The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [214]
She shouted aloud when the odometer hit the mark that she’d been speeding toward since she was a child: 3.4567. Three and a half times the speed of sound.
***
After her test flight, after all the follow-up and medical examinations and debriefings and all the congratulations and photographs and film footage, Annie drove home to her condominium in Chesapeake Cove.
She found her fiancé Dan in her kitchen, cooking Asian food. Pots and pans sat out everywhere. He was chopping ginger. “Welcome home,” he said to her. Her cat Amy Johnson circled his feet. “Now here’s something I never thought I’d say to my future wife. How did your test flight go, baby?”
“3.4567.”
“That’s the record! Isn’t it the record?” He lifted her, spun her in a circle.
She kissed him, smiling her incandescent smile. “Yep, it’s the record! In ’99, Brad did 3.4498 once. So this was faster.”
“Call him and tell him. And thank him for divorcing you.”
“Hey, thanks for threatening him with jail if he didn’t.”
She picked up her phone to call Sam and Clark. They were thrilled for her. Clark added, “Okay, honey, now you can slow down.”
***
When Annie returned to the kitchen in her robe after a shower, Dan was stir-sautéing lobster with the ginger. He tossed a tiny bamboo steamer at her. She caught it in one hand, opened it, filled it with the dumplings he’d made.
As they ate them, side by side on her couch, overlooking the Chesapeake Bay, he handed her a wrapped present. Inside was an Afro-Cubano folk-art sculpture, a little red airplane made from old tin Coca-cola advertising signs. She loved it.
“Look inside,” he told her.
In the cockpit, there was a small leather jeweler’s box. Gold letters spelled
Ramirez
Plaza de Armas
Habana, Cuba
Inside the box was a beautiful, ornately worked gold ring with a blue sapphire. Dan slipped the ring on Annie’s finger. It fit. “Raffy’s mother made this. I bought it while you were talking to Ruthie. I had it sized in Key West. You like it?”
“Yes. The answer’s yes.”
“Good. I know you’re marrying me for my cooking. And my singing.”
“It’s awful. But your marriage proposals are good.”
“I’m marrying you for your cash.” He followed her into the kitchen. “Your dad’s cash from Feliz Diaz. Least the part of it you didn’t give Raffy.”
Annie tasted a piece of ginger. “That money goes in the bank for our kids.”
He spooned rice into bowls. “So we are getting married? Or are we just having the kids?”
Annie took the plates of lobster back to the table. At her neatly arranged desk in a corner of her living room, her divorce papers sat. She brought them to the table and signed them.
Dan called to her. “Is that a yes? We’re getting married?”
“That’s a yes,” she called back.
“Because, Annie, we’ve got to make some plans.” He brought the rice to the table. “I’ve got to go back to Miami before they fire my butt for letting Raffy get away. So once we’re married, do you move nearer Miami or do I move nearer Annapolis? We need to figure this all out. This is a major problem.”
She lit the candles and poured two glasses of wine. “Oh, you’re starting to sound like me. Stop planning. Everything’s going to be okay.”
Chapter 54
Annie
This time, every detail of Annie’s wedding would turn out, Sam vowed, perfectly, just the way a bride’s wedding should, which was just the way the bride wanted it—classic and beautiful, nothing gaudy. Oh, maybe a little cheerfulness, like the hand-painted banner that Dr. Sarah Yoelson had helped Sam hang across the porch posts of Pilgrim’s Rest:
Congratulations!
Annie Goode and Daniel Hart
August 16, 2001!!!
Clark tried to persuade Sam that the banner’s neon-glitter letters didn’t fit in with the pale gold satin bows they’d tied on the linen tablecloths at the tables in the white tent or with the pale gold rosebuds twined with dark ivy that looped down the stair rail to the newel post and around the carved peregrine hawk. Or the garlands of small white orchids, cone flowers, and