13 alleviate the weight. There’s a small book wedged behind my laptop, biting at my spine. I try to shift away from it. It doesn’t work. Minutes pass. More drinks slide across the counter. Fingers toy with lids, pepper-haired men adjust their glasses to read the names. I lean against my suitcase and peer beyond Starbucks to my gate agents. They’re behind the desk, just standing there looking bored. It would be a good time to talk to them. I won’t leave, though. Not yet. My drink is coming soon. I begin to realize that the people in my vicinity have all changed. I have a new neighbor: An older woman with a cropped, silver thatch, petal-pink sweater, and necklace with frosty-glass beads. She, too, is leaning against her suitcase. I wonder if she has arthritis. I glance down at the floor, noticing the details in the tiles again. Cobalt flecks adorn the outer rings of the rhombus pattern. I used to think there were little shell pieces embedded there but now, I’m not so sure. It just looks like shards of scrap metal. I think about the beach. The real beach, with giant conkles washing up from the gulf foam. I miss the authenticity of the beaches I once knew. We only went to the beach once on this trip. It wasn’t what it used to be before the hurricanes. Ft. Myers beach was once home to a Dairy Queen, to shell-studded sand that sliced into your heels when you walked, to tide pools that filled up by the shoreline and turned to spas (and probably toilets) for small children, to a concrete boardwalk that we once
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