The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [140]
“I can’t keep borrowing Brad’s jets. I’m divorcing him.”
“Are you sure? I just want you to be happy.”
“Come on, Sam. Were you happy? Like Clark says, who’s happy?”
Sam claimed that she was much happier than she’d used to be. The older she got, the less she cared about crap that made you unhappy, like what anybody else thought of her, and how much money she had, and what she might have, could have, should have done better in the past. Like that double-fault serve in the ’83 national first round that had haunted her for ten years. She just wished she could help Annie not waste these years of her youth that Sam herself had wasted.
Annie said, “Sam, don’t get philosophical on me. I’ve heard enough of that from Raffy Rook today.”
“Raffy?”
“Rafael Rook. By the way, he told me Dad said my mother’s name was Kay Denham. Think that’s possible?”
There was a long pause. Then Sam said, “Sweetie, Kay Denham is the name of the character Claudette Colbert played in I Met Him in Paris.”
“Goddamn him!” Annie made her exit turn so fast her tires squealed. “Why would he even tell Raffy that?”
“Leave well enough alone,” suggested Sam.
Annie said that she had left well enough alone for decades. It was Jack Peregrine who had hauled her back into his life. “So too bad. No way I’m dropping this, Sam. Bye.”
Annie followed the exit back to South Beach and the Hotel Dorado where she answered all her Annapolis emails and sent her uniform in a rush order to be dry-cleaned. Okay, if she had to wait till tomorrow morning, she’d wait. Maybe that was her challenge; she hated waiting and so she was forced to do it. She hated not working and never took vacations. She had so much unused leave that the Navy had told her to use it or lose it. How long had it been since she’d answered to no schedule? Not since she’d started elementary school. All right, today she’d win the war of waiting. Maybe she’d even go shopping. Maybe she’d go to a bookstore and buy a book and sit by the Dorado pool and read it. She could do anything she wanted. That would be the hard part.
***
Late that afternoon, Annie was swimming laps at the hotel pool. As she swam, methodical, classic form, she determined that if she had a mother out there anywhere alive, she would somehow get that woman’s real name out of her father and would track her down and…why…?
What would she even want from the woman at this point, besides asking her why she had ever left her baby behind with a man like Jack Peregrine? Maybe it was only that. She would ask her that one question.
Annie thought about how her first Navy flight instructor had yelled at her in the cockpit as they’d sat in the jet on the rainy deck of the USS Enterprise. “You gotta go, Goode! You women wanna join the Navy, you gotta fly a Tomcat not a pussycat. Commit to go, damn it!” And she had forced herself to set aside both his remark and her fear. She had taken a long breath and then shot her jet forward off the deck of that rolling ship in what the instructor had admitted after they’d landed was a goddamn 90 percent perfect takeoff. Afterwards, he’d made her repeat the takeoff to get the other 10 percent right. And Annie had done it again. And again.
If she were asked to claim a single virtue in herself, it would be that she didn’t quit. She had never failed to cross a high school track meet finish line, however much it hurt. She had never failed to crawl over the last wall of the Annapolis obstacle course, however bigger, stronger male midshipmen mocked her. And in a month she would break a record testing a new jet. Or if she failed, she would try again. She wouldn’t quit.
Swimming faster, Annie’s hand touched the pool’s end; she neatly flipped herself and headed back in the other direction in her smooth steady crawl. Lap forty-eight.
Forty-nine.
Fifty.
As she climbed out of the pool, reaching for her towel, her glance caught sight of a woman at the other end of the large long rectangular pool, standing near the diving board. To look at the woman, Annie had to face into the blinding