The First Rule of Swimming by Courtney Angela Brkic

Author:Courtney Angela Brkic [Brkic, Courtney Angela]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Contemporary, Adult, (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯), Historical, Mystery
ISBN: 0316217387
Google: YT8UEbd397wC
Amazon: B008TURNP8
Barnesnoble: B008TURNP8
Goodreads: 15791438
Publisher: Little, Brown
Published: 2013-05-28T07:00:00+00:00

He returned home to find Luz sitting at their kitchen table, looking through old recipe books. She had not heard him enter the apartment and was intent on the pages in front of her, her finger moving from one line to the next. He had always loved his wife’s single-mindedness, the tenacity that had kept their restaurant afloat through lean years when he might have given up, and he watched her for a moment before clearing his throat. He fought hard to adopt a neutral expression, but when she looked at him over the top of her reading glasses, she frowned slightly and rose from her chair.

Over the years of their marriage, it had always amazed him how she was able to decipher his mood, just as she did now, embracing him wordlessly so that he was tempted to linger in her arms the way their sons had done when they were small.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, catching his chin in her palm.

He took her hand in his and studied its olive smoothness, then turned it over and examined its lines, a smattering of scars from handling hot pans and knives in the kitchen of their restaurant. He lifted it to his face again and kissed it.

Usually that hollow place inside him closed up, the door swinging shut as he left the hymns of his childhood behind in the Forty-first Street church. He was an expert at segregation, at keeping the various chambers of his heart walled off from one another, the same way that a single apartment building contained lives that never intersected. But for weeks now the door had refused to swing shut.

“I have something to show you,” he told her, then led her back to the apartment’s entrance, where he had left the painting leaning against a wall.

She did not understand what it was at first, staring at it with a confused expression.

“This is the house where I was born,” he managed to tell her, so that she only stared at it in shock. She picked it up and walked with it into the living room, taking it over to the windows to look at it in the light.

“It’s beautiful,” she told him.

He nodded. “I don’t understand it.”

She studied every inch, drinking in the landscape. She had never before been able to attach an image to the things he had described, he realized. And he had never had tangible proof of them.

“There’s a number,” she told him suddenly.

He joined her at the window, frowning. He looked where she pointed, and it was true. In the left margin was a series of numbers that he had missed.

She read them aloud in her soft Spanish. “They must mean something.”

He watched her copy the numbers onto a piece of paper and frown at them. She had a fondness for riddles and Sudoku puzzles. She would spend hours poring over them, whereas he never had the patience.

“It can’t be a date,” she said. “Perhaps it’s a telephone number?”

He looked at the piece of paper.

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