It was a Tuesday, and the tide was high. It lapped at the stairs of sand layering the beach, pulling the granules through the surf, both out to calm waters and back onto shore. At the horizon the sun was two fingers away from set, and an orange hue tinted the waves as they rode to shore and melted, like sticky creamsicles on the boardwalk, back into the water. By now all the fallen boardwalk treats had been reduced to wooden sticks by birds and heat, splintering tan wood against the weathered brown of the planks. Pigeons pecked for popcorn kernels between the cracks, seagulls circled and screeched, beckoning to their underwater prey like sirens no mortal would chase. Beneath the shade of the hotdog stand, a worker wiped his ruddy face on a tan forearm and continued repairing the picnic bench that had spontaneously collapsed around midday. As he worked, he thought about his family– wife, no kids yet (although they’d been trying), a dog and a small apartment east of town. The super was friendly, the neighbors were few. This was a tourist town, made for instant gratification and short-term pleasures, more of a how-hard-can-you-bang-this-stick-on-that-platform, hey-do-you-want-your-prize?, two-for-a-buck-come-and-get-it mentality than the mom-and-pop community he had been envisioning. It was peaceful for three quarters of the year, but too quiet. The only jobs available were at the grocery store and the gas station, or at the school where his wife worked, where the kids came in with salt in their hair and surfboard leash imprints on their ankles, and where they lived for summer, as most kids naturally do. But this was a special sort of dedication, the one reserved for those kids whose parents toured them around Europe to dine on tapas and prosciutto and occasionally snails, and for these kids, the ones who spent the hottest days biking across town with wet towels around their shoulders, who rode the Ferris wheel for free because the operator ate at their parents’ diner on the weekends, who knew the nauseating joy of too much popcorn as well as they knew the streets. In that sense, the town was homey; he could cheer on the kids during the hot dog eating contest using their nicknames, but next to Jake, whose dad ran the hardware store, there was a man in a Hawai’ian shirt yelling at his wife for having bought only one souvenir for the relatives back home, and the twentysomethings sitting on the benches he cleaned on the weekdays, reeking of pot smoke and unrequited lust, out-of-townness evident in posture and the way they lurked in the same 30 square feet every night, blissfully ignorant of the whirling delights a roller coaster could bring to an addled mind.

During the fall and winter, he worked at the gas station, where he kept a stash of mystery novels taken from the boardwalk lost-and-found (but only after they had gone unclaimed for two weeks) and read them during his breaks, and in the spring he was the designated repair man for the rides that had deteriorated during the rainy season. Despite only having lived there for three years and worked there for two, he knew the ins and outs of the boardwalk. The trap door under the whack-a-mole machine that led to a secluded sunset vista, the cash registers that stuck and the ones that refused to lock, the reason the ferris wheel gate needed the most oiling (it was a popular weekday makeout spot among the high schoolers, and many took advantage of their late curfews to sneak through the gate after hours and climb the emergency ladder to the top). Sometimes he would climb up there himself, ignoring the ache in his shoulders and conscience, to relax into the swinging metal seat and watch the sun drowsily burn its wick to the base. He would remove the stowed paperback from his pocket, and 70 feet suspended, whitecaps waving below, he would read.

Sometimes he’d skip the novel and just sit, admiring the horizon, twisting his head to look back on the town outlined behind and below, with the school and the hardware store and the gas station, and the small apartment to the east, nestled between tourist traps and B&Bs. In the winter, it was chilly, but he didn’t mind– admiring the ocean, sunset, three-quarters-mom-and-pop town wasn’t a chore. Reluctantly, when the sherbet glow had almost disappeared from the clouds, and the number of streetlights and stars were about equal, he would climb down, grateful for the well-worn planks under his feet, and set off for home.