It began with a walk on the beach, a course in the identification of apathy.
Rita had certainly been to the beach before. Her parents took her there every summer between the ages of six and fourteen. As she’d grown, so had her interests, from seashells to surfing to the fine lines made by young men’s damp fingers on her warm skin. And later, after a dozen years inland, after too many midwestern winters and steak dinners laced with fat and potatoes, she came back to the beach again.
It was all about the exotic then, the homoerotic taste of her own salty lips, stiff nipples under wet cloth. The way sand clings to a woman’s bikini bottom like an unidentified secret. Eight months with Jordan in a two room apartment were enough to convince Rita that she did not need another woman in her life.
And there followed years away from the beach. Years when houses and cars seemed important. When there was a husband and kids, a career that was on, off, on. All the things that Rita might have been slipped past her as easily as waves erasing a castle in the sand until finally, in her fifty-third year, Rita returned to the beach.
This time, Rita didn’t notice the shells half-buried in the sand or the supple bodies that surrounded her. She didn’t think about the grandchildren or the mortgage that was nearly paid. This time Rita saw him for the first time.
He was sitting on a concrete bench, shoeless, dirty. He’d been there all along. His form changed over the years, but as long as there had been a beach, he’d been there. Rita looked at his face, his matted hair. She touched the money folded in her pocket. She saw how he held his head high. He was not dejected, just forgotten. Rita stepped forward and offered him her empty hand.
***Brava.***
And from Easywriter....
He was not young but neither was he old. Lost: the sea found him, tried to make him hers, but he would not have it choosing instead to sit by her side and listen to her cajole and rage in turn. Some day he may go to her, but not today.
