The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [56]
Clark held up the huge emerald on its chain. “Where do you suppose Jack got this thing?”
“Not by paying for it at Tiffany’s,” replied Annie.
Sam examined the emerald again. It was doubtless worth a hundred thousand, she theorized. It was very large and looked to be perfectly formed.
“Great. Maybe he wants to trade it for my mother’s name.” Annie zipped the stone with the fake business cards and the hundred dollar bills inside her father’s flight jacket. “Let’s go.”
Clark left them to go check on Georgette before he brought the car around to the porch.
Annie repeated the numbers from memory, “362484070N and 678STNX211,” and wrote them on a message pad, handing the pad to Sam. “Keep this.”
Sam checked the numbers against those on the pink cap. “Perfect. And I can’t remember a phone number long enough to call it.” They walked together through the hallway. “More and more I just remember what happened ages ago, millions of little things, just flashes, from when I was a kid. When you’re young, you don’t have time to remember your life. When you’re my age…” Sam rubbed at her white hair. “The past starts to push the present aside.” She pulled from her shorts pocket the copy of Annie’s birth certificate that she’d found in the attic. “Know what I mean?”
“Not really.” Annie studied the certificate.
Sam’s familiar frown deepened. “Well, like when I was eating the chicken korma, I was remembering squeezing soy sauce out of a plastic packet in a booth at House of Joy. The soy sauce squirted onto my mother’s blouse sleeve. A gray silk blouse with two little covered buttons at the cuffs. Grandee was furious at me and hit the back of my hand hard with her fork. She didn’t like chopsticks and always used a fork.” Sam answered an accusation no one had made. “All right, all right, my mother wasn’t a loving person. But she had great style.”
Annie patted her hands. “No wonder you eat everything with chopsticks, even French fries.” She took Sam back into the living room, pointed out a photo on the piano. In the picture, Sam stood among thousands of placard-waving protesters at the 2000 inauguration in Washington. “You’ve got the love thing and style too. Look at you. It’ll always be 1968, Sam.”
“I wish,” sighed her aunt. “Check out the gray hair in that crowd. We’re practically on walkers. Where are all the young people?”
Annie pointed at a group photo of her first flight-school class at their graduation. “Here we are. In a land called Reality where you know you can’t change human nature.”
“The world is fixable, Annie. You just need to get the real news so you know what to fix.”
Annie straightened the Navy photo. Two of those classmates were dead now. She said, “We’d rather hear the news on comedy shows.”
Sam helped Annie slip into Jack’s old leather flight jacket, rolling up its sleeves for her. “That’s about the only place you can hear the real news these days. Vietnam, we had Cronkite.”
Laughing, Annie put on her Navy cap. “Sam, just leave war to pros like me.”
“You think you’re so cynical. Good lord, you telephone Georgette practically every day. There’s no reason to do that but love.”
“Sure, and I buy organic. But most of all, I work hard to get promoted and—” Annie smiled, patting her flat abdomen, “—stay in shape.”
Sam pushed a curl back off her niece’s forehead. “Well, an elliptical trainer won’t make your heartstrings zing—”
Annie started melodramatically up the stairs. “Please, I beg you, don’t sing some awful love song.” Her mockery of Sam’s romantic songs was an old joke between them. “Love is not a many-splendored thing. Love does not make the world go round.”
Sam called after her, “Yes, it does.”
Annie turned back at the landing. “Well, I hope it doesn’t mean never having to say you’re sorry because I am looking forward to a major apology from Jack Peregrine!”
Sam patted the carved peregrine hawk in the newel post as she shouted up the stairs