The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [123]
“It’s okay. Everything’s going to be okay,” Clark told the sky.
Chapter 36
For the Love of Mike
It was almost dark in Golden Days as Annie turned on the bedside light to look at other small snapshots from her father’s wallet, pictures that she’d never seen before and could only identify by their dimmed descriptions on the back. In one, she was standing beside the red Mustang in an anonymous Wyoming parking lot, wearing her neon blue sunglasses and her cowboy boots (paled to lime green in the Polaroid) with the lariats up the sides. In another, the same age—about five—she sat atop her blue suitcase, her eyes the same color, but both faded in the old photo. In another she was a baby, outside some Southwestern motel, crawling up yellowed concrete stairs wearing paper diapers. In a fourth picture, she was crying, open-mouthed, in her father’s arms as he showed her the broken birthday piñata in the palm tree by a Las Vegas pool. In another, she was dancing wildly beside a portable CD player in a luxury Chicago hotel room. In the final photo he handed her, she was sitting in a little red airplane on a kiddie park merry-go-round near Vidalia, Georgia. The ride looked just like the little planes in her dream.
Also in his wallet was a small copy of the picture taken in the restaurant of The Breakers Hotel on her seventh birthday, the one that Sam had framed on the piano at Pilgrim’s Rest. In this copy, a fold had left a crease between the little girl and the tanned smiling man with the cigarette gracefully arced in his raised hand. On the back of the photo her current cell phone number was scrawled in her father’s upward slanting style.
“Keep it,” he said. “It’s a good picture.”
“Sam has a copy at home.”
“You can never have too many memories of a good thing.”
Annie slid the photo back into his wallet.
It was a distinctive portfolio deeply tanned wallet; it looked like the wallet she remembered from her childhood. Jack said, “So there’s your life as I know it. And now here you are, a grown woman, a flyer, like your dad.”
Standing just inside the door, Raffy held both arms as if they were wings, tilting them. “Annie’s definitely a flyer. Absolutely a flyer. Just like you, Jack.”
Annie was offended. “Well, I fly for the U.S. Navy. I don’t know who he flies for. Or why.”
“My mistake,” the Cuban shrugged apologetically.
Her father touched her hand again; his fingers felt like snow falling on her. “Tell me about Sam?” he suddenly asked, willing energy into his voice.
“She doesn’t want you to do anything stupid like die.”
“Tell her I tried my best.” It was an effort now to lift his head from the pillow. “How ’bout some water?” He shook a pill from a bottle beside the bed. When she held the glass to his lips, his chilled hand closed softly around hers. She was shaken by their closeness after so many years; a tremble floated down her back. She said, “Sam will never stop loving the people she loves.”
“You needed a home. I knew Sam would be a better mother, Clark would be a better father, than the couple who wrote the check for you in Barbados.”
His self-congratulation annoyed her—as if Sam and Clark’s virtues had justified his abandonment; as if throwing her out in the yard at Pilgrim’s Rest had been his plan all along, farsighted childcare.
Had he no remorse about that desertion? Did he regret the chaos of her life with him, before Sam and Clark? She recalled one moment of many such: he had rushed into the shabby motel room where she sat on the bed eating dry frosted cereal for supper, watching a movie on TV. He flung open her suitcase like a magician. “Let’s see how fast you can pack it up, baby, we’re out of here.” And they were in the car within minutes. Speeding down highways, racing into black sky. Had he thought about how she’d felt about that at all?
There was a screeching rattle as a Golden Days food trolley moved past the door. The thick smell of hospital food seeped into the room. Her father frowned; his eyes