Lost

My father had lunch with an old friend named Dale Smith who remembered a trip we once took with both of our families.

Costa Rica 20 years ago, the Smiths and the Marstellers, 12 people, two vans (one for each family), and one Spanish speaker among us. We never understood why my father always insisted on speaking Spanish because there were plenty of people who spoke English like the guy at the hotel, but he always spoke to them in Spanish. There was a huge pool at the hotel that my best friend Ben and I would sit in and watch a man cut the grass with a machete. “Don’t they know about lawn mowers here,” I asked Ben. He just shrugged his shoulders.
On our way to a mountain town for lunch we stopped at some place so my father could get some coffee to take back, though I didn’t like having to wait so long when you could get coffee back in America, and I tried it once, and it tasted awful. Finally he came back with a burlap bag, and we drove up to this small town. I was in the Smiths van so I could ride with Ben.
The restaurant was a wooden building and all the furniture was wooden. It looked dirty, but my father had heard something about the restaurant that we had to try. I wanted a hamburger, but they didn’t have them. I asked where the restroom was and my father pointed towards a door with a sign that said vaqueros. I went in and watched the other men, who look suspicious, leave and I locked the old rusty lock because there were suspicious looking people, though it was hard to budge. I found out just how hard when I tried to unlock it. I was trapped in there for 15 minutes before finally I worked it open.
Not really interested in what my father had ordered me I went back to the table to talk to Ben, but… I couldn’t find them. It wasn’t a big restaurant, but I looked all over, and went outside to look. No one. No one even paid attention to me. There was a store across the way so I went in to find them there waiting for me to catch up because I was always dragging behind, I was the slow eater. No one.
I went back to the restaurant and sat on the front steps. They had left me. Now I couldn’t go home. What am I going to do? Well, I bet I can get a job at the store across the way. They probably need someone to sweep, and I bet that would pay me enough to eat. Sitting there trying to work out my future was where they found me. Later it was explained to me that my family thought I was with the Smiths and the Smiths thought I was with my family. I was always so quiet that they often forgot I was there, and sometimes forgot I wasn’t. The first thing I did was burst out crying because I wouldn’t have to sweep the floors of the store.
That wasn’t the last place I got left for being so quiet, but it was certainly more exotic than Disney land. At least back in the states when I was forgotten in a corner for time out there was my older brother to tell my mother because he needed someone to play with.