Fiction
Agatha’s foot knocked one wine bottle into another and the clink was enough to force her eyes open. She’d been half awake for several minutes, but hadn’t wanted to face what the sound of the surf and the gulls told her, what her throbbing hip in the uneven sand told her: that she and Sergio had finally passed out on the beach last night, too spent from their impasse to trudge up to the parking lot, too drunk to drive the dozen or so blocks back to their rented bungalow.
She closed the eye that was blocked by a fold of blanket and, with the open one, watched the gray-blue tide roll in and out, the horizon’s clouds promising a muted sunrise. For all the grandness the beach had had in the night, with the wild stars and heaped-up silvery clouds, it now had a controlled and tamped-down feel.
She rolled toward Sergio and pulled the blanket around her shoulders, tried to grind a better spot in the sand for her body. Sergio’s open mouth was relaxed into a comical diagonal, a trickle of drool glistening at the corner.
The question wasn’t whether he would go to prison this time; his sentencing was in a couple of weeks and they had a pretty good idea it would be somewhere between one and two years. The question was whether their relationship would survive to the end of their vacation. But that hurt too much to think about. That couldn’t really be true.
She turned away from him again and noticed a speck forming far down the beach, near the resort hotels. Probably one of the metal detector types: they reminded her of housewives in vintage vacuum cleaner ads she’d seen, their serene expressions, the graceful sweeping arms.
Sergio’s crimes were usually minor—a means to an end, a way to get enough money together to invest, or start a legit business, or take that fantasy trip, like this one to Hawaii, which she knew hadn’t gone as he’d planned. He had been expecting romance, and Agatha had given him therapy.
The speck was a person, she could see now, with coarse movements, more masculine than feminine. She tried to make out whatever contraption the person was pushing, definitely not a metal detector. It wobbled ahead of him. He pitched and tossed like a plastic bottle on waves.
She loved Sergio. He was funny, and sociable, and he always told her she looked good and her voice was beautiful and her body felt great. He earned more loyalty from her than was warranted, she supposed, just by saying the right things.
A few minutes passed and she understood the object was a wheelbarrow, a sight she’d never seen on a beach before.
She got up and swiped sand off her evening dress, glanced back at Sergio, still sleeping, and started to walk. She reached the man, old, tan, teeth missing, the whites of his eyes so bright they gave his face a feral quality.
She asked if she could help and then wondered at herself, whether she should be cautious of her attraction to—of her quickness to support—more esoteric schemes. The man only shrugged.
There was no way, she quickly learned, to help a man pushing a wheelbarrow down the beach, except to pick up the front of it, as she’d helped her hipster sister do with the stroller whenever they trotted up steps to museums or shops. She picked it up for him and he grunted, his eyes flashed, his sinewy muscles rippled.
She wondered how long they would walk. Sometimes she had to set it down and let him struggle as the wheels sank into the sand. Then her muscles were ready to go again and she would lift. She was surprised when he stopped in line with Sergio, who continued to snooze.
“This is where we wait,” he said, his voice a flat Midwestern accent that didn’t match his islander look.
“For the whales?” she asked. She and Sergio had hoped to see a whale in the moonlight the night before, this being a good beach for it, from all reports, but they’d had no luck.
She wondered what you could take from a whale that would fit in a wheelbarrow—a tonsil? A gallbladder?
“I don’t care about those whales,” the man said. “What can they do for me? I’m waiting for the shoes.”
He explained that he had relatives in South Korea who worked a loading dock for a massive distributor. They had seen a container ship loaded with pallets, had seen that it was too full, had heard about a massive storm in the middle of the sea. They said it was certain the upper pallets had floated off. It would be torn apart, there would be running shoes, thousands of expensive ones, lost at sea. By some mysterious mathematics and understanding of the currents, it had been determined by his relatives that the shoes would reach shore here.
He explained this while rolling a cigarette and lighting it and smoking, picking the tobacco methodically off his lips, looking at it and tossing it aside with a kind of satisfied disgust.
“When are they supposed to arrive?” she asked.
“Anywhere in the next six hours,” he said, and he sighed. “I’m late. They could have come six hours ago.”
She laughed and gestured around them. “It doesn’t look like they’re here,” she said. He grunted, someone who’d lived in the world long enough to know that anything was possible.
She thought of her own running shoes in her closet, not getting much use, about how running shoes are symbols of a regimen. Of discipline. But that borrowed or lost running shoes could be a symbol of somebody else’s regimen. Of course, these shoes would be soggy, tangled with seaweed, and what would be regimented about that?
“We’ve been here all night. We slept here,” she told him, when she saw him looking at her evening wear. Whenever the sun went behind a cloud she felt goosebumps, but then it shone bright again and she was fine.
“Listen, that wheelbarrow isn’t going to do you much good,” she said.
He sucked at his teeth. “A friend is supposed to come with his van,” he said. “I was going to pile them up in there.”
“If we’re still here, and the friend hasn’t come, let us offer you our car,” she said.
“OK—I won’t have anything to give you, though.” He gave her a suspicious look.
“We’re on vacation. We’re in need of adventure.”
The day before, they had dined at a sidewalk café and ordered the first drink of the day.
“We were on the ‘why’ of it,” she said.
“Right. The why of it,” Sergio said, stretching his arms wide and then bringing them in to rub his chest through his guayabera.
“Why do you need to do it?”
“I forget to look for a pattern,” he said. “And I only see each moment as an individual opportunity. I forget to think, ‘Oh, yes, this is bad behavior—better check that.’”
“Wouldn’t a gambling habit be better? Easier on our relationship?”
“You always lose money gambling. I’ve made some money doing what I do. And hey, we’ll still have another year or so after I get out, won’t we, if you wanted to try for a baby?” Sergio said.
She stared him down. “I don’t want a baby,” she said. They had covered this before.
“Ok,” he said, smiling. “I just thought I’d bring it up in case you’d changed your mind.”
She had met him through the kayaking group she joined, had been flattered that he came to see her at the nightclub where she sang on Fridays. She hated and was a bit embarrassed about the particular club, where everyone was over sixty and expected straightforward renditions of Doris Day and Dinah Shore songs. But talking to him during the break made it all better. He was driving to Minneapolis, he explained, while she sipped a Coke. It was a ten-hour drive and he wondered if she would join him. He needed to drop off a package. He thought she could sing to him, keep him from getting bored. Maybe she’d like to see what the clubs were like in another city. It was six months and several expensive dates later that she found out the trip had been a drug run, that he had made twenty grand doing it, that he’d known all along what it was about.
“I’m done with this, you know that,” she said, brushing crostini crumbs off her hands, watching a little sparrow pecking at them on the tile floor. “I’m glad we’re keeping it good-natured, but you see what I mean. I’m about through.”
“You didn’t mind our first summer together, when all we did was sit by the pool and order green drinks the whole day,” Sergio said with a playful side-eye.
She tilted her head, deciding not to tell him she’d been reminiscing too, that she’d just been thinking of their first summer.
She pushed her straw up and down through the ice in her glass. “You don’t even love me for me. It’s the Casablanca vibe you like.”
“Very old school,” he agreed, his laugh coming out in a little puff.
The total of his two prior sentences had been almost half their time together. Both times she lied and told their friends he was on a business assignment overseas—but the lie left her paranoid that she’d screw up the story. So she kept to herself, seeing her sister, who was the only person who knew the truth, babysitting her niece, then both the kids when the second one came, spending time at the pool, bringing her office work home to the quiet apartment. It would have been better if she had wanted kids—there might have been more urgency to get out of this thing with Sergio, more urgency to look for a real marriage and family. She felt cursed by her solitary leanings—the singer and her microphone, the childless auntie, the office worker eating in her cube while the others went out. At times, the long stretches without Sergio seemed to suit her brooding style. But for all the ways aloneness sometimes fit her, it always went on too long, always grew to feel like she was sentenced too, on house arrest. When she told him about this feeling he sighed, gave a little sympathetic hum that made her feel like she’d been insensitive—he was the one really in jail, after all. When he got out they always had so much sex, so much fun—both times it had seemed worth it. Sergio was a master of the unskipped beat.
“I love you, Sergio, that’s the thing. But I would like to get on with life. To do the real living-our-lives together. But you can’t do that and continue being who you are.”
“This? I could change,” he said, with a quick reach for her hand, a jiggly massage of her knuckles.
Agatha heard a cough and saw Sergio sit up in the sand, his black hair wild and handsome. He rubbed his eyes, then waved to her and the old man. She figured he might be frustrated that someone else was in the picture, but she was determined not to care.
The guy, Hyo, told her a bit more about the work he’d been able to find—demeaning work for the tourist trade, cleaning rooms, clearing tables—and she knew why getting rich quick would be so important to him.
The next time she looked back, Sergio was coming down the sand toward them.
“This is Hyo,” she said when Sergio sat. He reached his hand over to shake, his grin sleepy but wide. “Hyo’s waiting for thousands of Nike sneakers to come in on the tides.”
Sergio loved this plan. He asked question after question, covering many of the details Agatha had already heard. He added some insights: there would likely be plastic around groups of them, and they would be in boxes too—so maybe with all that packaging they would be dry. But the ocean would have been pitching them about. So definitely some of them would be loose.
Sergio’s hypotheses were wrong for the most part, according to Hyo. These shoes would be completely loose, Hyo explained. Many of them wouldn’t have mates. They had been traveling for years. They had hit British Columbia and Washington first, and some had reached the shore, were even written about in the papers. Hyo’s Korean relatives weren’t as interested as they’d been in the past, Hyo said, believing that the shoes might be too beat up by now to be worth anything, even with their novel journey.
His commitment to the shoes sounded ridiculous and yet she saw the similarities to her plight, to whatever it was that made her love a criminal, to stay with him when he was involved in this raunchy nonsense for so many years, when he had a college degree and good friends, and could call in some favors and have a decent job whenever he wanted.
She should have left him long ago.
Instead, she’d waited for him through the jail time. She’d sent him letters and visited him separated by bulletproof glass and masturbated at night in the cold bed during those lonely years he’d been gone.
She’d planned on leaving him the night before, but their conversation had been cut short by the start of a blues band. It had been too loud to hear each other, so they brought wine and continued talking on the beach. He reminded her that they had two more days of this trip, and that if she had to end it she should just wait, because what were they going to do, mope around the most beautiful island in the world?
As Agatha and Sergio sat on the shore with their new friend, waiting for a flotilla of shoes to come ashore, Agatha was glad she and Sergio hadn’t broken up—otherwise they wouldn’t have met Hyo, wouldn’t be part of this odd experience. So they sat for a long time, sometimes talking, sometimes just looking over the water. The crowds came in, they set up their umbrellas, their beach chairs. The children played around them. Hyo was nervous, snapping at the children if the sand they kicked touched him.
Sergio said he would go and get beverages. He came back with three frozen drinks and a fresh pack of cigarettes that he shared with Hyo.
With so many people in the water, Agatha wondered if everyone would try to get their hands on the shoes. Hyo had no more claim to the bounty than these people did.
“What if he’s wrong?” Sergio whispered.
But the sun was pleasant, and the diversion better than the breakup with Sergio that she’d told herself was imminent.
And then she spotted one.
She found herself unable to get a breath from the surprise of it, the sight of a shoe she’d never expected to see, smacking against the rocks in the pebbly section of beach where none of the kids played. She pointed it out to Hyo and he got up and casually walked over. He crouched before the shoe and then stood back, a respectful gesture. He picked it up, shook water off, turned the sneaker around and around, then stood and faced Agatha and Sergio, offering a quick nod across the yards separating them. He trudged across the rocks cradling a white leather Nike with a black swoosh. “May I?” Sergio asked, after a minute or two watching Hyo with the shoe. Hyo handed it to Sergio, reluctantly, and she could feel his impatience while Sergio and then she handled it. Though it was heavy, it seemed already barely wet. She figured the sneaker would feel soggy if she pushed her hand inside, but worried that would offend Hyo.
“It’s in much better shape than I expected,” Agatha said.
Hyo nodded. “Now each shoe needs to dry naturally, or the leather could crack. I don’t expect to make too much from them, being an older style and with the damage,” Hyo said, turning the shoe in his hands, “but some people will buy them for their story.”
“Time for another drink!” Sergio said. “Should I make a run?”
“Sure,” said Hyo, a big smile.
Hyo turned back to the water and looked over its great expanse. She could feel him vacillate between certainty there would be more and dread over the single shoe. The waves lapped in, revealing no secrets.
Sergio returned and they sipped quietly. Her drink completed, she nudged Sergio and whispered to him, “Let’s take a walk. I think he needs time.”
They moved along the shore and she could see women noticing Sergio’s broad chest, his easy good looks.
“So, six months tops,” he said, a diminishment of last night’s estimate. “And there’s plenty of money. None of that stuff is traceable and you have all those account numbers.”
“You just expect I’ll be here when you’re out?”
“It’s a lot for me to ask, you know, directly. Expecting is a little easier.”
“You can’t. You can’t expect it anymore,” she said.
“You have to do what feels right, Agatha.”
“You’re setting me free, then?”
“Whatever you need to do, honey. You have my support.”
“I don’t want your money,” she said. “I don’t want those accounts.”
Sergio shrugged. “Then don’t use them.”
“I don’t want to have access at all. Don’t leave me thinking that I’ll be using your apartment or your money or anything of yours, because I need to end this.”
“You don’t seem like you mean it. You seem like you want us to be together,” he said.
“I’m just here for this vacation and then that’s it.”
“OK,” he said.
“Shouldn’t you get angry? Shouldn’t this mean something to you?”
“It’s deeply painful,” he said in his fully relaxed voice. “I’m going to prison. Again. And it sounds like I’m losing you this time.”
She sighed. “You think I’ll be waiting. I can just tell.”
He stopped walking and turned to her. “I wasn’t thinking it so much as hoping.” He put his hands on her shoulders and she readied herself for something deep and sad and romantic. “I will need to make some arrangements for my houseplants,” he said. “Can I give those to you or would you prefer that I have someone come and water them?”
“Sergio!” She couldn’t believe he would talk to her about his plants. “Rent it out, I guess,” she said, exasperated by the what’d-I-do? look on his face. “Rent it furnished and they can water your plants.”
“Oh, that’s a good idea. Can you take care of lining someone up?” he said.
“No. It’s not my problem.”
“You’re really done, then?”
She looked into his eyes, dark and deep in the bright sun.
“Wow,” he said. He turned from her, leaned and reached for a smooth stone, gave it the swinging toss of an expert skipper, but it didn’t skip and was swallowed by a wall of wave.
Did she want him to make a promise? Would she wait if he promised not to let this happen again? What could be done with one of his promises anyway?
Hyo was excited when they returned. There had been another shoe, the exact match to the first one, same size, same style. The pair. What were the chances, he reasoned, that there could be an exact pair? Didn’t that mean there would be the variety, the masses, to follow?
“Who’s going to call me, and sing on the phone to me?” Sergio whispered over her shoulder.
She felt an uneasy rise and fall in her middle. Sergio was reminding her of sweeter times, also maybe telling her that she had a role in their demise, that she had changed the rules of the game by no longer really being a singer. She had taken an office job during his last sentence, stopped hunting down nightclub work because the hunting itself was tedious and the rewards too sporadic, the late nights crossing club parking lots giving her a devastated feeling.
She would need to start all over, looking for a companion, a love, without even dreams of artistic success to sustain her.
“You could have changed this,” she said, stepping away from him, searching the horizon for more shoes.
“Hyo?” Sergio was suddenly animated, and by the sound of his voice it was anger that energized him. “You know what? You know something? My girlfriend here, of ten years, she’s done with me. This is our last vacation together and we’re through.”
Hyo looked at her, his bushy eyebrows raised, more concern than was really possible.
“What happened?” Hyo said. “You’re a nice couple!”
She thought of all the times she had covered for Sergio, kept his secret from their friends. What for again? He had never thanked her for that, but instead had shrugged like it was a lie she told more for her sake than for his. Well, fine then.
“He’s going to prison,” Agatha said, her voice hotter and rougher than she’d expected. “Again!”
Hyo looked at Sergio. He wanted the whole story.
“It’s part of my work,” Sergio explained, a quick glossing over of facts. “Sometimes I have to serve some time.”
“You’re here now,” Hyo gave Sergio a sly look. “So—you disappear before sentencing!”
Agatha was in awe of how quickly Hyo understood Sergio’s criminal mind. The energy between the two men notched up, like a chemical reaction. And next they were onto schemes, partners, cutting Agatha out. They reviewed the merits of escape, all scenarios she’d heard Sergio work through before. They circled toward the place where the flight plan always broke down, that part when Sergio needed to picture himself in some kind of menial work, something low profile. She knew the outcome. He’d rather serve prison time than start completely over.
Freedom wasn’t his real concern. Going to prison, in fact, allowed him to maintain a way of life he’d become accustomed to, one that he’d be comfortable enough returning to. Still he humored himself and Hyo, their enthusiastic discussion rattling on, while she fumed.
She told herself it was a good thing she felt so cut off from him, a good sign that she was really letting go. It was hard to trust herself, though. She had felt done with him in the past and somehow hadn’t pushed it through to a final end.
Maybe the frustration was what caused her to bark, “Sergio, let’s go. There’s nothing more to wait for.”
He blinked hard and fast. “What are you talking about? There’re shoes coming. We told Hyo we’d wait with him!”
“No, there aren’t any shoes. And there’s no escape plan. And we should be spending this time saying goodbye.”
Sergio shrugged, perplexed in a particularly male way. “Hyo, it’s been a pleasure. I’d like to buy those shoes from you.”
“You want my cousin’s number? In case you decide to stay here? Like we were saying?”
“Uh, sure.” Sergio fumbled for a piece of paper and pen, but had no luck. They spent another five minutes getting the number memorized.
And then there was the business of the shoes, confirming a fit, negotiating the price.
“Come on!” she yelled.
Hyo looked at her with a touch of shock, then said, “Hey, hey, Agatha, now.” He came toward her, took her elbow. “Don’t let him go, see? He’s a good guy, just with some big dreams.”
“He thinks he can make his own rules.”
“He wants to hit it big.”
“Always.”
“And so do I. And so do you. You want the tide to turn, the money to rain down, the shoes to come in, the old man to become a new man.”
Sergio slapped his hand on Hyo’s back. “I thank you, my friend, but she’s tired of our kind.”
“She is our kind! That’s what I’m trying to tell her.”
Sergio raised one eyebrow, looking at her with affection.
He held out the pair of shoes he’d purchased from Hyo. She saw now that one had frayed laces. The other’s sole was separating.
“They’re beautiful,” he said, giving her a long look. “No match is a perfect match.”
It was too much, all the hurt and anger, and Sergio just being cute about it. She shook her head and trudged back to the blanket. Soon he was beside her and together they piled their things without a word, slung the beach bags over their shoulders. They headed up to the rented car.
They were parked at the top of a slight hill. After stowing their belongings in the back, they closed themselves inside the car.
Sergio said, “Look.”
At first she thought he was going to try some plea or declaration, something about their relationship.
But then she knew he was directing her gaze, looking out with his eyes wide so that she would look, too. What she saw was, at first, like one of the whales they had hoped to see, a great shadow hundreds of feet from shore. But the shadow, she soon saw, was made of many parts—hundreds, maybe a thousand, coming in like an alien tide. The shoes. An army of Hyo’s shoes.
It was easier to see from this height and distance than it would have been right on the beach, but Agatha thought she heard sounds of recognition from the sunbathers. Soon everyone would be enthralled by the spectacle. She could just make out Hyo among the crowd, standing next to his wheelbarrow, a hand up to shield his eyes. She wondered how he would claim them, whether they would float all the way in on their own or if Hyo might need a rowboat to make trips from shore to retrieve them.
“Guess it’s worth waiting for the long shot sometimes,” said Sergio, a hopeful lilt in his tone.
“Do you want to go back down and help him?” she asked.
“Yes, I’d love to,” he said, his voice deep and moved.
“Go ahead,” she said.
He looked at her, made a slight movement toward the door handle, then sat back slowly into his seat.
And there it was in his face. A shift. A change in how he saw her.
“So you won’t come along?”
“No,” she said, her eyes locked on his.
“I might have fixed things,” he said, finally. “But I really don’t know how.”
“I know,” she said, and she felt the pressure in her throat, behind her eyes.
They sat in the car and looked at the ocean, the raft of shoes as large as a whale, closing in.
For so long she had hoped he would stop taking her for granted—but she hadn’t imagined what it would feel like when it finally happened. Mostly it hurt, knowing follow-through was required. If only she could enjoy it a little longer, the knowledge that he finally recognized her autonomy.
“OK then,” he said. He lifted the shoes off his lap and put them on the back seat. He turned the key.
All the way back to the bungalow, the ocean was behind them. In her mind Agatha saw Hyo at his work, the children helping him line up shoes on the dry sand, finding the rights for the lefts, readying the group for their next dispersion.
Jennifer Bannan’s second short story collection, Tamiami Trail, is forthcoming in fall 2025. Her first short story collection, Inventing Victor, was published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in 2003. She has had stories in the Autumn House Press anthology Keeping the Wolves at Bay, and has been published in literary journals including The Kenyon Review online, ACM, Passages North, Chicago Quarterly Review, and Eclectica with work forthcoming in Terrain.org. Her nonfiction has appeared in The Millions, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, The Washington Post, and others.