The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [70]
Boss’s obituary called him “the quintessential American,” which was true enough: there was no edge of the earth he wouldn’t push his way into—even as far away as Cuba and the Philippines. For him the frontier was always filled with desirable things that somebody else was going to grab first if he didn’t get a move on. But wherever Boss’s wealth had come from, it hadn’t made him happy. Only his mistress had given him any joy—despite which fact it had never occurred to him that he loved her. Nor had his wealth protected him from getting stabbed to death in the street.
So Boss was laid to rest with other dissatisfied Peregrines under a heavy gravestone in the Emerald cemetery where the mistress famously flung herself at the coffin and then into the grave and then moved penniless to “Darktown,” where she married a Native American tobacco farmer named Destin.
From his grave, Boss, if he could watch anything, watched his son lose the family bank and his grandson—Sam and Jack’s father—lose his two-year-old son in a pool accident and then years later drown himself, so mysteriously that people in Emerald were still talking about it thirty years later.
The Peregrine graves in St. Mark’s, ponderous gray granite blocks, begged their occupants to Rest In Peace, but, as Sam lamented, her family had never been able to get any grasp on peace at all. Desire kept them stretching for every new thing they’d ever been told they should want. And when it all turned to smoke and wisped through their fingers, desire kept them longing, as Sam’s brother Jack longed for emeralds and rubies buried on Peregrine land.
“And why?” Sam wondered aloud to Clark as they got out of his car. What had Jack really wanted?
Clark pulled the barn doors shut behind the Volvo. “Maybe he really wanted emeralds and rubies.”
Sam said, no, Jack didn’t want money. He wanted what was out of reach, because it was out of reach. Like he’d wanted Ruthie Nickerson, George’s sister, who appeared to have been one of the few people in his life who hadn’t loved him back.
“Love’s a slow dance,” said Clark. “Jack didn’t have the patience.”
Sam caught his arm, stopped him. “If you’re going to say Jill wasn’t the real thing because she left me, you’d be wrong. Just because love doesn’t last, doesn’t mean it isn’t real.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything about Jill. Why do people always think you’re talking about them?” Clark’s pager beeped. As he waited for his service to connect him to the hospital, he pointed into the dark. “There’s a deck chair in our driveway.”
Sam looked too. “I think that’s Georgette’s chair.”
“It’s been broken for years anyhow.” Clark tipped the chair over. “It’ll go into that stuffed garage of broken dreams she’s got.”
“Don’t be so cruel. Georgette’s just too busy to have a tag sale.”
“Sam, is there anybody you wouldn’t make excuses for?”
“Hey, you should hear me defending you.”
Together, they carried the teak deck chair up onto the Nickerson patio.
Afterwards, they climbed their porch steps together and righted the overturned green rockers and sat in them. In a while, Sam said, “So, anyhow, this Miami detective thought we were a couple.”
Clark rubbed her knee. “We’re not?”
Chapter 22
Bright Eyes
Samantha Peregrine and Clark Goode were certainly not a couple in any ordinary sense, although when Annie spoke to friends about her “aunt and uncle,” most of them assumed she meant a married couple. But the two hadn’t expected even to be friends, much less to share a home and raise a child.
Both were bachelors, battle-weary after a number of defeats