The SandCastle Hotel is as friendly to children as it is to judges. The decor in the spacious lobby is vivid turquoise and coral with terra-cotta tiles and couches upholstered in soft sand-colored leather. Bowls of taffy wrapped in wax paper twists sit on the registration counter. A floor-to-ceiling saltwater aquarium filled with exotic and colorful sea creatures lines the wall of a hallway that leads to the restaurant. In the middle of the lobby itself, beneath the large circular skylight, is a round shallow tank that holds an inch or two of white sand and six or seven inches of water. It’s chest-high to a four-year-old and kids are encouraged to touch the living sand dollars, sea urchins, snails, and skates or watch a school of tiny minnows dart through the water.
Adults can play there, too.
When I returned to the hotel that morning, the first person I recognized was pudgy-faced Bernie Rawlings from Lafayette County, who stood by the tank running his fingertips through the wet sand with a dreamy expression on his face. He wore sandals and a white tennis shirt and his bald head was covered by a blue cotton hat that matched his blue shorts. He smiled when he saw me. “This reminds me of when I was a boy and we’d come down from the hills in the summer to rent a place on the beach. My dad would set up a small tank so we could catch fiddler crabs and snails and minnows. He had a shore guide to marine life and we’d spend the week trying to identify everything. It was always sad when we had to leave and put them back in the ocean.”
“We must have had that same book,” I said. “My mother was always trying to get us interested in nature. Only instead of a tank, we used a plastic shower curtain.”
“Shower curtain?”
I nodded. “My brothers would scoop out a hole in the sand and we’d line it with an old shower curtain. That’s where we’d put the things we found. Like you did. Only we had to empty it out every evening so the tide wouldn’t take it away.”
We were joined by a pudgy-faced child in shorts and tank top who looked exactly like Bernie except that he was only half as tall and he had a headful of hair that was cut in a modified mullet. He also had a clump of taffy in each hand and was busily stuffing his cheeks full.
I was about to tell Bernie how much he and his son looked alike when he said, “Emily, this is Judge Knott.”
The girl stared at me unblinkingly as Bernie finished the introduction, her mouth too full to speak.
Bernie tried to interest her in the hermit crab that was moving its heavy whelk shell ponderously over the sandy floor of the tank, but she handed him a wad of wax paper wrappers to dispose of and said, “Can we go back upstairs now? I wanna watch
“Honey, you watched that thing three times on the drive down. Look! These are live ocean animals. Starfish! Horseshoe crabs!”
She scowled. “You promised! Momma said.”
Bernie sighed. “Okay, okay. Go ring for the elevator.” He gave me a sheepish smile. “What can you do with ’em at this age? And I did promise my wife that I’d amuse Emily so that she could have the day to herself to shop and go out with some of the other wives.”
“You’re a good husband,” I said, feeling charitable.
He beamed and hurried after his bratty daughter while the pragmatist whispered in my ear, “
Some of my brothers claim that I was spoiled, being the only girl and the youngest after a string of eleven boys, but no way would my parents have let me program their free hours like that.
I lifted a scallop from the shallow tank and waited till it slowly, cautiously opened a narrow crack to reveal a ring of shiny blue metallic eyes.
My earliest memory of the beach was of sitting in the gentle waves at Harkers Island. I was probably three or four at the time, so the older boys were either married or working summer jobs. The younger ones were there, though—Zach and his twin Adam, and Will, the oldest of my mother’s four children. If Jack was there that week, I can’t remember, but Seth, who’s five up from me, was my protector when the others wanted to dunk me or hog the inner tubes we used as floats. Ben was there, too, but he was always pestering Daddy for the car keys so he and Seth could go juking at Atlantic Beach.
If Mother had hoped to turn any of us into marine biologists with her shower curtain aquarium and the
Check out all the whorled shells in a tidal pool till you find one inhabited by a hermit crab. Draw a big circle in the sand, put your crab in the center, ante in a dime. If your crab makes it out of the circle first, you take the pot. Losers go back in the water, winners are kept until deposed.
At five or six, I looked for crabs with the biggest, prettiest shells and usually came in last, but Will always put his money on one that had taken over the shell of a lightweight moon snail. One summer he found a crab that won so consistently that we stopped racing with him. Next day, he made a big show of throwing his champion back into the water and hunting for another. We lost two rounds to his new contender before it dawned on us that it was a ringer he’d thrown back, not the champ. Daddy made him give our money back, but I overheard him tell Mother, “Takes after his daddy, don’t he?”
“I don’t know that the world’s ready for another Kezzie Knott,” Mother had laughed.
Will still plays the angles whenever he can get away with it. I wondered how things were going up in Virginia and if he was on his way back yet. I also wondered if Dwight had made an inventory of whatever Will had loaded onto his truck. Not my worry though. Dwight’s known my brother longer than I have and he’s well aware that Will’s moral compass is a few degrees off true north.
But thinking of them only reminded me that Dwight still hadn’t called.
I put the scallop back in the tank and watched it jet away, then stepped into a waiting elevator and mashed the button for my floor. As the doors were closing, I saw a cute little girl dart across the terra-cotta tiles to the touching tank. She was trailed by a smaller boy and the bearded man I’d seen Jeffreys talking to at the restaurant
