The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [14]
Like Annie, Teddy cried through most of her first night at Pilgrim’s Rest. After that, the little Shih Tzu pretty much took over the house.
Another present arrived in an express mail truck a week later. It advertised itself as “The World’s Biggest & Hardest Jigsaw Puzzle.” Clark, who had ordered it, set the puzzle out on a table by a bay window in a room called “the morning room,” although no one knew why it was so described. The jigsaw puzzle was a giant photograph of blue sky, nothing but blue, with—so its box claimed—20,000 tiny, nearly indistinguishable pieces. It was as large as the mahogany top of the fat spiral-legged table onto which Clark poured all its pieces.
Inviting Sam and a resistant Annie to help him assemble the sky, he told them, “We’ll get the corners first. Annie, see if you can find a corner.”
While she was still wary of these two strangers and did not yet return their smiles, she couldn’t resist proving how quickly she could locate in the huge pile of particles of blue cardboard a piece that had a 90-degree angle.
“Great!” Sam exclaimed. “We’re on our way.”
The little girl wrinkled her mouth in disdain. “This will take years to put together.”
Clark smiled. “Let’s look on the bright side.”
“It probably will take years. Decades,” promised Sam, her sad eyes for a rare moment as playful as her brother Jack’s.
The day the puzzle showed up was also the day that Annie’s eventual best friend, Georgette Nickerson, plummeted into her life. Georgette lived next door but had been away at a camp for overweight children—which her mother had forced her to attend.
The plump little black-haired girl had suddenly come loudly skittering into the kitchen of Pilgrim’s Rest, flinging herself at Sam and shouting, “I missed you! I hated that camp, they starved us and they threw us in the lake and kicked big orange balls at us. I ate purple Jell-O day and night, night and day.” She spun around at Annie. “Who are you?”
Sam introduced her niece, who was overcome not so much with shyness as surprise when the fat little girl flopped down abruptly on the floor beside the Shih Tzu and barked loudly. “Woof woof woof!!” The dog barked back at her, growling. “I don’t have a pet. My mom thinks I’d eat it. Is this yours?”
“Yes,” Annie said. “Her name is Teddy B.”
“My name’s Georgia Georgette Nickerson, can you believe it? I make people call me Georgette. Dumb, huh? I was named after a state and after my dad George. That’s like naming your child like, you know, Rhode Island Rhodette.”
“No it’s not.”
“My dad had a heart attack and died. My mom says the police are after your dad.”
“He’s too fast for them,” insisted Annie, pushed to his defense.
Over the years, Georgette’s fast-rising scale of laughter and Teddy’s sharp bark, and the hum of Sam’s and Clark’s voices at Pilgrim’s Rest, softly moving back and forth in the slow Southern dusk, conversation leisurely as a river, became for Annie the sound of safety. After dinner, the four of them would sit together at the mahogany table, with Teddy curled on the cushion of the best chair and Georgette staying until her mother telephoned from next door to demand her return, and they’d talk over their separate days, while idly looking for connecting pieces of the puzzle of the sky. Its frame wasn’t hard to assemble; in a month, they had all four corners in place. After that, things slowed down.
Annie’s father Jack was, as she predicted, too fast for the police. The state patrol eventually found that he’d sold the red Mustang with license plate MJ87143 to someone in Atlanta who hadn’t looked too closely into whether or not he’d really owned it. Sam pestered the