The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [143]
Upset, Annie snapped. “Did I say I was Melissa?”
The waitress rocked back and forth. “No, but Danny told me Melissa was a bitch, so I made the mistake.” She huffed away.
Sliding back into the booth, Annie said to Chamayra, “Let’s start over.” Daniel Hart, she explained, was investigating her father. She wanted the detective’s help but he kept blowing off appointments he’d made with her. How ill was her father? Shouldn’t he be in a good hospital? To her astonishment, Annie found herself tearing up.
Softened, Chamayra turned sympathetic. “Be easy, hey.”
“I’m sorry. It’s exhaustion, that’s all.”
Chamayra sat down in the booth, put her arm around Annie. “I lost my mama last summer. She’s asleep in her bed, just don’t wake up. I grab her arm; it’s like a tray of ice. She’s dead. I walk out in our backyard and go down on my knees and I’m making weird noises loud as I can. My son runs out and makes me come back in the house, says I’m setting off dogs up and down the block.”
Annie blew her nose. “I’m sorry about your mother’s death.”
“La muerte. It comes to us all,” sighed the nurse, apparently under the influence of the philosophical Rafael Rook. She stood again, wiping the booth with an automatic efficiency. “Sometimes, face it, life sucks. I got two kids, my ex-husband gets laid off, eighteen years on the same job, you believe that? He can’t help with money for the kids no more. Aw yeah, what you gonna do? You want my advice for the world?”
Wary, Annie nonetheless nodded yes.
Thumbs and forefingers together, Chamayra pantomimed positioning a rectangular sign in air. “Hang out the Love sign and do what you can.” She flipped the invisible sign upside down. “Hang out the Closed sign when you gotta put your feet up.” She took the imaginary sign from its place in the air and tossed it over her shoulder. “Yeah, I know Dan. He’s not here now.”
“Sergeant Hart?”
“We’re open six nights; he’s in here six nights. Raffy can’t stand him but I think Dan’s a good guy. He was good to my little boy.”
“Well, I wish he’d answer his phone.”
The plump waitress spun her finger beside her head. “Right now Dan’s a stress case. His marriage busted up.”
Annie asked, “Today?”
“No, no. Two, three years back. Sit still. I’m gonna locate him for you.” She took away Annie’s soda glass. “I’ll bring you a mojito.”
Annie said she didn’t drink.
“You ain’t drank my mojito.”
Annie’s white Navy jacket was lying on the bench with her Navy hat. Chamayra gestured at them, made a face. “I got a brother joins the Army. I’m like, don’t go, Luis. He’s like, ‘Hey, you know, it’s better’n laying asphalt in this neighborhood, and I like get myself popped in some fuckin’ Haitian drive-by.’ I go, you know what? You’re right, it’s a living. So what happens? His jeep rolls over and he like loses a leg. Fuckin’ Kuwait. I’ll be back.”
The minty drink was very good. As Annie sipped it, she studied the fake business cards she’d found hidden inside the lining of her father’s leather flight jacket. These cards had different typefaces and introduced different men:
Henry Frank
Antiques and Artworks Appraised
Jarvis J. Rochard III
Deputy Under Secretary, Department of the Interior
Edward Fettermann
Vice President
Southern Hemisphere Mining Corporation
Different addresses were inscribed at the bottoms of the cards. There’d even been a card with the name Clark Lewis Goode.
None of the cards told the truth. Not one of them said,
Jack Peregrine
Confidence Man
It had been on the backs of cards such as these that her father had long ago written out the words by which he’d taught her to read: Cat. Hat. Annie. Dad.
Now with a crayon, Annie wrote single words on the backs of the fake calling cards. She wrote con on one. She wrote art on a second. Then on a third card she found herself writing the word love—as if she were making a little version of that Love sign the waitress Chamayra had advised the world to hang out.
She studied the three cards, silently playing with them as she waited for Chamayra to bring her back news about where Dan Hart might be.
Con. It