“All right. I’ve been warned. But didn’t your instruction book warn you?”

“About what?” I asked.

“That your Approach No. 2, as you call it, won’t work after it’s been explained.”

“Killjoy. Now I’ve got to buy a new manual.”

She laughed again and started blocking in the outline of the bridge with the charcoal. I lay there and watched her, thinking how beautiful she was, and about the joking, and then beginning to be aware that beneath it there was something serious that had nothing to do with joking at all. I wondered if she had felt it too. What was there about this kid that kept getting under my skin? And then I wondered irritably why I kept insisting on thinking of her as a kid. She was twenty-one. I was nine years older than she was, but that didn’t mean she was sixteen any more.

It was impossible to lie there and watch her sketching without thinking of that other time at the abandoned farm, and that put me right back on the same old merry-go-round with Sutton and the same old unanswerable questions. But I had my mind made up about one thing—I wasn’t going to ask her about it again, at least not today. We were having too much fun, and the mention of Sutton always spoiled it for her. Maybe some day she would tell me.

What the hell, some day? In a month—or two, at the most—I’d be gone from here. As soon as the heat was off a little and the bank job began gathering dust in the unsolved file I’d dig up the money and beat it.

She was squeezing colours on to the plate from little tubes, and dipping her brush into the water jar to mix them.

“I thought watercolours came in little blocks,” I said.

“They do,” she said. “But the tubes are better.”

Just then Spunky came flopping down the bank, soaking wet and plastered with sand, and bounced in between us. I saw what was coming and grabbed him before he could get the shake started, rolling over and tossing him down below us.

She laughed. “That was fast work.”

“He’d have made a Navajo sand painting out of it in about one more second.”

“You’re nice to have around. Every painter should have one of you.”

“It’d never work out,” I said. “You run into the same old distribution problems. The pretty ones would soon corner the market.”

“You’re very flattering today.”

“It’s probably just the moonlight.”

She wrinkled her nose at me and went on with her brush. She worked fast, and I watched the picture take form. I knew nothing whatever about painting, of course, but it looked fine to me. It wasn’t exactly like the bridge, but somehow it had that same drowsy feeling of peace.

“I like that,” I said. “Will you do one for me sometime?”

She didn’t look up. “Have you wondered who this one is for?”

“You mean I can have it?”

“If you’d like it.”

“Of course I would. But why?”

“I don’t know,” she said quietly. “Maybe just because it’s my birthday, and I wanted to give you something.”

“That sounds crazy somewhere,” I said. “But is it really your birthday?”

She nodded, and put down the brush and set the block of paper off her legs on to the sand. “I’ll finish it later. Why don’t we eat our lunch now? I’ll show you my birthday cake.”

I went up and got the box out of the car and we started unpacking it, putting the sandwiches and Thermos jugs out on the tablecloth on the sand.