“Channeling your mother when she’s not even dead.”

“That’s it, I’m through,” she says, glancing down. “The baby’s going to fry if you don’t get him out of the sun.”

The baby’s wearing orange sunglasses. His hands are holding a little steering wheel mounted to the front of the stroller, and his head is leaning to one side. He looks like a miniature drunk driver.

The young man uses his foot to drag the stroller into his shadow and says, “He’s not in the sun.”

“Another contradiction?” the woman snaps.

A marital fight is the last thing I feel like witnessing right now, so I head back down the stairs.

Nothing looks the way I remember it. They’ve dredged sand from the bottom of the ocean and added it to the beach, and it’s twice as wide as it used to be. The port’s been gutted into a pair of turning basins for cruise ships. Even the jetty’s been renovated with a fancy cement overlay and metal railings. My loafers take in sand as I walk toward it.

A pair of chunky retirees are parked a little ways down the cement walk, fishing and watching a golf game on a battery-operated television. Farther out on the jetty is a foursome of rednecks: two men, two women, six poles. They’ve staked out a little area for themselves with Budweiser cans, a bait bucket, and a radio playing one of those “long highway back to you” songs. They have tattoos all over their backs, even the women.

I walk past them and lean into the railing.

One of the rednecks grins in my direction. He tilts a beer can up to his lips and drinks. Then he says, “When’s your birthday?”

“Me? October.”

“Mine’s today.”

The woman next to him makes a remark about how everyone on the goddamn beach already knows it’s his birthday. She suggests he tell the goddamn fish. “I’m sure they’d like to know.”

“Hey, guess what?” he asks her.

“What?”

“Chicken’s butt.” He turns back to me. “You know what time I was born?”

I shake my head.

“Twelve minutes after midnight. Twelve-twelve. How’s that for a lucky number?”

Over his shoulder, a cruise ship is inching toward us. It gets bigger and bigger as it steers away from the port and into the channel. There hardly seems room for it. On the deck, passengers are waving at us, the last land-bound faces they’ll see before leaving the coast behind. As the ship creeps past the jetty, the redneck who announced his birthday stares at it and holds up his middle finger for a solid minute.