The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [164]
Sam ran to the living room where her father sat still as death, drinking his tumbler of cognac, pretending none of it was happening.
“Dad, do something.”
He looked up and said in his stiff-mouthed way, “Go to bed, Samantha.”
She shook him so hard the glass flew from his hand. “Do something before they kill each other!”
He didn’t look at her. “There’s nothing anyone can do.” He picked up the glass from the rug and poured himself more cognac.
Sam left him when she heard the front door slam. Jack was driving off again. She cajoled her mother up the stairs, one by one, by promising that she would repair the Tiffany vase, that it wasn’t very damaged at all.
“He made me do it,” Grandee whispered. “Why does he make me do things I hate myself for? He does it on purpose.”
“No he doesn’t,” Sam kept repeating. “He loves you. He loves you.”
By the time Sam had cleaned up the broken chairs and glassware, it was morning and she had to leave for her summer job at the tennis camp. All day long she was overwhelmed by the sad certainty that whatever “family” the four Peregrines had ever formed together, this summer had ended it forever.
Five days later, Sam sadly drove Clark to the airport to start his long trip to Saigon.
A few weeks after that, Jack’s friend George came over to Pilgrim’s Rest to tell him that Ruthie had run off with a married man in the night.
The next evening Jack was stopped a hundred miles from home for speeding in a stolen car, which luckily he had not yet driven out of the state of North Carolina, so his father still had connections to get the seventeen-year-old’s sentence commuted. Jack had to pay back his fine by clearing two acres of Peregrine underbrush. Over the next month, he worked ten hours a day at the task. His muscles hardened, his skin darkened. Sam’s foreboding proved true. Jack did not ever speak again either to his father or to his mother. He worked till nightfall, walked to town, returned to sleep in the barn.
Six months later, Judge Peregrine was dead. During the judge’s funeral, Jack stole all the cash he could find in the house, threw his suitcase into his mother’s Mercedes coupe, and left Emerald, as he wrote Sam, forever.
But it wasn’t forever. Over the next quarter of a century, he came back to Pilgrim’s Rest three times—once to bring home the infant Annie and the King of the Sky, once when his daughter was seven, and once when he ran out of the cornfield and gave her a ruby for her seventeenth birthday.
***
Now it was time, Sam told herself, for her brother to come home again. She took a DVD she’d labeled “Jack’s Movie” across the lawn to Georgette’s house. It was three in the morning.
Georgette’s sleep-swollen eye peeped cautiously through the front-door glass in her hallway. Only last Christmas she’d had her house burglarized by an ex-con drug addict she’d been treating for bipolar disorder; she’d told him at the police station, “As your therapist, I hope you get help. As a homeowner, I hope you get eight to ten. And give me back my Dad’s silver Rotary trophy!”
As soon as Georgette saw Sam waiting outside her door, she swung it open and yelled, “Stop ringing that buzzer! How do you know I’m not upstairs having wild sex with six men?”
Sam pushed past. “If you are, it’ll have to wait.”
Georgette saw a DVD in her neighbor’s hand. “I am not watching Diabolique with you if that’s what this is all about. I have to be at the hospital