The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [145]
“How old is Ruthie now?” Annie asked.
Georgette had to compute it: somewhere around forty-three or forty-four or forty-five.
The only time Georgette had ever known Ruthie to come back to Emerald had been when Annie herself had met her, when they’d been in ninth grade.
“I sort of remember that,” Annie said.
She let the memory form, enlarge: they’d driven home from school that day with Georgette’s mother. Georgette was in tears because she’d been hit in the face with a field hockey stick. Pacing in the Nickerson drive near a rental car was a tense, well-dressed, attractive woman clearly waiting for someone to come home.
With shocking curtness, Kim did not even greet this woman but told her, “There’re three cartons in the garage. The other stuff you can box yourself. It’s all in the front bedroom upstairs. I’m sure you’re too busy to stay for dinner.”
Kim hurried inside the house. The woman looked at the teenagers with deep-blue eyes unfathomable to Annie, then calmly introduced herself as Georgette’s aunt Ruthie.
Later that night, at home at Pilgrim’s Rest, Annie raced downstairs with her algebra notebook; studying for her final exams, she couldn’t solve a problem with which Clark would have been useful had he been there. She had little hope that Sam could help her with the math; she expected only sympathy.
Ruthie Nickerson sat at the kitchen table with Sam, drinking wine. The Scrabble game that Annie and Sam had been playing after dinner was still on the table. As Annie entered the room, the stranger was saying something about Clark, how she was sorry he had to stay late at the hospital tonight, how she would like Sam to tell him hello from her. Sam, with a tug at her short nut-brown hair, introduced the woman as Georgette’s aunt, visiting next door.
The woman said, “We already met. Hello again, Annie.”
Sam took Annie’s hand, proudly squeezed it. “Jack’s daughter I was telling you about.”
The woman raised her glass. “Where is he?”
Annie raised her eyebrow. “My bet is, jail.”
Ruthie toasted Annie with the wine. “Good guess, babe. Listen, sorry. Sam said that’s your sky puzzle. While she was on the phone, I did a little of it.”
Annie shrugged. “It just sits there.”
Taking a praline from a candy box labeled “New Orleans,” Ruthie bit into it with beautiful white teeth. “So, how do you like life here in Emerald?”
Annie shrugged again. “Okay.”
“I hated it.” Deftly, the strange woman slid three Scrabble squares onto the board, moving down from a j in the word rajah to form the word jack. “I didn’t know Jack had a kid. We lost touch a long time ago.” She started spelling ruth off the r in rajah. “The good old bad old days.”
Sam moved away the woman’s hand, flicking the little wood Scrabble squares across the board. “Come on, Ruthie, stop messing around. No proper names.”
Sipping her wine, the coppery-haired woman shrugged. “Hey, ruth means sorrow and compassion. Jack’s a word too. It means, oh, an apparatus to jack up a price or an automobile; it means jack-o-lantern, jack-in-the-box, lumberjack, blackjack, hijack, jack-of-all-trades, straightjacket, jackrabbit, let’s see, jackpot. Jack means whatever the jackshit you want it to.”
With perverse pleasure, Annie laughed, impressed by all the rapid effortless words, aligning herself with this stranger against the aunt she knew and loved. “Jack,” she agreed, “means a lot of things.”
Ruthie, swallowing the last bite of her praline, reached for Annie’s algebra notebook and pencil, glanced at the unsolved problem written there. “What are you looking for?” she asked the teenager. “The roots of that cubic?”
“I don’t usually have trouble with this kind of thing,” Annie felt she needed to say.
Ruthie wrote something on the margin then handed her back the notebook. “Just a little glitch. One of the solutions is an imaginary number. Try 2i and the others will come. Okay?”
Annie looked at the equation, now solved “…Oh. Right.”
Sam folded, unfolded the dishcloth.
The woman leaned over, affectionately rubbing Sam