Then I remembered the boy. He was nowhere in sight. Maybe he left, maybe he felt as awkward as I had, or maybe he ran home to eat breakfast. Maybe he wasn’t as destitute as I thought. The sun poured into the courtyard and yesterday’s sunburn itched under my shirt. My problems were more immediate now.
Our motorcycles were parked in a jumbled line in the courtyard below. From the railing, I asked everyone if they had seen the kid, and only the Brit knew what I meant. He laughed and told the story as he pulled bungee cords from his luggage rack.
Right before I left, I got one more glance at him. He emerged from his room on the second floor, yawned and stretched, smiling straight into a beam of sunlight, unaware that everyone in the courtyard below had talked about him. He had washed his clothes, and now he laid everything carefully along the railing in the sun. When he saw me, he nodded and made a shy wave. For $100, he could let his mom ‘play’ for three weeks if that’s what she wanted, and he was just starting to make himself at home. Today, he was the luckiest kid in the world.