Then she stopped in front of the phone, looked up at her, and asked, very clearly,
“Where is your child?”
The woman blinked.
“Excuse me?”
Sophie did not move.
“Where is your child?” she asked again. “You keep talking about kids. Which one is yours?”
Sophie looked at the phone and then back at her face.
The woman looked around as if an answer might appear beside her.
“I don’t have one with me.”
Sophie looked at the phone and then back at her face.
“Then why are you telling my mom how to feed hers?”
The whole beach went quiet.
A grandmother sitting two umbrellas down lifted a hand toward Sophie.
The woman straightened and tried to recover.
“Sweetheart, come back to your mother,” she said.
Then she turned to the woman.
“The child already made the point clearly enough.”
The woman straightened and tried to recover.
“I’m thinking about everyone else,” she said. “Some of us care what children are exposed to.”
A father near the shoreline shook his head.
“Put your phone down.”
“My kids did not notice anything until you started shouting and pointing your phone,” he said. “You made this weird, not her.”
That was when my voice came back.
“Put your phone down,” I said. “You do not have permission to record my children.”
She hesitated.
Then I said, “No one here was uncomfortable until you decided they should be.”
Her face went bright red. She lowered the phone, muttered that the beach had changed, and walked fast toward the parking lot without apologizing.
She crouched beside her castle again and asked if I thought the tower needed another shell.
When I looked back at Sophie, she did not seem proud of herself. She seemed irritated, like the woman had interrupted something important.
She crouched beside her castle again and asked if I thought the tower needed another shell.
I told her it definitely did.
