What Was Mine: & Other Stories Read Free Page B

care.”
    She frowned as he walked away, sorry, suddenly, that she had not been more compassionate. If one of the boys had really tried to run him down, of course she cared.
    Andrew had walked off so fast that he had forgotten his cane.
    She watched the sun sparkling on the water. It was so beautiful that it calmed her, and then she slowly surveyed the Mediterranean. There were a few windsurfers—all very far out—and she counted two canoes and at least six paddleboats. She stared, wondering which would crisscross first across a stretch of water, and then she turned, having realized that someone was staring at her. It was a young woman, who smiled hesitantly. At another table, her friends were watching her expectantly. With a heavy French accent, but in perfect English, the young woman said, “Excuse me, but if you will be here for just a little while, I wonder if you would do me a favor?”
    The woman was squinting in the sun. She was in her late twenties, and she had long, tanned legs. She was wearing white shorts and a green shirt and high heels. The shoes were patterned with grapes and grape leaves. In two seconds, Christine had taken it all in: the elegance, the woman’s nice manner—her hopefulness about something.
    “Certainly,” Christine said. And it was not until the woman slipped the ring off her finger and handed it to her that she realized she had agreed to something before she even knew what it was.
    The woman wanted her to wear her ring while she and her companions went boating. They would be gone only half an hour, she said. “My fingers have swollen, and in the cold air on the water they will be small again, and I would spend my whole time being nervous that I would lose my favorite thing.” The woman smiled.
    It all happened so quickly—and the woman’s friends swept her off so fast—that Christine did not really examine the ring until after the giggling and jostling between the woman and her friends stopped, and they had run off, down the steep steps of the Cobalto to the beach below.
    The ring was quite amazing. It sparkled so brightly in the sun that Christine was mesmerized. It was like the beginning of a fairy tale, she thought—and imagine: a woman giving a total stranger her ring. It was silver—silver or platinum—with a large opal embedded in a dome. The opal was surrounded by tiny rubies and slightly larger diamonds. It was an antique—no doubt about that. The woman had sensed that she could trust Christine. What a crazy chance to take, with such an obviously expensive ring. Even though she was right, the woman had taken a huge risk. When Christine looked down at the beach, she saw the two men and the beachboy holding the boat steady, and the woman climbing in. Then the men jumped in, shouting something to each other that made all of them laugh, and in only a minute they were quite far from shore. The woman, sitting in back, had her back to the beach.
    As he passed, the waiter caught her eye and asked if she wanted anything else.
    “ Vino bianco ,” she said. She hardly ever drank, but somehow the ring made her nervous—a little nervous and a little happy—and the whole odd encounter seemed to require something new. A drink seemed just the thing.
    She watched the boat grow smaller. The voices had already faded away. It was impossible to believe, she thought, as she watched the boat become smaller and smaller on the sparkling water, that in a world as beautiful as this, one country would drop bombs on another to retaliate against terrorism. That fires would begin in nuclear reactors.
    Paddleboats zigzagged over water that was now a little choppier than it had been earlier in the afternoon. A baby was throwing rocks into the water. The baby jumped up and down, squealing approval of his every effort. Christine watched two men in straw hats stop to look at the baby and the baby’s mother, close by on the rocks. Around the cliff, going toward the swimming pool chiseled out of a cliff