Humidity assaulted my hair the way waves had come at my feet.
I maybe have an hour, I thought as I stood waiting for Chase to lock our room, until my flat-ironed highlights turn to a tangled mess of fuzz. 
The black and white cat who so very much wanted to be friends, mewed a pathetic whimper down our hall.  Huh. Now that would suck. To be a walking hairball in this suffocating air.

Chase and I strode across the concrete bridge of our resort and already my cuticles were sweating. Our hands found that familiar place of connection as we breathed easy because our kids were thousands of miles away with their grandma. 

I’m not bragging, but I’m bragging. It was amazing.

“Hola,” we said in painful Americano.

“Hola,” he said. He opened our gate with a nod and a smirk. Maybe because he knew my husband was about to approach the street the way he approaches spiders. With great fear and trepidation. I mean, we were a few days into our vacation so he’d watched us hop resorts several times already. He’d seen the frantic eyes, the scurry, the dust that clouded me as I was left to fend for myself.

“Want a drink before dinner,” Chase asked once we’d survived a Tasmanian of a Camry. 

“Yeah, sounds good.”

They were sitting atop the same barstools where we’d met them earlier. When our shoulders burned like the sand and we smelled of salt and seaweed.

“Heeey!” we said as though we were longtime friends. And of course in bar-speak, we were.

“That wedding was beautiful.”

“It was.”

I’d seen them as part of the onlookers who’d climbed trees and lifeguard stands to watch our family.

“Where you guys from?” she asked us, her voice whiny and a bit grating.

“Denver. How about you?”

“Florida. We came down here and left our kids with their dads.” Her thumb waved over to her girlfriend.

She has a life, I thought. Parents she’s close to, relationships that have hurt, friends that have stuck it out, siblings who won’t speak to her, a school she attended, a street she drives every day to get home, a family of her own. There were many days before this, the one that crossed our paths.

“Ah. How many kids do you have?”

 “I have four. She has two,” she said.

“Wow, four.”

“Yeah, after my first two I was diagnosed with cancer in my ovaries and my stomach.”

“Oh. My. Word. Are you kidding?”

“No, so I went through chemo and radiation, that’s why my hair’s so short,” she said with a flip of her cute blonde bob. “The doctors told me I’d never have any more kids.”

 “And you have four.” I’m no genius but the math wasn’t working out. I could feel a meaty story coming. 

“Then I found out I was pregnant so they wanted me to have an abortion, but I just couldn’t do it, you know?”

I think I closed my mouth long enough to get my next words out. “What a difficult decision to have to make.”

“It was crazy. And then I went in and they were like, ‘There are two sacs,’ and I was like, ‘What?'” Her sentences were running into each other with a nervousness that said she was letting us see a preciously vulnerable place. My own breathing became a little faster as I listened.

“I went through with the pregnancy. Both boys were almost full term, born a healthy six pounds, and I’m cancer free now.”

“No. No way. That is an unbelievable story. I…that’s amazing.”

Sometimes my faith grows in places I never expect. Even at a poolside bar with an afro and a sunburn.