The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [35]
The owner of Hôm Qua Restaurant stepped out of the shadows and raised his hand. Clark acknowledged the man with a wave, then leaned over and pulled up Daddy Alton’s eyelids. “He’s fine.”
At 2 a.m., D. K. Destin grabbed Brad by the hair and threatened to kill him if he ever hurt Annie.
Mama Spring threatened to kill D. K. if he threatened to kill her son.
“Let’s all say good morning,” Clark proposed. “Then nobody will have to kill anybody.” Turning, he bowed to the physician-restaurateur, who stood patiently by the door with his car keys in his hand. “Cám o’n rat nhieu. Ban that tot. Tam Biet.”
The owner bowed. “Vinh biet.”
Clark laughed.
Annie told Sam, “This is the worst wedding I’ve ever been to. And it had to be mine.” She burst into tears.
“Come on, everybody,” Clark said. “Let’s look on the bright side.”
“Oh shut up, Clark,” Sam said, hugging Annie who was hugging Teddy. Malpy barked. “What did that Vietnamese man say that was so funny?”
“I said good night for now and he replied, ‘Good-bye forever.’ Sort of how they felt in Vietnam in general.”
***
A month later, Annie and Brad were deployed to the Gulf, where their air wing distinguished itself in Operation Desert Fox, a strike campaign from Kuwait against Iraqi forces. Annie and Brad flew F/A-18 Super Hornets off the aircraft carrier Enterprise in four separate successful bombing raids, for which they each received a minor medal. Both enjoyed what they were doing.
During the two-year tenure of the young couple’s marriage, Mrs. Hopper never (“thank you, g.d. Jesus”) laid eyes on Sam and Clark, Georgette and D. K. again, nor on Jack Peregrine once. But she continued to ask Annie with a careful innocence about “the father of the bride” whenever they spoke, which was too often for Annie.
Nevertheless, as Sam remarked to Clark and Georgette when, a few months after the wedding, they sat at Pilgrim’s Rest, looking through the wedding photos, it was as if Brad’s mother could never recover from Jack’s absence, as if she had always imagined him some rumpled grumpy Spencer Tracy, who should have been grousing in his armchair about losing the teenaged Elizabeth Taylor to a younger man and having to pay for it, whereas Annie’s father had failed even to show up, proving himself, Sam had to admit, no Spencer Tracy.
Clark passed around a snapshot of Mrs. Hopper taken at that tempestuous banquet in the Vietnamese restaurant. He noted dryly that Mama Spring was no Spring Mama either. Indeed, she might be more accurately called “Mama Late Summer. Or even Mama Nearly Autumn.” Nevertheless, Mama Spring had been dressed for Annie and Brad’s wedding as if she’d expected to pick up Keanu Reeves at a salsa bar later that night.
Georgette added—in the wry voice that Sam and Clark had always appreciated far more than her own mother ever had—maybe Mama Spring had been dressed up for that Georgia Tech senior Daddy Alton had accused her of sleeping with. Maybe that undergraduate had been waiting for her next door at the Marriott. Maybe Georgette had slept with him too. She put her hands over her eyes. “Oh God, don’t make me remember that night. I think I did sleep with a friend of Brad’s that night. It was the worst night of my life.”
“You don’t know that yet,” Clark pointed out.
Sam sighed. “You think Annie will be happy with Brad?”
“No,” promptly answered Clark.
“It’s so easy to be negative.”
As it turned out, negativity was the better bet.
***
After their tour in Kuwait, Annie and Brad returned to the San Diego base where Lt. Commander Wirsh’s wife Melody had time on her hands and decided to spend it having sex with her husband’s best friend. Annie caught them at it and left him. The news came as no surprise to her family in Emerald.
Georgette, now a psychiatry intern at Chapel Hill, explained it