Read Learning to Swim for Free Online

mood—left over from the successful dinner with the Carltons—that it only took her a moment to recover.
    “This stuff is really dirty, Cora.” She turned back to emptying the pockets of my laundry. “Really, you should wash stuff off before you go dirtying your clothes.” She wiped her hands on the lace dress and her face turned wistful. “I remember when you were little, you’d always be putting leaves and things in your pockets.”
    I had distinct memories of Joan finding these things. She’d take my play clothes and turn the pockets inside out, scolding me repeatedly, afraid my mother would complain at the state of my clothes.
    “You were always so curious, putting the strangest things in your pockets. Helicopter leaves and acorns and dandelions and those honeysuckle flowers.”
    “Did Joan tell you that?” I said icily.
    It wasn’t nice. Downright mean, really, to follow her attempt at discussing Gretel with that sarcastic remark. But we didn’t talk about Gretel. That was the rule. Her own rule. And she had broken it. It was her own fault.
    She was quiet for a moment before picking some invisible lint off her skirt, brushing her manicured hands over the wrinkles, and walking briskly out of the room. These days her mere presence left me annoyed and ready to quarrel with an empty room.
    Good riddance , I thought. Don’t shrink my clothes.
    When she was gone, I got up and retrieved the flute from where she’d left it on the desk. I inspected it as if I was some connoisseur who could read its features. I banged it on the desk to empty the holes of sand and spit on my shirt, rubbing the mouthpiece clean before taking a tentative breath and blowing. It let out a shrill shriek that set Princess to howling downstairs.
    “What the hell is that?” was my father’s muffled comment from below.
    I hopped down the stairs. “Do you know what this is?” I called.
    Dad stopped in the second floor hall. I tossed him the pipe.
    “What the hell are you doing making that kind of racket at this time of night?” he was mumbling, as he turned the thing over in his hands. “Looks like a recorder to me. Where did you get it?”
    “Found it,” I said.
    “Just a piece of junk.”
    I trudged back upstairs, already regretting even asking him. I felt as though some of the magic of this little treasure had been rubbed away by revealing it to someone so mundane as my father.
     

 
     
     
     
     
    Ceachtanna Snámha
    Swimming Lessons
     
     
     
    Usually going to bed much earlier than my parents and generally consuming far fewer margaritas, I was up before them in the mornings. I would grab the plastic blue pail and matching shovel from the table on the back porch. I had scoffed at my mother in the middle of the bright store in St. Louis when she had bought the preschool-blue pair in the hopes of early morning family shell hunts. But she had apparently underestimated the nighttime festivities in the old houses, so I usually found myself shoving off down the boardwalk, having emptied the previous day’s finds on the table, with only Princess at my heels.
    I would pick my way slowly to the pier, where Princess would sit down resignedly beside me and watch the waves with alert ears, as if squirrels and cats could be found lurking there.
    The swimmer, skin wet and shiny, was always there, a few yards away, completely unaware of being watched.
    Some days he was slow and gentle with the waves. But others he seemed to move with a renewed vigor, his rigid arms cutting through the waves like the biggest of Joan’s Cutco knives. And I couldn’t help but wonder what he was thinking. Sometimes he ducked under water completely and I looked anxiously around until he would resurface a yard farther on.
    I stayed only until he turned in the distance—maybe it was two miles—and came back toward the pier. Then I’d walk back north and start my day.
     

     
    One such day was marked with a big red circle on the calendar Mom kept on the