Skinny Dipping Read Online Free Page B

run Chez Ducky into the ground, Mimi would still prefer to be dead before Debbie took over. But since Debbie was only ten years older than Mimi, she didn’t hold out much hope for this. Maybe she’d be demented by then? The thought cheered Mimi considerably.
    She turned on her back and floated. She was immersed in blue: the jade-speckled indigo of the blooming lake beneath, the cobalt sky above, the blue-green of pine trees drifting by on the shore. She closed her eyes and drank the soft air, a hint of autumn crispness teasing her exposed skin into gooseflesh.
    It was late summer, almost autumn.
    And so are you.
    She jackknifed in half, dropping beneath the lake’s surface and coming up sputtering. Where the hell had that come from?
    She was only forty-one. The only difference between early summer and late summer was a few less hours of daylight. And all that meant was that there might not be quite as much time to get things done.
    Or get things going.
    Jesus! What had gotten into her lately?
    Lately? She could pin down the exact date: March fourteenth, around four o’clock in the afternoon, when the mail arrived with the lab results for a pregnancy test she hadn’t even realized she’d taken.
    This year when she’d packed her borrowed car to come to Chez Ducky, she’d come with a motive: she was determined to recapture her lovely soporific bliss. For the most part it worked. But even here she sometimes grew fidgety, her unoccupied thoughts seesawing between her father’s postcard and a computer-generated lab report. Frank Sinatra kept crooning, “It Was a Very Good Year” in her head, and she’d taken to captioning her experiences with Hallmark card sentiments like “It was late summer, almost autumn, and so was she.”
    “Mimi!”
    With a sense of relief, Mimi swam around the raft to see who was yelling. The beach was filling up with people arriving for the picnic. Birgie was nowhere to be seen, but Mimi spied Debbie holding court near the fire pit in the middle of the beach. Naomi perched atop Chez Ducky’s other pontoon where it had been beached three years ago as unusable.
    “Mimi!” Naomi hollered again. She’d draped herself in a white bedsheet, which she’d hitched up around her waist, revealing a pair of bright pink polka-dot pedal pushers underneath. Above her head she waved the claw hammer with which she’d spent the last two days pounding together some sort of scaffolding on top of the pontoon.
    To Mimi’s knowledge no one had bothered to ask Naomi what she was doing. Few people did anymore. The answers might lead to uncomfortable conclusions about Naomi’s mental state. It wasn’t that Naomi was incapable of taking care of herself, or wasn’t aware of what was going on, or who was who. Not at all. She just reveled in being odd.
    “What?” Mimi called back.
    “You’re going to turn into a prune!” Naomi shouted. “How long you planning on staying out there? People are starting to arrive.”
    Naomi had always taken her step-grandmother duties seriously.
    “I’m coming in now!” Mimi shouted back.
    “Good!” Naomi stooped down and recommenced thwacking at some boards.
    Mimi paddled to the pontoon to retrieve her swimsuit. It was gone. She frowned, gripped the edge of the raft, and was about to hoist herself up to peer over the pontoon to the other side when she realized she’d be hoisting herself out of the water in full view of the picnickers on the beach. She moved to the other side and looked around. It was empty.
    In a flash, she realized what had happened. Her suit, caught on the corner of the pontoon, had fallen into the water when Birgie had jumped up and down before diving into the lake. Mimi dove under the raft, squinting as she tried to see through the soft green veils of suspended algae. No good. She couldn’t make out a thing. She swept her arms around, hoping her suit had gotten tangled in the weeds as it drifted to the bottom twenty feet below. She came up after