The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [42]
“Check out the Weather Channel. It’s a bad twister, fifty miles from here.” Clark pointed overhead. “I predicted this.”
“For like fifteen years.”
“Well,” he said, “Annie’s up in her room.”
“Please tell me she’s developed a sense of humor because she just said she’d decided to fly the King of the Sky to St. Louis tonight to give it to her dad!”
“I know. Stop her.” Clark explained what had happened.
Georgette mulled it over. “She’s got to think Jack will help her find her mother.”
“She’s crazy.”
“That’s a loose diagnosis, Clark.” She added that Brad had just called her, with the remarkable hypothesis that Annie would take him back if he flew from Charleston to Emerald in this storm and proposed to her.
“He’s crazy too.”
“Clark, stick to pediatric orthopedics. You can’t just keep saying Annie’s crazy, Brad’s crazy.”
“They are. You need to stop encouraging Brad. He already gets enough of that from Sam. Let’s not have him keep fighting this divorce.”
Georgette sighed, still single. “At least Annie got married so she could get divorced. I’m a doctor. It used to be that people wanted to marry doctors.” She pulled off her rubber rain hat and shook out her spiky black hair.
Clark said, “Those were women who wanted to marry male doctors. Like me. I’ve had two different women propose to me in the last five years.”
“Right, and did you marry either of them? Would you like my analysis of why you’re divorced and living with a Lesbian, Dr. Goode?”
The tall thin man laughed. He’d known Georgette since her early childhood, had encouraged her medical school aspirations, and now saw her daily at Emerald Hospital. “I’ve heard your analysis, dozens of times. You see, here’s your problem, Georgette. You’re in psychiatry and men don’t want a wife who’s going to analyze them for free.”
The young woman snorted. “‘Free.’ Oh. So ‘free’ is my problem? If I ever have another date, I’ll charge him.”
“There you go. Go talk to Annie.”
Pulling a small damp box wrapped in birthday paper from her raincoat, she fluffed up the ribbon. “This is for her birthday.”
Clark warned her with his raised forefinger. “You shrink-wrap it?”
“Please, only new puns.”
“That’s hard at my age. Go on. She’s up there, hanging from her door doing chin-ups or something till D. K. gets her plane ready. She doesn’t have the body weight to hold that Piper down in thirty-mile-an-hour winds.”
“Lucky her.”
Clark called after Georgette as she headed up the stairs, “Tell her she can’t fly to St. Louis! She won’t listen to Sam and me. We’re old.”
She turned back and did a sixties dance step. “I’m bookin’, man. Don’t sweat it. I’m hip, I’m cool—”
“Fine. Mock the elderly.”
Georgette ran up the stairs to the second floor, where she found Annie in her bedroom, finishing a set of abdominal crunches. She sat on the bed to watch her. “So, your birthday party’s cancelled. Frankly, the old gang was relieved. You only see them once a year and they feel like you’ve, you know, left them behind.”
Annie’s left elbow briskly tapped her right knee. “Behind how?”
Georgette fluffed pillows. “Well, to keep up with you, they have to study Sam’s big window display at Now Voyager. For them, life is a little more landlocked: complaining about husbands, kids, jobs. By the way, Jennifer had another boy.”
Annie’s right elbow tapped her left knee. “How can so many kids we went to high school with have kids now?”
Georgette pointed at the retro chrome clock on the wall, spinning her finger in a circle. “Well, frankly, it’s not like at our age we’d be Burmese child brides. The bio bell is tolling.”
“We’ve got a whole decade.” Finishing another set of sit-ups, Annie touched both elbows to both knees. “I’m shooting for pregnant at thirty-five.”
“If you want to make thirty-five, you might rethink taking this solo trip in a superannuated single-engine airplane tonight.” Flying the King of the Sky to St. Louis through a