Tea with the Black Dragon

Начало книги

Martha Macnamara stood at the Pacific, her toes digging into the froth. She had come the length of the country in one day’s flight, and she had trouble believing that this was a different ocean.

“Oh go on, admit it,” she grumbled, kicking the ivory scum from a pile of kelp. “You’re all the same water.”

Perhaps not. She peered at the line where the iron blue of the sky hit the soft-colored water. So bare a sky did not shine over Coney Island.

A gull plunged, kissed the water and veered right and away, all ten yards from Mrs. Macnamara. Her head rose to follow its flight and her hands lifted, echoing the bird’s gesture. For a moment it seemed her prim figure, gray suited and graying, would fly away into the west—or north along the dirty beach toward the Bridge.

But that was just for a moment, and then the hands touched at the braids that coiled around her head, braids that threatened to slip over her ears.

Читать дальше →