The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [33]
“Luckily the same thing didn’t happen to me,” muttered Annie’s aunt Sam as she sat down at the hotel bar’s piano and began to play “Take My Breath Away” from the Top Gun soundtrack.
Brad’s invalid father Daddy Alton took a puff of the oxygen attached to the back of his wheelchair as Mama Spring sank onto a barstool in tears. He ordered two White Russians and drank them both while Brad’s twin sister Brandy was comforting her mother.
Later, alone with “the bride’s party,” Sam was taking requests at the piano (she played by ear and only needed to hear someone hum a melody in order to reproduce it). She played “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” for D. K., then “Only the Lonely” for Clark, then confessed to both that Brad’s behavior was scaring her. The young man appeared to be on the verge of a fit. Had the others noticed how he kept scratching at his scalp, how his knees kept bouncing up and down and his foot twitching as if some irascible puppet master was jerking on his strings? “What’s that boy’s problem?”
D. K. Destin pressed big brown fingers together into a pinch, held them to each nostril. “Brad’s on a sleigh ride in the snow. Our baby’s marrying a junkie.”
“No, she isn’t,” Sam insisted, her face a wrinkle of worry. “That’s not possible.”
“Anything’s possible,” Clark admitted. “Lot of Huey pilots in ’Nam were cokeheads. Who could blame them?”
“Not me,” said D. K. “I wish I’d had a little snort, anything to pass the time all those hours I was hanging onto two feet of scrap metal in the Commie China Sea waiting for a God-Almighty U.S. Navy ’copter to show up. Stress can get to you.”
Sam frowned. “What stress is Brad under?” He had not been shot out of a jet plane and crashed into the ocean; all he was doing was getting married.
“Easy for you to say,” Clark told her.
She wondered, “Are we going to make it through tonight and tomorrow?”
Clark and D. K. together told her, “No.”
“Oh God,” sighed Sam. “You think Brad’s not the One?” Since Annie’s adolescence, her three surrogate parents had devoted considerable speculation to who would be the right man for their adopted child. Whenever she brought home a new boyfriend, Sam would ask, “Is he the One?”
“He’s not the One,” sadly agreed Clark and D. K. on the eve of her wedding to Brad Hopper.
Chapter 11
The High and the Mighty
It was not only in retrospect that Annie’s wedding was a failure. No one much enjoyed it even at the time, certainly not Annie, too busy to notice that it wasn’t an auspicious occasion, although she marched so briskly into the justice of the peace’s office in her Navy uniform and recited her vows so quickly, like a pledge of allegiance, it was as if she suspected she would change her mind if she slowed down. Brad’s mumbled response to the solemn questions could scarcely be heard and he had trouble keeping his eyes open during the chaplain’s (admittedly unsolicited) homily on Jesus wanting everybody—except presumably Himself—to have a lot of Christian children. In general the groom was looking, to his dispassionate sister Brandy, “totally wasted,” and his bride “totally hyper.”
Brad’s best man, Lt. Commander Steve Wirsh, had driven out from the base with his wife Melody. After the rehearsal Melody paddled up and down the hotel pool in a hot pink thong and a black sports bra, attracting attention, including Brad’s. Wirsh, mistaking Clark and Sam for Annie’s parents, chastised them for allowing their blind dog to bite Melody on the thumb. He was taken aback when Clark cheerfully