Before the Footprints

At sunrise, the wet sand at Cape Hillsborough held more color than the sky. Coral light spread beneath Jo’s feet, interrupted by the dark shapes of the headlands and the faint ridges the retreating tide had left behind. Beyond Casuarina Beach, the sea moved in low, patient folds. She had come down from her borrowed camper with her phone ready, intending to send her daughter proof that her mother was having a wonderful time. Then she noticed the patterns in the sand and forgot to take the photograph.

They looked like little explosions made of beads. Some formed careful fans; others curled around holes scarcely wider than a pencil. There were hundreds of them, separated by stretches of apparently untouched beach, and their delicacy suggested an unreasonable amount of effort. Jo crouched beside one without stepping into it. At forty-seven, she had spent enough mornings finding things someone else had left on the floor to feel entitled to recognize a mess. This was something more deliberate.

“I was hoping you’d know,” someone said behind her.

She looked up and recognized Kit, the man who had helped her decipher the campsite washing machine the previous evening. Neither of them had been able to make it start until another camper pointed out the closed water tap. Their shared incompetence had led to twenty minutes of conversation, and afterward Jo had caught herself listening for his laugh from the neighboring pitch. This morning he wore a faded green shirt, and his hair had escaped whatever he had done to it before leaving his van.

He crouched at a respectful distance from the tiny arrangements. Jo suggested a very industrious insect. Kit proposed a crab, then spoiled his authority by admitting that he had proposed a crab yesterday to explain an entirely different hole. They agreed to wait and see. Along the upper beach, a wallaby bent toward the ground while visitors watched from farther away. Jo tucked her phone into her pocket. The animal needed no contribution from them, and for once neither did her daughter.

Lucy had moved into her first apartment the previous week. Jo had helped carry a mattress up three flights of stairs, stocked the new refrigerator, and returned home to discover that her own evening required no planning at all. The holiday was Lucy’s suggestion; the camper belonged to Jo’s sister. She liked traveling, but most of her journeys had involved delivering somebody safely to somewhere. She had not expected the hardest part of being alone to be resisting the urge to report that she was managing it.

Kit listened while looking at the sand, giving her the comfort of not having to perform her confession. His own visit was a pause between a family gathering in Mackay and the long drive home. He had intended to stay one night and had stayed three, partly because he liked the park and partly because a book he had brought was proving better than expected. Jo found this explanation both attractive and faintly outrageous. She could imagine being persuaded to remain somewhere by a road closure, a sick relative, perhaps a broken axle. A good book would never have occurred to her.

The first crab appeared when they stopped talking. It was so small that Jo initially mistook it for a piece of sand moving in the breeze. Then it vanished, leaving both of them leaning forward. They settled on an undisturbed patch a little farther back, where their shadows did not fall across the hole. A few minutes later it returned. The creature worked beside the entrance, and one more tiny pellet joined the others. Kit’s smile widened slowly, pleased enough by the answer that he seemed to forget he had guessed it.

Jo wanted to laugh, but quietly. The beach had been busy under their feet all along. She watched another crab emerge and then another, the patterns acquiring makers as the light strengthened. When Kit checked the park’s information on his phone, they found a name for them: sand bubbler crabs. He offered her the screen, and she moved close enough to read it over his hand. His shoulder touched hers. Neither adjusted the distance immediately, and the warmth of that small contact remained after he put the phone away.

The sun had begun to clear the horizon. Visitors along the beach turned toward it, and the sand brightened around the intricate little fans. Jo and Kit stood, careful to step back into their own tracks, and walked toward the shade. At the beach entrance, a silver-haired man with amber eyes and a cobalt-blue scarf passed close enough to offer a quiet good morning. He continued toward the water with a camera slung over one shoulder, leaving them to decide which path to take.

They chose the day-use area, where trees held a little of the night’s coolness. Jo sat on the edge of a picnic bench while Kit shook the sand from his shoes. Without the wide sea to look at, it was suddenly easier to notice him: the crease beside his mouth, his careful attention when she spoke, the fact that he had asked about her holiday without once asking whether she had a husband. She volunteered that there had not been one for several years. Kit paused with a shoe in his hand, and the brief, unmistakable lift in his expression pleased her more than a polished compliment could have.

He told her he was single too. The admission changed nothing about their surroundings, but Jo became conscious of the space beside her on the bench and shifted her bag to the ground. He sat there. They talked about places they had passed without stopping, and she confessed that she had driven by several turnoffs because she could not decide whether a detour was worthwhile. Kit had done the opposite and once spent an afternoon at a lake that had contained no water. She laughed so hard that he looked satisfied with the failure all over again.

When the laughter faded, his hand rested on the bench between them. Jo put hers over it before she could turn the gesture into a question she was too sensible to ask. He turned his palm upward and closed his fingers around hers. The park was waking around them, birds calling overhead and a car door closing beyond the trees, yet she felt she had found an unexpectedly private moment in the middle of an ordinary morning.

“Would this count as a worthwhile detour?” he asked.

Jo looked at his mouth, then back at his eyes. “It’s showing promise.”

He leaned closer, giving her time to meet him. Their first kiss was gentle and brief; the second came after she touched his cheek and kept him near. His hand tightened around hers, and she felt the unfamiliar pleasure of wanting something without also having to organize it for everybody else. When they separated, he was smiling, though less confidently than before. She liked that too.

They decided to walk one of the park’s tracks together while the morning was still cool, collecting their water and hats first. Jo finally took out her phone and photographed the bright curve of the beach through the trees. She sent the picture to Lucy with a message saying she would call later. Then she saved Kit’s number, returned the phone to her pocket, and stood up without checking for an answer. He waited beside the path, holding out his hand.