The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [215]
Sam told Clark, “Love means you fit in even if you don’t.”
“Okay, leave your banner up, just don’t start crying again.”
“I never cry, Clark.”
“You always cry.”
Sam’s surgery had been so successful that she’d been moving about on her cane and decorating the house for weeks before the wedding, without, she claimed, much discomfort at all. Despite a busy schedule, Sarah Yoelson was a big help with everything. Sarah still lived in Charlotte, where she was chief of orthopedic surgery at a hospital, but she was visiting Emerald more and more often, and Sam was visiting Charlotte, although Sam said she would never move out of Pilgrim’s Rest, until Clark and Annie carried her out of the house in a box.
“Couldn’t we hire an undertaker to do the heavy lifting?” asked Clark. “You’ve put on some L.B.s since your surgery.”
“Hey, I’m fitter than you’ll ever be,” Sam told him.
“God knows,” he agreed.
***
Annie finally called Brad the night before her wedding. She wanted to tell him she was marrying Dan and to ask his pardon for her part in their failed marriage. There were so many stupid things she’d said and bull-headed decisions she’d made; she’d thought she’d known everything but she hadn’t known much at all.
As soon as they hung up, Brad phoned Sam and told her that Daniel Hart must have pressured Annie into marriage by threatening to send her to jail for aiding and abetting a criminal.
“I don’t think so,” Sam told him.
Brad claimed his heart was broken.
“He’ll recover,” Annie predicted to Sam.
Later that night Brad met a fashion model at the Atlanta airport. She had a gold stud on her tongue and was very sympathetic to the way Brad had been mistreated by his former wife, who was (and he choked up saying it), marrying somebody else tomorrow, even though he would have taken her back and had told her so.
“You’re a prince,” agreed the model.
***
At Pilgrim’s Rest, where the wedding party gathered after the rehearsal dinner at Dina Destin’s Barbecue, Sam took a stack of old sheet music from her piano bench and offered to play a few songs. But when she called for requests, she knew none of the songs that anyone under thirty wanted to hear. So, instead, Sam, rolling arpeggios up and down the keys, played a medley of “Moon River,” “The Sounds of Silence,” and “Lara’s Theme.” Most of the people under thirty fled from the lush romantic music to the kitchen. But Annie sat with her aunt at the piano. As she sat there, she glanced at the tattered music cover to “Lara’s Theme,” where “Ruthie Nickerson” was inscribed, the looping curves under the R and the N, con amore in faded blue ink. She thought of the postcard with its photo of Claudette Colbert on the front and the note in the same handwriting. Maybe Ruthie had actually sent that postcard to Jack, rather than his having forged it as Annie had assumed. “Better this way,” the card said. And after all, maybe it had been better.
For Annie there was no longer any surprise in thinking of Ruthie Nickerson as the young girl who’d given birth to her and then given her away. In that moment when Annie had looked a last long time into Ruthie’s eyes, there in the Plaza de Armas, she’d felt a curious sense of quietly closing a door on the past; just as her father’s raised hand, waving good-bye, dappled in the gold Havana sun, had made her feel so oddly peaceful.
Annie leaned over and gave a kiss to Sam’s cropped white hair.
***
After the rehearsal guests all left, Sam announced that she was taking the plunge and throwing away the World’s Biggest & Hardest Jigsaw Puzzle so that Annie could have the wedding cake set out tomorrow on the round mahogany table in the bay window of the morning room. Besides, the family had long ago stopped even pretending they were interested in finishing that puzzle of vast rectangular cloudless blue sky. Annie herself wasn’t interested, although she had once worked diligently to find parts that fit together, believing, without being able to articulate it, that to fill in the corners of the sky would