It's All Relative by Wade Rouse

with the waves, the tide her partner, back and forth, side to side, arms extended, kicking high, high, higher than the waves.
    â€œYou’re amazing!” I screamed one morning over the water and wind.
    â€œYou’re kind!” she exhaled, returning to grab her husband’s hand. “But thank you, my dear!” She sang this line, like she sang most lines, before kicking a leg—and a whole lot of sand—straight up into the air like a human geyser.
    And then we would walk. And talk. About nothing important, except life and time and hopes and dreams.
    Every morning, toward the end of our walks, Ira and Dottie would open a plastic Publix grocery bag they had brought with them and start throwing bits of bread and crushed crackers at a horde of gulls.
    Anything having to do with birds and possible pecking of eyes caused me to panic.
    â€œIt’s okay,” Dottie said. “We feed them every morning and night.”
    â€œWe feed them a lot,” Ira continued. “Some people have their hummingbirds or wrens, we’ve got our gulls.”
    â€œThey’re a bit aggressive,” laughed Dottie, “but they are full of life. We started feeding them because”—here she danced directly into the middle of the pack, like she was moving into a war zone, the birds swarming her—“because of these two.”
    Sitting rather still, in the middle of this chaos, were two cartoonish-looking old sea gulls, not even bothering to move. “These two we found bound in a plastic six-pack container. We cut them loose to save them, but their wings and legs were injured.”
    â€œThey’re slower than their comrades, but still full of life,” Ira said. “We call them Ozzie and Harriet.”
    â€œShoo, Ozzie,” said Dottie. “Shoo, Harriet.”
    The gulls didn’t move exactly, but Ozzie took a step or two to the left, squawking loudly, screaming at the top of his lungs, for his mate to hurry up. She took one high step and then another, very deliberately, going at her own pace, even stooping carefully to eat a few grains of sand. Ozzie would squawk, followed by Harriet, and it was then I knew I had seen this act before: not only from my parents, but also standing before me.
    True love, I thought, solidified by time, hardened by age.
    A few mornings later, Dottie and Ira surprised me by announcing, “Oh, my God, we read your first book,
America’s Boy
!”
    Both laughed but said nothing more.
    â€œWhere did you get it?” I asked.
    â€œThe library.”
    â€œYou should have bought it. I need the royalties.”
    Again they laughed, but said nothing more.
    â€œAnd …?” I asked. “Don’t leave me hangin’.”
    â€œI can’t say we enjoyed it,” Dottie said, “but I can say it was something we needed to read.”
    â€œLiving in New York, we always assumed it was easy for people to be themselves, no matter who they were, what they did, who they loved,” Ira said. “But your memoir made us reevaluate that.”
    For the next few weeks we continued to walk and talk and laugh, me always turning one final time—before I would head back to see Gary and the dogs—in order to watch this old couple walking, holding hands, an image clouded on the beach, blurred by the fine mist from the ocean, until I could see nothing more than two ghosts giggling, kissing, and then disappearing.
    And then one morning they
were
gone.
    After the weekend, they did not meet me for our regular walk on Monday. Or Tuesday.
    I had never asked where they lived. They had never offered it. So I didn’t know where to look for them.
    I began to ask passersby and homeowners along the beach about the couple, only to receive very little information. Sarasota, it seemed, was a town of transients, coming and going, staying one step ahead of the snow and then one step ahead of the heat.
    Finally, one day, I happened to