do something about her, Bill. Before one of these fool antics of hers results in a lawsuit.”
    Birgie looked at Naomi. Naomi shrugged.
    Debbie looked really shaken. And really mad.
    “Now, Debbie. She’s my mother—”
    “And I’m your wife, and those”—Debbie pointed at a pair of boys wrestling in the surf—“are your sons. And she put us in danger. When are you going to grow a spine and do what needs to be done?”
    “Why don’t you just shut up, Debbie?” Mimi’s voice rose above the hubbub. Birgie looked around and saw Mimi hobbling toward Debbie. Joe was gone. Mimi’s expression was stony. Almost…angry. And her tone was…imperious.
    It was about time someone had told Debbie to shut up, Birgie thought. Past time. It was only amazing that it had been Mimi who’d done the telling. Mimi never took the lead. She was never imperious. She always claimed she was too lazy to command anything, but Birgie had always suspected the real reason was that she didn’t want to care so much about something or someone that she’d felt compelled to act. She hadn’t cared about anything very much since her dad had disappeared.
    Birgie applauded. Gerry joined in. Then Johanna and then someone else. Not everyone clapped, but enough people did that Debbie knew where she stood in relation to Naomi. Her face suffused with color.
    “Well, excuse me for not wanting anyone to get hurt,” she sniffed and stomped off, nose high.
    Naomi, inured to Debbie’s pain-in-the-assness by seventeen years as her mother-in-law, sighed. “Poor Bill.”

Chapter Nine
    As soon as he got back to the rental car, Joe pulled off his waterlogged loafers and tossed them into the backseat. He felt a little as though he’d just popped back up out of the rabbit’s hole.
    No forty-year-old women of Joe’s acquaintance would go skinny-dipping in a lake at the same time a picnic was under way a few hundred feet away. Nor would they run naked through the woods. And if bizarre circumstances should force them to do so, they’d definitely be at least a little nonplussed by the experience.
    As soon as Mimi Olson had gotten the ratty stadium blanket over her, every bit of embarrassment had evaporated. It hadn’t returned, not even when she’d shown up wearing a kiddy beach robe. Nor when she’d blithely informed him that she spoke to ghosts for a living. On a ghost hotline.
    Mimi Olson, he had come to the sad conclusion, was quirky.
    That