“Crab, please, crab, please, crab, please,” a voice says. I look farther down the jetty, and there’s the little girl in the lime green swimsuit, clutching her bag of Skittles and ducking under the railing. She’s alone, from what I can tell. I walk farther out until I’m even with her, and by then she’s several yards out from the walkway, her legs apart and her bare feet resting on two slanted rocks.

“Miss,” I call to her. She doesn’t look up. She’s bending over, reaching into one of the crevices. “Little girl,” I say. And then, “Hey!” for it seems certain she’ll topple headfirst down the jetty.

She looks up and says, “What?”

“You should come back to the walkway,” I say. “You’re not supposed to be out there.”

“Who are you, Mr. Cocoa Beach?”

“I’m Mr. Kerrigan,” I say. “Come on, now, you don’t want to get in trouble. It’s dangerous on these rocks.”

“I’m trying to catch a crab,” she says, looking down around her feet.

I tell her the crab is gone. I tell her I saw it jump off the jetty and swim away, that it was probably following the cruise ship. She rolls her eyes at that one. Then, as graceful as a gazelle on a mountainside, she hops here and there, arms out, braid swinging, and returns to the walkway. She says, “You’re nosy.”

Fair enough, I think. I ask where her parents are.

“Dead!” she cries in a delighted voice. “Everyone’s dead!” She skips back up the walk, past the rednecks and the chubby retirees, all the way to the steps and then down onto the sand.

I watch after her, thinking how Teresa would have had a heart attack right there on the spot if one of our kids had climbed out onto the jetty like that. She once read an article about how sharks eat the small fish that feed off jetty rocks, and from then on we had to walk clear down to the other side of the beach before the kids could get in the water. She read about rocket fuel sweeping outward when it exploded, and that was the end of our viewing the launches from the employees-only field, a mile away from the launchpad. “You know,” I’d told her, “it would take a lot of burning rocket fuel to spread out over a mile.” But logic like that didn’t matter, once she’d made up her mind.

I follow the little girl as she ambles along the waterline, and she looks back every so often. I see her bend over and draw something in the wet sand with her finger. She skips on, and when I reach the spot where she’s been, I see the word HI!