The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [152]
“You mean, a CD of Dinah Washington. Because she’s dead so she couldn’t be—”
“God, you’re impossible! Okay, listen.” Grabbing a bough of a banyan tree, the only tree left in the yard, he swayed from it, close to her. “All right, here’s the one. You’re in Peru, you’re hiking at fourteen thousand feet, through the clouds, and you hike for days and sleep under the stars and you make your way around that last curve on the high Inca trail and all of a sudden there you are. At the same instant the two of you see that big Peru sun rising through the clouds, lighting up the high green mountains. And then it comes out of the mist. The lost city of Machu Picchu.” He leaned down to Annie’s face. “That’s when you propose.”
Annie looked up at him for a long moment. She knew she either had to acknowledge what was going on between them or she had to pretend it wasn’t there. So she glanced away.
“Oh, you chicken,” he whispered as he swung on the bough, back from her.
After a silence, she asked if any of these imagined proposals of his had ever been real. Had one been his proposal to Melissa?
Dan said no, that his proposal to Melissa had been at the Dorado bar. Actually his whole relationship to Melissa had been alcohol-related. He’d first met her when he was a rookie cop, part of a bust-up of a fraternity house binge at U of M; he’d pulled her naked out of a hot tub filled with shaving cream.
It was hard to imagine. “Ms. Skippings? She was so hard-assed at Golden Days.”
“Yeah, wild’s the flip side of oppressive. You didn’t know that?” Dan had next seen her at a salsa club in the Grove. They’d started meeting at the Dorado, then spending his days off at her family’s condo in West Palm, which her parents only visited from January to March. The next thing he knew he was standing at the altar of a big church in Coral Gables, wearing rented tails and striped trousers.
“Right,” scoffed Annie. “You were an innocent bystander.”
Hart walked back to his tree stump and sat down on it, rubbing at his hair. “Fair enough. True. The lush life sucked me right in. Like that arcade game when you’re paying to make the little crane grab plastic crap in its claws that you don’t even want anyhow and dump it into a drawer for you. So we come to a screeching halt and now she sits in her office and tells me she’s going to marry Jeffry…Jeffry without an e. This is the guy that advised me to buy Lucent at seventy-five.”
Annie thought back to how nasty Melissa Skippings had been to her at Golden Days, and then shortly afterwards how furiously the detective had pursued Raffy. Both those things must have happened right after Melissa had given Dan the news that she was marrying someone else, when they’d both been upset. Annie said, “So you hear your ex is getting married and you deal with it by chasing Raffy and me down the street?”
He flexed a fairly perfect bare leg. “And I pull a hamstring. And I get roughed up by the Feds, and I get fired, and I get stupid blotto and chop down my stupid magnolia tree. I told you I’d had a bad couple of days.”
She noticed another uprooted fuchsia in the yard and planted it delicately back in its pot. “Well, Sergeant, I can’t say I haven’t had a day at the beach myself, because I have.” He laughed and, again, as in their first phone conversation, it pleased her that he laughed so genuinely at her humor. She said quietly, “My dad seems to be dying—”
Hart groaned. “My dad’s already dead or he’d be so pissed about this magnolia tree.” He stared out over his small yard. “He died in a high-speed chase. Head-on collision with a utility pole. Long time ago.”
“I’m sorry.”
Hart shrugged a sad acceptance. “I’ve got a mom, nice lady, school librarian in Overtown. By the way, your mom’s not really Claudette Colbert, is she? I mean, there’s a birth certificate at Key West I got pulled, says Claudette Colbert’s your mother, but it’s a joke, right?”
She agreed that it was