Sorry

Gordon Everson first spotted the girl on the July Fourth weekend, wending her way across the crowded holiday beach, stepping nimbly around the sunburned weekenders and their scattered summer debris, with the practiced grace of a soldier navigating a minefield. She was wearing an oversize man’s T-shirt, which hung almost to her knees, a Yankee baseball cap pulled low over her brow, and a pair of wide mirrored sunglasses and was carrying a straw beach bag over her shoulder. The outfit seemed designed to disguise as much of her face and figure as possible, but it was obvious to Gordon, even given the girl’s shapeless camouflage, that she was an exceptional beauty. She walked right by his blanket, kicking up a little sand as she passed. His wife Susan was asleep and didn’t stir, but Jason, his four-year-old, who was busy burying a Batman action figure headfirst in the sand, looked up and said, “Hey!” The girl didn’t stop or even turn, and Gordon, for a moment, felt the familiar flush of fatherly indignance at her rudeness. But the feeling faded quickly enough in the face of the girl’s tan incredible legs pushing away from him through the sand. After all, he reasoned tolerantly, if a girl like that stopped for every male, large or small, who shouted something at her, she’d have trouble getting anywhere at all.