The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [32]
She raised her Claudette Colbert eyebrow at him. “The only thing I didn’t do fast enough with Brad was leave him.”
Annie and Brad had met at Annapolis on the first day of their first year. By the time they graduated—Brad by the skin of his perfect teeth, and despite (or in his view, because of) his strategic use of uppers under stress—they’d been engaged for two years. He had set out from the beginning to win Annie’s affection because she was pretty and Southern and, like his mother, so competent that she could run his life without troubling him about it.
In the beginning she resisted Brad’s flirtation. But the first time that they flew a jet together, she fell in love. In the air, he was exciting, intense, the fastest midshipman at the Academy. On paper, he was perfect too: good-looking, star athlete, only son of wealthy parents who doted on him. But in the end—at least this was Georgette’s theory—Annie fell in love with Brad because the more she pushed him away, the more he resisted going. It was the opposite of her begging her father not to leave.
With the highest academic grades in their class, she’d been given her choice of assignments on “Selection Day.” She’d chosen the Fighter Weapons School in San Diego, where, after initial training in Pensacola, she would train to fly new Navy jets. Brad, a top-ranked midshipman Naval Aviator (holder of a speed record), had also been offered a billet in San Diego. The day they heard their assignments, they lay on his bed in his boyhood room in a wealthy Atlanta suburb, where taped to the ceiling was a poster of a blonde spilling out of a bikini that he’d put up back in the tenth grade. That the poster hadn’t been removed should have been, Annie later mused to Georgette, a clue.
After they finished their pilot training, before they were to ship off together to the Persian Gulf on the USS Enterprise, Annie and Brad suddenly announced a wedding date. They called their families and gave them only three weeks notice to come to California for the ceremony, which was to be a quiet, almost stealthy one, since their base commander had told them (presciently as it proved) that so quick a marriage would be a dumb-ass idea.
Worried but sounding cheerful, Sam and Clark flew with Georgette and D. K. Destin from North Carolina, bringing all the way across the country the little Maltese terrier Malpy and the old Shih Tzu Teddy.
The service was held in an ugly desert town west of the San Diego base. Georgette was Annie’s maid of honor and D. K. Destin, in his wheelchair, gave her away with Sam, Clark, and the two dogs (Malpy wearing a plaid bow tie, Teddy a plaid hair bow). That three such adults and two dogs should perform this ceremonial function much distressed Brad’s formidable mother, who told her daughter Brandy that she felt strongly that “a g.d. freak zoo is no substitute for a father of the bride.”
All through the wedding rehearsal, Annie and her new mother-in-law watched each other like gunslingers in the street.
The South Carolinian Mrs. Hopper, who referred to herself in the third person as “Mama Spring,” fired a shot: Where the g.d.h. was Annie’s g.d. father? If Brad’s father, Daddy Alton, could make it all the way from Atlanta on oxygen with emphysema, surely Daddy Jack, father of the bride, could have gotten his b-u-t-t to San Diego as well?
Annie returned fire in a barrage of sarcasm: the family she wanted here was here. Daddy Jack was irrelevant and had either fled the country or had his b-u-t-t locked up in a federal penitentiary.
Mama Spring volleyed back with a sardonic smile. Couldn’t the father of the bride have gotten a special family leave of absence from prison in order to come give his little girl away, so Annie could have enjoyed what any normal girl craved, a church and a lace veil and a satin train and a g.d. maid of honor in something coordinated, instead of having a size-eighteen sleazepot (Georgette Nickerson) at the rehearsal