The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [39]
“What’s the matter with him?”
Nevertheless, the next morning, a bleak March weekend, Annie, off-duty, drove all the way from Annapolis to Emerald in order to keep on arguing with Georgette about why she wasn’t divorced yet.
As soon as Sam had seen her niece driving up River Hill Road in her gray convertible, she’d telephoned Brad, whom she knew to be in Atlanta, visiting his mother. He flew straight to Emerald the next day to try to “smooth things over” with his estranged wife.
Annie refused to see him, although she did hide with her old dog Teddy at the top of the stairs, listening in on her husband’s lament to his aunt-in-law. Sam spotted Annie crouched there on the second-floor landing, head pressed between the rails, just as she’d done when she was a child, with the black-and-white little Shih Tzu on her lap. Her eyes were squeezed shut in the same way too, and seeing the young woman, Sam’s heart ached for the child.
There’d been a time, a few years after Annie’s arrival in Emerald, when Sam and she had stood in the yard on a crisp starry night, watching Clark set up her new telescope. They’d found Venus luminous in the low southwestern evening sky. “The Queen of Love,” Sam had said. “Don’t bother asking Venus about anything but love because she doesn’t care about anything else.”
“Annie can make any kind of wish on any kind of star she wants,” Clark assured the child. “Doesn’t have to be Venus.”
Annie tightly scrunched an eye shut and peered with the other into the telescope at the resplendent black-mirrored sky. “Is that Venus that’s so bright?”
Clark looked. “Yep. That’s her.”
Still staring into the lens, Annie said, “I wish you both would never die.”
On either side, they took her hands. “We plan,” said Clark, “to put it off as long as possible. Tell you what, I’ll quit smoking.”
Sam added, “I plan to clean out the attic and the basement before I die.”
Annie laughed. “That’ll never happen.”
They laughed together and looked up at the stars.
Thinking of that starry night, Sam lied to Brad; under orders not to reveal her grown niece’s presence in the house, she claimed Annie.
The handsome naval officer choked up, telling Sam that for some reason Annie thought he didn’t respect her. Whereas, deep down in his heart, even though everybody always said that he himself was the best pilot they’d ever met, deep down he believed Annie was the best, male or female, ever seen in the sky. “I mean, I’ve got the big T and that’ll just always kick ass in the end, but truth is, she’s Number One. And you tell her I said so.”
“What the hell is the big T?”
Brad hit himself in the abdomen. “You know. Testosterone.”
With an elaborate thoughtfulness, Sam considered this idea. “Ah…but otherwise, Annie’s got at least a tiny little bit of a future in flying?”
“I don’t know why y’all have to be so sarcastic. She’s the best. I mean, before she went nuts about our problem. Probably not doing so good now. When she stresses, well, you know…”
Sam swung an imaginary tennis racket overhead as if she were going to serve Brad’s head to the other end of the hall. “Well, it’s true, having her marriage blow up in her face did stress her out a little bit.”
Brad said he had no idea how their lives could have gone so fatally wrong so fast. “I wish you could help me smooth this over. Why can’t she just move on?”
“I’ll give you a hint,” growled Sam, the invisible racket swinging back and forth. “Naked married woman under naked married man, not married to each other. Man would be you, you dumb big T dickhead!”
Brad yanked at his thick black hair. “I sure see where she gets this aspect of her personality.” He rapidly cracked his knuckles in an elaborate tattoo. Couldn’t Sam look at it from Brad’s point of view? He was always getting shot out of the water by Annie’s smart bombs and it was no vacation. “Sam, with her, it’s twelve o’clock high every day of our lives.” And while he’d be the last to deny that, given his wedding vows, he’d been out of line with Melody, he felt Annie should admit that she was partly to blame for his “slipup