THE SAND CASTLE

Brown follows the durable Hunsenmeir sisters (Loose Lips, 1999, etc.) to the seashore, where the younger generation carries on the aimless, benign, revelatory quarreling of their midlife elders.

Louise (Wheezie) is the Catholic one. Julia (Juts), the Lutheran, is still free-spirited enough to get under her more authoritarian sister’s skin. And that skin has been especially tender since Wheezie’s daughter Ginny died of cancer in 1947, leaving Wheezie and her husband Pearlie, the painting contractor, to help their son-in-law Ken, a hero of Okinawa still weeping for his late wife, raise their grandson Leroy. Five years later, when the boy is eight, the two sisters pack him and Juts’s adopted daughter Nickel, seven, into a car and take them down to St. Mary’s, Md., where the family’s ancestors landed in America, as Wheezie constantly reminds everyone, in 1634. The two sisters reminisce about the misadventures fat Aunt Doney had the day her bathing suit uncontrollably shrank and bat putdowns back and forth like veteran tennis players just looking to keep the ball in play. Nickel, who tells the story, observes every nuance of these volleys, sometimes adding her own precocious judgments: “It was good to see Aunt Louise laugh.” In between times, she needles her cousin with barbs about his private parts, his fear of crabs and his limitations as a hard worker, and trades insulting epithets only slightly less veiled than those of her mother and aunt. Despite constant disagreements among most of the four characters, the prevailing tone is tranquil, as if a storm had recently blown itself out.

Not much happens—there’s just enough incident for a substantial short story—but Brown has a great ear for the way children argue, and a keen eye for the way their childish arguments shade off into the defining conflicts of a lifetime.