Eighteen hours from Seattle, David pulled his black bag from the baggage carousel and walked toward the front of the airport where the tour guides were waiting with clipboards. The women wore blue scarves.

“Deutsche?” a woman asked him. Then: “British?”

“Sure,” he said, smiling.

She checked his name on the clipboard and told him “Hotel Del Mar” and he said fine. She pointed with her pen through the doors and told him his bus number.

David blinked in the Spanish sunlight and felt suddenly pail. His tie flapped against his shoulder.

The other tourists on the bus were all German, and he listened to them as they found seats and shoved bags in the overhead space. The driver made a speech in German that made them all chuckle. He didn’t repeat it in English but hung up the microphone and put the bus in reverse.

The ride took an hour, across the dry interior patch-worked by strawberry fields and small yellow towns. Tiny cars passed the bus and he looked down at the drivers as they passed, studying their backseats and dashboards. He looked up to see a little German boy watching him and he smiled.

The bus entered the resort city and began weaving through narrow streets, up and down hills, finding each hotel in order to call out its name and help the passengers off.
Hotel Del Mar was a small white block on a slight hill above the beach. David pulled his bag from the under-bus storage area and faced the beach from the parking lot. He stepped forward to the sidewalk as the bus ground into reverse and backed adeptly from the cramped parking lot. He smelled the ocean and watched the sun glint off the wide leaves of the palm trees.

Picking up his suitcase, he walked down toward the beach along a narrow path wet from bare feet. His loafers slid in the sand. He paused and pulled them off, balancing one foot at a time. He stuffed his socks in one shoe, tied the laces together and hung the shoes around his neck. Leaving the suitcase at the edge of the strand, he walked through a band of half-filled beach chairs and straw sun umbrellas to the water.

It was as warm as a swimming pool. An old woman tossing a ball to a little girl said something to him in German that sounded like “You should roll up your pant legs,” but he just smiled at her. His tie threw itself over his shoulder and he felt the win lifting his hair. He took off his glasses and put them in his shirt pocket.

David looked down the beach where the marina was barely visible. There were white yachts at anchor out in the bay, and the water looked like a blue sheet of plastic rolling itself out to them over and over. People were playing badminton in the surf, and little kids rode inflatable toys.

Reaching for his shirt pocket again, he pulled out a second plane ticket and tore it in half. He knelt to soak it in the Mediterranean until it disintegrated, letting the pieces disperse around his ankles. He turned and walked back up to where his suitcase stood waiting in the sand.