The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [3]
“Hi, sweetheart.” He folded her in his arms. “Happy birthday! Weather Channel’s predicting a tornado.” He gestured at the clouds, then at the long plastic cones on the roof of his station wagon. “They’re for the roses.”
She hugged him again. “Will you stop listening to the Weather Channel?”
Behind round tortoise-shell glasses, Clark studied her. “You look a little anemic. Teaching too much?” A pediatrician, he had long been checking her health.
“I’m fine.”
He felt her left hand, touching the ring finger with good-humored taps. “Divorce final?”
A year ago, Annie had left her husband but she still wasn’t legally divorced. “Next week, the lawyer swears.”
“Hmm.” Clark nodded, the quiet blue of his eyes speckled as light through an old window. “Hmm.”
She rubbed his hands between hers. “Don’t ‘hmm’ me. Let’s get home before it rains.” She checked her watch. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes and you’ll be there when, in…about an hour?”
“Ha. Don’t mock the late-middle-aged.” Comfortably he curled his lanky frame back into the Volvo. “You were speeding, sweetheart. Slow down.”
“Clark, it’s good to be home.” Annie raced back to her Porsche, revved the motor, and rocketed away.
“Too fast.” He shook his head, slowly starting his station wagon.
Annie’s uncle never went over the speed limit; in fact, he rarely reached it. He preferred walking to driving and occasionally walked even the two miles to the hospital where he ran a pediatric clinic. When Annie was fifteen and he’d been teaching her to drive, he’d told her, “Slow down,” so often that she had begged her aunt Sam to give her lessons instead. “Where are you going, you have to get there so fast?” Clark would ask the teenager. “Everywhere,” she’d tell him, although there was really no place in particular she wanted to go; she just didn’t want to be left behind.
Clark had always acknowledged amiably that he saw no reason for speed except to save a life. In Emerald Hospital’s hallway, generations of children had heard the same old slow stories as they waited outside the ER. In the same unhurried way, he moved his cushioned rocker, one foot nudging it in a steady (and to the child Annie, maddening) rhythm of three taps, pause, three taps, pause, while he watched baseball games, with slow shadows inching across vivid green grass on the television screen. Clark loved almost nothing that moved fast, except Annie.
Now she was racing so quickly along Old 41 that within less than a minute he could no longer see her gray Porsche ahead of him. “Too fast,” Clark repeated and rubbed at his hair and checked his speedometer.
As she drove, Annie glanced at her bare left hand on the wheel where once she’d worn a wedding ring. Her husband had fought their divorce; she’d avoided the fight. As a result, the settlement was still “pending final papers.” It wasn’t like her not to finish things. For what was she waiting? Certainly not for Lt. Bradford Hopper, a textbook example of a false hypothesis—that he loved her—on the basis of which the logic of her life had crashed into mistake after mistake.
A year ago, when she had flung her suitcase into the Porsche and told Brad, “I’m leaving you,” he shouted at her, kicking at their doorstep, “Get back here! You can’t leave me!” And she told him with the steely distinctness that was always her response to his fits, “Watch me!”
***
The fight took place at their small stucco house on the San Diego base where they were both pilots. They were not long back from Kuwait, but long enough for Brad to start an affair.
He blocked her path to the Porsche, jumping up and down on the hard asphalt as if it were a trampoline. “A, you come back here right now! What’s the matter with you?”
“The matter?”
As always her irony ricocheted off him. “Yeah, what’s the matter!” He repeated it. “What the fuck’s the matter?!”
“How about, you cheated on me!” Their hands fought at the Porsche’s door handle. “How about, you cheated on me in my own bed! I’m taking the cat and the car.”
“What?”
“You don’t want the cat and I trust the car!” She’d grabbed at