He is super-pissed. It was one of his favorites, an Italian leather loafer that his dead father left. This was pretty much all his father left him, and now Jack lives in a sad single room in the back of a butcher shop where he cleans up slimy innards and throws the pig-snouts away. This was the only job and place Jack could find after Lila kicked him out. And that was after Jeanette kicked him out. 

One day, Jack gets a postcard from the shoe. It is vacationing in the Virgin Islands. Living the life you aren’t, reads the scratchy shoe-scrawl. Being a kind sort, Jack worries what will happen to the shoe’s leather upper if it takes a swim in the ocean, but really that’s the shoe’s problem now. 

Jack blames his latest, Ramona, for losing the shoe in the first place. He had taken her to see an old foreign movie. It was sexy and Italian. He was trying to get her juiced up. All night she kept remarking on how beautiful his shoes were. How they made him look so Mastroianni, so Fellini. Later, they went back to his room and she didn’t say a word about his deli-jacket slung over the chair, stinking of dead cow and liver. 

He imagines the shoe all covered with sand. Maybe sipping a piña colada or something else fancy with rum. This shoe could do plenty of damage, Jack knows. Will run up a bar tab and split. Maybe get into a couple of brawls. 

Ramona must have taken the shoe while Jack was asleep, Jack figures. After they did it like a couple of jackals in heat and she slipped out in the early morning.  Not to own it, but just so he couldn’t anymore. Everyone knew a shoe like that was a chick magnet or something like it. She probably FedExed it to the VI. 

What burns him most was that the shoe probably let her. If he’s honest, the shoe was always pinching his big toe. Not like the right shoe, which didn’t seem to have the same plucky attitude and slipped on easy and seemed to prefer the nights when Jack went to Morley’s Pub next door to the butcher shop, for a beer, nothing fancy. 

Jack figures that it might be time to have another beer. Sit and think about why women and shoes always want something different. He puts on his right shoe, faithful and looking like the closest thing he’s had to a friend in a long time. He hops, one-shoe, one sock, over to Morley’s, hoists himself onto the shaky barstool, and when Old Man Morley asks Jack, What do you need, my friend, Jack is not exactly sure what to say.