“What’s your name?” I asked him as we walked.
“Jackson,” he said, squinting up at me. “What’s yours?”
I hesitated for a moment. I rarely said my own name anymore for a whole bunch of reasons. There was one person in Florida who knew my name. But again-he was a kid.
“Noah,” I said.
“Like the ark?”
“Like the ark.”
“Cool.”
We worked our way through the sunburnt masses, down to the water line.
“I hate the seaweed,” Jackson said, sidestepping one of the piles that littered the sand. “It gets in my shorts.”
“Yeah, that’s a bummer,” I said. “Your mom with your dad?”
“I don’t have a dad,” he said. “It’s just my mom.”
There was no feeling or expression behind it, just a kid making a statement, like it was normal because that was all he knew.
I envied him.
“Do you live here?” he asked.
Again, I hesitated, uncomfortable with any question that pinned me down. “Yeah.”
“Do you actually live on the beach?”
“Where do you live?” I asked, redirecting him.
“Here. In Fort Walton,” he said. “We come to the beach whenever my mom isn’t working.”
“Where’s she work?”
“A restaurant. It’s kinda far from here.” I knew what he was thinking. She wouldn’t be there.
We walked another fifty yards or so. Still no panicked moms. I glanced down at him. His smile was fading, his eyes scanning the faces under the umbrellas.
“We’ll find her, buddy,” I said.
Without looking, he reached up for my hand. His tiny, sandy hand slid into mine, his fingers wrapping around my ring finger.
It made me uncomfortable.
“How’d you find me?” I asked.
Jackson though for a moment before answering.
“I saw you. Renting umbrellas and boogie boards,” he said. “Then I saw you lying down.” He shrugged his small shoulders.
If he’d seen me working, he’d wandered a pretty good distance down the beach. We were still a hundred yards from the stand.
“Where was your mom when you last saw her?”
“She was lying on her towel. Like you were. Sorta by my castle. It has a dragon.”
“You told me that.”
“Do you wanna see it?”
“Maybe after we find your mom.”
“Okay.”
Kids got lost nearly every day on the beach. They’d pour out of the condos above the dunes, just arrived from Alabama or Mississippi or somewhere else in the South, and they’d get disoriented, separated amidst the crowds. I just hadn’t had to help one in the few months I’d been there.
But I knew what it felt like to be lost.
“What is she wearing?” I asked.
“Her bathing suit.”
“What color?”
“I don’t remember. Blue maybe?”
Great. Only about a million of those.
“Oh, man,” Jackson said, his fingers tightening around mine. “Someone smashed my castle.”
“Where?”
His hand slipped out of mine and his legs pinwheeled across the sand. He screeched to a halt in front of what was now an imploded castle, the bucket-designed turrets pancaked and kicked over.
“That took me forever.” His lower lip quivered.
“So where was your mom when you were building the castle?” I asked, trying to keep the sympathy I felt-for the smashed castle, for his missing mom-at bay.
He stared at the remnants of his castle, dejected. “I dunno.”
“Come on, dude,” I said. “Look around. Where was she?”
He looked up from the castle and pointed. “There.”
He aimed his finger at a striped beach towel and what looked like a wicker beach bag about thirty feet from us.
“That’s your mom’s stuff?”
He nodded.
We walked over to the towel and the bag. I could see sunglasses and a wallet in the bag. A set of keys sat out, visible, the metal glinting in the sun. No shoes.
“You said you come here a lot,” I said.
“Almost every day,” Jackson said. “When Mommy doesn’t have to work.”
“Do you drive here?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Do you remember where she parked your car?”
His eyes lit up. “Yes! We always park in the same spot!”
“Show me.”
We moved up the dunes, toward the line of tall condo buildings. The long stretch of sand was shadowed by seven-story buildings, housing rentals of all types. Expensive, moderate, dirt cheap. Something for everyone.
The wet, wooden ramp took us up and over a large dune and between two of the buildings. We passed an outdoor shower and descended the walkway into an asphalt parking lot, sand scattered around like glitter.
“There she is!” Jackson cried and took off running.
I looked in the direction he was heading. A woman in her late twenties, longish brown hair, light pink coverup over her bathing suit, was talking to a guy a little younger. Muscled up, wraparound shades, dark green tattoos on each shoulder. She looked agitated and he looked like he didn’t care. He had hold of her arm and she was trying to remove it. They both looked at Jackson as he got closer.
“Mommy!” he yelled. “I lost you!”
The guy let go and his eyes drifted in my direction.
She gathered him up and hugged him. “I’m sorry, bud. I was just on my way back. Didn’t mean to scare you.” She looked up at me. “Hi.”
I held up a hand. “He was scared. He couldn’t find you.”
The muscles in her arms flexed as she hugged him a little tighter. “Thank you. For bringing him to me.”
“He knew where your car was parked,” I said, glancing at the guy next to her. He rocked from foot to foot, his arms folded across his chest. “He found you. Not me.”
She kissed the top of his head and set him on the ground, hanging onto his hand. “Well, thank you anyway.”
“Sure.”
We all stood there for a moment, heat rising off the pavement around us.
“You can go,” the guy said, adjusting his sunglasses.
“I know,” I said, not moving.
“Then go.”
I didn’t say anything.
He stepped in closer to me. “Or I can make you go.”
“Colin,” the woman said. “Don’t.”
Colin shuffled his feet. He was shorter than me, a little over six feet, and had his chest puffed out. A small white scar ran lengthwise down the bridge of his nose. He smelled like beer and sunscreen.
I looked past him at the woman. “You okay?”
“She’s fine,” he snarled, exposing perfect white teeth.
She hesitated, then nodded. “Yeah. Fine.”
He stuck a finger in my chest. “You got three seconds.”
A finger in my chest had always been a pet peeve of mine. I hated it. It was rude, invasive, condescending. I could think of a number of times that I grabbed the offending finger and bent it backwards until I felt like letting go. Or it broke. Either way, I’d made my point that I didn’t like it.
I had no doubt I could’ve quickly snapped this guy’s finger in half.
Jackson and the woman stood there, watching, waiting.
She said she was fine.
I stepped back in the direction I’d come.
The guy grinned. “That’s what I thought.”
I looked past him. “I’ll see you around, Jackson.”
Jackson smiled and waved goodbye and I headed back to work.