Most days, Mable could occupy herself very well until night came to trap her inside the walls of her and her brothers shared hotel room.

Today was not one of those days.

No one interesting was around!  Or at least, no one that wanted to give her the time of day or even talk to her.  It was making her feel very sad and invisible.  But she wouldn't let something like that keep her down!

Instead of sitting and sulking and feeling sorry for herself, Mable made up a game to play by herself in the streets of Whitby.  Currently, she was timing how long it took her to kick a rock down the road, and then tried to beat that time by doing it again and again and again.

It wasn't as easy as it looked.

But it was something to do other than think, and Mable was very intent on not thinking today, so she would keep it up for as long as she possibly could.

The cart was empty. Some days it felt like the thing would never be empty again. No one around to pay for the order? Then he had to haul it back, unload it, and try again until he ran out of space again. Ran out of space? Then he had to solicit. Soliciting establishments didn’t work? Well, then he either had to drink the costs or try the people he knew couldn’t say ‘no’, even if they were better off doing so.

Mostly, he ‘drank’ the costs.

He saw a tall child kicking a rock down the street, and gave her a polite nod and wide berth regarding himself and his cart. While his stature was more common in Whitby, it didn’t stop people of all walks of life taking one look at him and deciding: ‘threat’.

The sound of a cart approaching was not unusual, but Mable still paused in her game at the sight of a tall man accompanying it.

Less than a year ago, someone like this was a person Mable would have avoided.  In her memories of him, her father had been massive, a giant of a man who used his height to intimidate and cause violence.  But since leaving home, she'd seen and met many people who looked just like him, but were nothing like him at all.

So Mable picked up her rock when the man sent her a polite smile, taking it as a sign, and skipped up beside him.  She would try just once last time to have a nice conversation with a stranger, and if it didn't work out, she'd keep to herself until breakfast the next day.

Hopefully, it woudn't come to that.

"Hello, sir," she greeted, "what are you up to today?"

Like clay rapidly hardening, Ropati’s damning smile plastered itself in place as she bounded up. Well, shit. He’d meant to look non-threatening, not approachable.

He blinked when he saw her face. She was a bit older than he expected to be out playing with rocks.

“Just the end of a long day, little miss,” he answered, pausing to wipe sweat-beaded glasses on his breast pocket.

He kept pushing and walking, though his stride had slowed out of knee-jerk sympathy. Something told him this one wasn’t done with him yet.

“How about you? Did you find the right rock?”

What did British children concern themselves with at her age, other than finding work, having an early mid-life crisis, and fighting in the street? He still had a faded partial bite mark on his hand from breaking up that one.

A long day was right.  Mable nodded sympathetically and looked over the empty cart with a tilted head.

At the mention of her rock, Mable smiled and lifted it, showing it off to the man.

"I think so.  Its very nice and heavy, but not so hard that it hurts to kick!  The very best rock, in my mind, the very best ever.  Would you like to try?"

Did he want to try kicking more rocks in his life? No. Not particularly.

Did he understand that this might be very, very important in a young woman’s life? Yes. Better her heaviest concerns be rocks than whatever that last girl had been going through.

Ropati paused, leaning forward on his cart and pushing up his glasses to study it closely.

“The right amount of heft for the task, an excellent shade of gray,” he observed. “It is an exemplary rock, Little Miss.”

Still. Maybe he could get out of kicking it by just complimenting its fantastic utility for kicking.

The man's words made Mable beam as if he was praising her, and not a rock she had found on the street.  She hugged it close to her chest and did a little twirl.

"It is very ex - excellent, isn't it!  I shall name it Bertha, and she will keep all my shells company on my desk!"  Bertha would fit in perfect among the rest of her collection.  How wonderful, how wonderful!

"My name is Mable, sir, and this is Bertha!  What might your name be, kind sir?  Bertha is very fond of you, you have been very nice to the both of us!"

“A beautiful name for a beautiful rock. Shell have a long life.”

The longer he looked at her, heard her … the more he wondered if someone might get the wrong idea about a fellow his age talking to an unaccompanied young woman.

Then again, her hair texture and the tone of her skin were not so far from his own. Eyes too light to be his (or hers) … his head ran numbers. That child would be old enough to have children of their own.

If anyone asked, she was his grandchild.

“Ropati,” he answered, perhaps too quickly for an untrained ear.

Her accent wasn’t, well, from here, nor did it seem woven with more familiar Spanish or German.

“Are your parents about?” he asked, friendly but for some carefully tucked away wariness.

Am I about to get charged with something?

"Ro - Ropati?"  What a unique name!  Mable had never heard anything like it before.  "Mr. Ropati, you have a wonderful name!"

Mable looked away when he asked about her parents, her smile faltering for just a moment.

"My parents have passed, Mr. Ropati, but my brother is about.  He takes care of me.  But he's very boring lately, so I have to entertain myself during the day."

The girl was ignorant to Ropati's concerns other than that, and moved the conversation on quickly.

"May I ask where you're from, Mr. Ropati?  You don't sound like the other people in Whitby, but I think that's a good thing!  It makes you more interesting than the rest of the folk here."

Well, that was a new one. Same island? Different island? The European names in Samoa tended to run French, but ‘Mable’ sounded … not-French. English? German? One of those, maybe.

“So do you, Mable.”

Oh. Ropati pulled his lips in the moment she looked away. Whatever this was, this wasn’t good news. He would have apologized for her loss, but she was on to the next subject. Her brother?

“Are you both … orphans, then?”

Were they both too young to be fending for themselves?

“There are … much more interesting things than where I came from,” he answered, leaning against his cart. “Tell me about your shell collection.”