Deserted by the sea, sand dollars speckled the strand beneath children’s feet. The boys went swimming, goggles spying secrets like flitting glitters and sudden glimmers while the inner-tube girls spun and splashed on the undulating glass. There was the smell of salt and seaweed sweating in the sun, laid out in ragged strings like a hapless picket line between the blanket bathers and the deep. Ambitious castles sprawled along the sand but the lords had been called away for peanut butter and jelly, fiefdoms unguarded, deceptively safe from the tide. In memory they will stand as ageless stone.

The hot dog vendor scolded his watch and went for more buns, a couple that packed their own lunch eyed him from a picnic table as he cursed by their convertible. The man spoke inaudibly to her about the swelling of the sea to a distant moon. She ate a quiet lunch, sparse in words and carbohydrates, watched an old man struggling to stretch tired scuba gear over his limbs, changed the subject to luckless fishing and found typically stale commiseration. Her hand trembled and dropped to the table top, his hand advanced timidly across the sandy surface.

Look for little holes said the grandfather in the sand. That’s where you’ll find them just below the surface. I’ll give you a real dollar for every one.

The boy began a furious hunt worthy of Ovid, Diana could not out pace him, a victor to be crowned with more than wilted memories. In time he ripped one up and pressed it to his grandfather, who smiled distantly as he took it in hand. Running his finger over the underside: Feel its little feet he said it’s alive.

Can I keep it like a pet?

Taken from the sea it will die in time he said unless you return it now.

But I won’t have it anymore.

It’s the price you pay. Here’s your dollar.

He pocketed both dollars and renewed the hunt padding up and down the lacquered shore leaving a trail behind him that no one would see half an hour from now. The grandfather grinned proudly over his shoulder, but the father hunched in an umbrella’s shade listening to water and rocks and the wind tousling what remained of his hair. The mother used a pocket mirror to check her back for lines, shifted her towel a few feet away from the umbrella, scowled at the heedless sun and the father. He only murmured, mutely rigid as he frowned at the sea, a somber monument to triviality.

Her hand remained in place and his faltered before receding back across the stolid picnic table remembering how once it brushed blonde locks from vibrant eyes. She looked at the vendor getting into his car, the old man not getting into his diving suit, the grandfather springing up the beach with handfuls, the boy watching the inner-tube girls washing up on shore, the mother and the father not speaking to each other.

He looked at her and knew she cried at night.

The couple stayed late, silent, until the castles washed away, and the old man surrendered to inevitability.