The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [74]
For the next year, whenever adults asked Annie what she planned to be, she told them “a judge like my grandpa and Judge Patterson.” Some people in Emerald thought this was “precious.” Some thought the less Annie knew about her grandpa the better.
Clark warned Annie, with one of his terrible puns, that she was too fast to be a judge. What she wanted was wheels. “Whoa, slow down, you’ve got the court before the horse. You need a job where you don’t sit still.”
Years later, when Annie flew her first mission for the Navy, she joked to Clark that he’d been the one first to predict and then to make possible the “dangerous” profession of aviation from which he’d tried to divert her.
“See, Clark, it all balances out.” She patted his shoulder. “As long as you and Sam don’t go anywhere, I can go 1200 miles per hour.”
“So Sam and I just get to hang around here waiting?”
She laughed. “That’s what parents do.”
***
On the Pilgrim’s Rest porch, Sam sat with her cell phone on the table beside her rocker, waiting for Annie to call to say she’d made it to St. Louis. Clark was still at the hospital, where he was removing a .22 slug from the thigh of a ten-year-old whose little brother had accidentally shot him with one of the family guns.
Sam couldn’t sleep. She told herself to stop worrying about Annie. Annie flew every day in all kinds of weather—much faster than she was flying the King of the Sky to St. Louis tonight. In fact it was almost impossible to conceive of the speeds Annie flew. How was it imaginable for anyone to travel at 1000 miles per hour, at 2000? What must that feel like? In a big passenger plane, you had almost no sense of speed at all and yet you were sometimes going as much as 600 miles per hour. But suppose you were moving three times that fast? It must feel…well, impossible to grasp.
Sam looked over at the Nickerson house next door. All the lights were off except the one in Georgette’s bedroom. She went back inside. In the hallway her glance caught something glittering. It was the pink baseball cap that Annie had worn here nearly twenty years earlier; the cap Sam had taken out of the suitcase with Jack’s flight jacket tonight. Annie had forgotten and left it sitting on the newel post.
The green and red beads spelling ANNIE on the front of the cap drew Sam’s attention again. A few of the brass-set round beads sparkled in the chandelier lights as she turned the pink brim. Finding the bone-handled magnifying glass that Clark kept in the hall table drawer because he couldn’t see the print on envelopes as well as he once had, she studied the capped round beads, noticing that they’d been painted over with green, blue, and red paint. Where the paint had worn away was where the sparkle was. She scratched more paint off with her fingernail; wherever she removed the paint, a shimmering twinkle of bright color flared in the light.
In the kitchen she scrubbed with a soapy brush on the water-based paint until all thirty-seven beads were clean. There would have been, she counted, forty-two little beads spelling ANNIE, except that five were missing.
She took the pink hat into the living room to hold under a halogen lamp so she could examine the exposed beads in its brighter light.
In her excitement, Sam couldn’t stop herself from calling next door. Georgette took a long time to answer her phone.
“Did I wake you up?”
Georgette told Sam that she’d been trying to read herself to sleep with her own upcoming conference paper on sleep disorders but that all she’d done was convince herself that her paper was stupid.
“I know the feeling,” Sam commiserated. “When I can’t sleep, every wrong I’ve ever committed slips in through the cracks in the doors and windows like the ghosts in Poltergeist.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
“I want you to come over here and look at something.”
But Georgette didn’t want to get dressed in order to come over to examine Annie’s childhood baseball cap. Besides, Georgette’s appraisal