The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [151]
She noticed Hart’s stomach muscles tighten as he snatched back his beer. He said, “Well, then, you should be happy! Me, I don’t like looking like a chump.”
She stared at him a while then smiled. “I think it’s the single white sock with the blue underwear that makes you look like a chump. Lose the sock.”
The young man’s smile came toward her, kept coming, kept coming, and for all her skilled deflection, finally reached her. She felt her face loosening, felt herself smiling back, although it made no sense that she should do so. They just sat there a while, smiling at each other.
Finally he said, “I hitched a ride to St. Louis in your husband’s jet.”
“I heard.”
“Wow. Carrying on a conversation for two hours with Brad Hopper makes me wonder what the hell you could have been thinking of, marrying him. I mean, the conversation! He gives me details of every single hole of his best golf game at Southern Pines. Yep, I have had a very rough couple of days,” he sighed.
“Because of my ex and your ex?”
“Plus your dad.” He counted out with raised fingers a sequence of misadventures. “I lose Jack in St. Louis, thanks to you.”
“Don’t blame me.”
Uninterested in accuracy, he continued, “Then I lose my wife.”
“What do you mean? Haven’t you been divorced for years?”
He started tossing branches into a neat pile. “I lose my job. I mean, sure, I’ve been suspended plenty of times, but fired? This is a first.”
She waved her finger at him. “That’s not my fault either. And you had no business conning Brad into flying you to St. Louis.”
“Brad is a jerk. Well, I married just as stupid as you.” Dan made a fist, striking at his breast. “Melissa invites me to her office where she informs me she’s just gotten engaged to an asshole financial planner that I introduced her to.” He stacked the magnolia branches more and more quickly. “This was when I was dumb enough to let the man who was stealing my wife manage my very small retirement savings that are now even smaller.”
Annie started helping him clear the chain-sawed branches. “I’d say Melissa’s new fiancé is doing okay, because I got a peek at her engagement ring when she was throwing me out of Golden Days and it is big.”
“Yeah, I saw it too. Serious bling-bling.” He made the shape of a baseball.
“Tacky.” Annie found it baffling that Hart had ever married this woman. But then, hadn’t Clark and D. K. found it baffling when she’d married Brad? Even Georgette and Sam, both of whom had fallen for Brad, had wondered why she’d chosen him. She neatly added the final branch to the pile “People make mistakes,” she conceded. “I mean, like you.”
“Like me? How ’bout Melissa?” Sitting down with the beer, Hart gave her a rueful look. “This guy she’s marrying? He’s a pod person; seriously, the kind nobody can tell the difference when the pod takes over. He proposes to Melissa at intermission of Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas! You hear what I’m saying? And she’s such a pod herself, she’s boasting about this to me like it was something great he’d done, as opposed to an act of sleazy toe cheese! She thinks that’s a good proposal? Intermission at Cirque du Soleil?! Jeez!”
Annie heard herself asking Dan what he would consider a better proposal.
Frowning, he reached up as if he could grab an answer out of the stars. “Okay.” He rubbed his hands against his bare thighs. “Say you’re ice-skating in Central Park, Wollman Rink, and it starts to snow, big soft pretty snow. Say you can waltz her around the rink, dancing while you’re skating. Well, you turn and turn and turn together, arms around each other, and then you stop and skate off the ice. You hold your faces up to the snow, you feel the snow on your eyelids and you taste it on your tongues and that’s when you propose. Okay?” He leaned over to her.
She nodded with her wry smile. “That’s okay.”
Frowning, he jumped up, pacing back and forth across his small yard, the unbuttoned shirt flying open behind him. “Okay, how’s this? It’s raining outside your house, November rain, and you’re wrapped in a blanket on a rug in front of