The Four Corners of the Sky Page 8

  Sam turned the pink baseball cap around, inside out, examining it. She pointed at the faded ink scribble inside the small hatband. “Hang on. I remember seeing something written in here too. Look.”

  Annie examined the pale ink marks in the light: 362484070N. She was still studying the scribbled sequence when her cell phone rang.

  She was surprised by the jolt she felt, like a scramble out of sleep, like a plane in a graveyard spiral, disoriented. The thought raced through her that someone on the phone was going to tell her that her father was dead.

  But a familiar voice jumped in and out of static. “Babe? That you, A? A? Can you hear me?”

  “Brad?…Brad?”

  “Yeah, babe. Happy birthday.” It was her almost ex-husband Brad Hopper, who phoned her every few weeks, ostensibly to settle specifics about their divorce but actually to urge her to call it off.

  “Brad. Can we talk later? You’re breaking up and I’m busy now.”

  “You’re always busy, A.” He started quickly singing, “Happy birthday to you…”

  “Brad—”

  “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you…Guess what you’re getting as a present? Me. I’m on my way to Emerald.”

  Chapter 10

  No Time for Love

  Outside the wind shrieked and there was more static in the connection. “You hear me, A?” He had always called her “A,” as if his saying “Annie” would waste her time. “So, what are you so busy with? Busy-ness, that was one of our problems.”

  “‘Our problems,’ not my problem?” She muttered, “You must be in therapy.”

  Brad laughed just a little too long to mean it. “Hey, that’s your buddy Georgette’s thing, not mine. What happened to your party tonight?”

  “How’d you even know about it?”

  “Georgette.”

  Annie glared out the window in the direction of the Nickerson house, where more lights were now coming on. “Brad, I wish you’d stop calling Georgette or you’d marry her or something.”

  “No, you don’t,” her almost-ex said with his oddly rapid Georgia accent. “You want you and me to get back together and that’s why, deep down, A, you don’t want a divorce.”

  “Really?” She gave him her well-known raised eyebrow, knowing that although he couldn’t see it, he could sense it.

  “Really,” he agreed. “That’s why the paperwork’s taking so long.”

  She sighed. “The paperwork’s taking so long because your lawyer won’t return my lawyer’s phone calls.”

  He chuckled conspiratorially. “You bet.”

  Annie began pacing the hallway. “The final papers are at your lawyer’s, Brad. You sign them.”

  “I’m never home.” He laughed again. “I just sold a jet in Charleston and I’m headed your way.” Brad, retired from the Navy and now in the Reserves, was the figurehead of Hopper Jets, the highly successful Atlanta-based private aircraft company that had been founded by his grandfather and was actually run by his mother and his twin sister Brandy. “Anyhow, Georgette just told me Sam called your party off because of the weather. It’s not so bad.”

  Annie stared out the window, where she saw Clark out in the yard, bent over by the wind, tying the barn doors shut. The wind blew the tall man’s yellow slicker sideways like a big flag of surrender. “You’re crazy, Brad. It’s very bad here. Georgette told you it wasn’t bad?”

  “Yeah, well, you know she’d love to see me.” Brad, whose mother had persuaded him that he was the apple of the world’s eye, had always theorized that Georgette had a crush on him; he’d felt sorry for her as a result. “Sam sent me an invite to your party, so I wasn’t like crashing or anything.”

  Annie grimaced at her aunt. “Sam sent you an invite?”

  “She’s my bud.”

  “Apparently everybody is.”

  “So weather’s really bad there?”

  She pushed away the balloons. “Major storm. Stay where you are, Brad.” Watching Sam, who was rereading the letter Jack had sent, she added, “I may be leaving town anyhow. I just found out my dad is dying.”

  Brad was surprised. “No way!”

  “He wants me to bring him the King of the Sky to St. Louis tonight. I’m thinking I should go because if he is dying, maybe he could tell me something about my mom.”

  “Your mom? You don’t have a mom.”

  “Everybody’s got a mom. I’d like to know who mine is.” Sam looked over at her. Annie, checking her watch, made a face at the phone. “Brad, even your mom’s better than none at all.”

  “Ah, A, come on.” Brad hated for Annie to make cracks about his mother. It was an old argument.

  “Fine. Bye. I’ve got to go deal.”

  “Go deal. It’s bizarro, babe. But I’m sorry your dad’s sick. See, I’m nice about him.”

  Annie couldn’t stop herself. “I’m nice about your dad.”

  “My dad’s dead.” He sighed.

  “I was nice about him when he wasn’t dead. Later, Brad.”

  “Okay, later, A.”

  She hung up with a decisiveness that she knew reminded him of his mother, Spring Hopper, the real estate mogul. Annie had always understood that Brad feared and admired the cut-to-the-chase take on life that she shared with “Mama Spring,” who hated her (and vice versa). Brad had kept photos of the two women in his wallet, separated by a divider. The one of Annie was one that she disliked, from the local newspaper, titled “Emerald’s Young Top Gun,” a picture of her in her Navy flight suit, arms folded, with her helmet stenciled “Lt. Annie P. Goode” with the black eagle, standing in a starry sky with a vacuous grin as if she’d just successfully straightened out the Milky Way. In the photo her fake smile (she had to admit) looked rather like Mama Spring’s.

  Sam had hung this same photo of Annie, proudly enlarged, on a big posterboard headlined, “My Niece Lt. Anne Samantha Peregrine Goode!!!” The board sat in the window of Sam’s movie store so that everybody in town could keep up with Annie, whether they wanted to or not. Annie found the window display embarrassing and asked Sam to remove it. Sam refused. “Love means never being sure you won’t be totally mortified by the people who love you.”

  “No fooling,” Annie replied.

  She had separated from Brad immediately after walking into their bedroom and finding him having sex with their squad leader’s wife. She told him then that she was never again going to make herself so vulnerable. “It’s over, Brad. You need to know that.”

  “I don’t know it, A. I don’t want to know it.”

  Clark, who’d never thought Brad a particularly wise choice, had tried not to say I told you so. But after the separation, when Brad began begging her to come back, her uncle warned her, “Take some time to find your bearings, Annie. I married my second wife too fast, when I was still mourning my first. Result: Divorce.”

  She raised her Claudette Colbert eyebrow at him. “The only thing I didn’t do fast enough with Brad was leave him.”

  Annie and Brad had met at Annapolis on the first day of their first year. By the time they graduated—Brad by the skin of his perfect teeth, and despite (or in his view, because of) his strategic use of uppers under stress—they’d been engaged for two years. He had set out from the beginning to win Annie’s affection because she was pretty and Southern and, like his mother, so competent that she could run his life without troubling him about it.

  In the beginning she resisted Brad’s flirtation. But the first time that they flew a jet together, she fell in love. In the air, he was exciting, intense, the fastest midshipman at the Academy. On paper, he was perfect too: good-looking, star athlete, only son of wealthy parents who doted on him. But in the end—at least this was Georgette’s theory—Annie fell in love with Brad because the more she pushed him away, the more he resisted going. It was the opposite of her begging her father not to leave.

  With the highest academic grades in their class, she’d been given her choice of assignments on “Selection Day.”
She’d chosen the Fighter Weapons School in San Diego, where, after initial training in Pensacola, she would train to fly new Navy jets. Brad, a top-ranked midshipman Naval Aviator (holder of a speed record), had also been offered a billet in San Diego. The day they heard their assignments, they lay on his bed in his boyhood room in a wealthy Atlanta suburb, where taped to the ceiling was a poster of a blonde spilling out of a bikini that he’d put up back in the tenth grade. That the poster hadn’t been removed should have been, Annie later mused to Georgette, a clue.

  After they finished their pilot training, before they were to ship off together to the Persian Gulf on the USS Enterprise, Annie and Brad suddenly announced a wedding date. They called their families and gave them only three weeks notice to come to California for the ceremony, which was to be a quiet, almost stealthy one, since their base commander had told them (presciently as it proved) that so quick a marriage would be a dumb-ass idea.

  Worried but sounding cheerful, Sam and Clark flew with Georgette and D. K. Destin from North Carolina, bringing all the way across the country the little Maltese terrier Malpy and the old Shih Tzu Teddy.

  The service was held in an ugly desert town west of the San Diego base. Georgette was Annie’s maid of honor and D. K. Destin, in his wheelchair, gave her away with Sam, Clark, and the two dogs (Malpy wearing a plaid bow tie, Teddy a plaid hair bow). That three such adults and two dogs should perform this ceremonial function much distressed Brad’s formidable mother, who told her daughter Brandy that she felt strongly that “a g.d. freak zoo is no substitute for a father of the bride.”

  All through the wedding rehearsal, Annie and her new mother-in-law watched each other like gunslingers in the street.

  The South Carolinian Mrs. Hopper, who referred to herself in the third person as “Mama Spring,” fired a shot: Where the g.d.h. was Annie’s g.d. father? If Brad’s father, Daddy Alton, could make it all the way from Atlanta on oxygen with emphysema, surely Daddy Jack, father of the bride, could have gotten his b-u-t-t to San Diego as well?

  Annie returned fire in a barrage of sarcasm: the family she wanted here was here. Daddy Jack was irrelevant and had either fled the country or had his b-u-t-t locked up in a federal penitentiary.

  Mama Spring volleyed back with a sardonic smile. Couldn’t the father of the bride have gotten a special family leave of absence from prison in order to come give his little girl away, so Annie could have enjoyed what any normal girl craved, a church and a lace veil and a satin train and a g.d. maid of honor in something coordinated, instead of having a size-eighteen sleazepot (Georgette Nickerson) at the rehearsal dinner announcing she planned to wear a black bustier with pink satin elbow-length gloves tomorrow? After all, Annie was marrying the most eligible young bachelor in all Atlanta, a large city where the active Junior League was practically draped in black, a whole city where every good mother at every good club had wanted Brad to marry her daughter, instead of marrying somebody nobody knew, and without a spit of notice either! But Annie didn’t even seem to realize her good fortune! Why, when Mama Spring had first come out, her picture was in every paper in the state.

  “Luckily the same thing didn’t happen to me,” muttered Annie’s aunt Sam as she sat down at the hotel bar’s piano and began to play “Take My Breath Away” from the Top Gun soundtrack.

  Brad’s invalid father Daddy Alton took a puff of the oxygen attached to the back of his wheelchair as Mama Spring sank onto a barstool in tears. He ordered two White Russians and drank them both while Brad’s twin sister Brandy was comforting her mother.

  Later, alone with “the bride’s party,” Sam was taking requests at the piano (she played by ear and only needed to hear someone hum a melody in order to reproduce it). She played “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” for D. K., then “Only the Lonely” for Clark, then confessed to both that Brad’s behavior was scaring her. The young man appeared to be on the verge of a fit. Had the others noticed how he kept scratching at his scalp, how his knees kept bouncing up and down and his foot twitching as if some irascible puppet master was jerking on his strings? “What’s that boy’s problem?”

  D. K. Destin pressed big brown fingers together into a pinch, held them to each nostril. “Brad’s on a sleigh ride in the snow. Our baby’s marrying a junkie.”

  “No, she isn’t,” Sam insisted, her face a wrinkle of worry. “That’s not possible.”

  “Anything’s possible,” Clark admitted. “Lot of Huey pilots in ’Nam were cokeheads. Who could blame them?”

  “Not me,” said D. K. “I wish I’d had a little snort, anything to pass the time all those hours I was hanging onto two feet of scrap metal in the Commie China Sea waiting for a God-Almighty U.S. Navy ’copter to show up. Stress can get to you.”

  Sam frowned. “What stress is Brad under?” He had not been shot out of a jet plane and crashed into the ocean; all he was doing was getting married.

  “Easy for you to say,” Clark told her.

  She wondered, “Are we going to make it through tonight and tomorrow?”

  Clark and D. K. together told her, “No.”

  “Oh God,” sighed Sam. “You think Brad’s not the One?” Since Annie’s adolescence, her three surrogate parents had devoted considerable speculation to who would be the right man for their adopted child. Whenever she brought home a new boyfriend, Sam would ask, “Is he the One?”

  “He’s not the One,” sadly agreed Clark and D. K. on the eve of her wedding to Brad Hopper.

  Chapter 11

  The High and the Mighty

  It was not only in retrospect that Annie’s wedding was a failure. No one much enjoyed it even at the time, certainly not Annie, too busy to notice that it wasn’t an auspicious occasion, although she marched so briskly into the justice of the peace’s office in her Navy uniform and recited her vows so quickly, like a pledge of allegiance, it was as if she suspected she would change her mind if she slowed down. Brad’s mumbled response to the solemn questions could scarcely be heard and he had trouble keeping his eyes open during the chaplain’s (admittedly unsolicited) homily on Jesus wanting everybody—except presumably Himself—to have a lot of Christian children. In general the groom was looking, to his dispassionate sister Brandy, “totally wasted,” and his bride “totally hyper.”

  Brad’s best man, Lt. Commander Steve Wirsh, had driven out from the base with his wife Melody. After the rehearsal Melody paddled up and down the hotel pool in a hot pink thong and a black sports bra, attracting attention, including Brad’s. Wirsh, mistaking Clark and Sam for Annie’s parents, chastised them for allowing their blind dog to bite Melody on the thumb. He was taken aback when Clark cheerfully offered to have Teddy put to sleep immediately.

  “Oh my God, oh my God, don’t do that! We didn’t mean that.” Melody tried to kiss Teddy, who growled at her.

  After the ceremony, at Hôm Qua, the local Vietnamese restaurant that D. K. had chosen for his wedding gift dinner party, young Wirsh gave a speech about America’s imperial destiny that Sam could only endure by eating an entire steamed sea bass.

  Annie overheard Mama Spring Hopper lamenting to Brandy that the whole bridal party was “nothing but a parade at the g.d. Mardi Gras!” with Sam a make-no-mistake-about-it pervert, and who ever heard of a purple satin tuxedo? With Clark, Annie’s uncle, who wasn’t even her uncle but just a man who lived with a Lesbian, never saying two words a bat could hear through a megaphone. With the maid of honor, Georgette Something, looking like Madonna half way through a Kahlúa and chocolates binge—Madonna the rock star not the Virgin Mary—shouting out wedding toasts that would have been worse had they not been incoherent; so drunk she had fallen flat on her face, unable to catch the bride’s bouquet, despite the bride’s having tossed it straight at her.

  Plus those two horrible dogs had run off with Mama Spring’s purse and torn it to shreds.

  And to top it all off, that big crippled black man with dirty cornrows, wearing black pajamas and sitting in a wheelchair with Move the F O
ver! on the back of it, that man had told Daddy Alton that Daddy had only himself to blame for even being in a wheelchair, whereas the black man claimed he had gotten his disability by being shot out of a plane for his country. The whole thing had so upset Daddy (admittedly not a veteran, except of thirty years of two packs a day) that he’d ordered three mai tais in a row from a waitress talking Asian gibberish and had made a fool of himself by singing “Strawberry Fields Forever” with that awful Sam playing it on the piano. In Mama Spring’s view, and Brandy could take it to the bank, the bride’s entire wedding party was like one horrible preview of what Liberals would do to America if given a chance. It assuredly wasn’t the kind of wedding party anyone would want to paste in a book of Treasured Memories.

  At this point, Annie had heard enough. Thrusting her champagne glass at Georgette (who drank it), she tapped Brad’s mother on the shoulder. “A parade? How about my bridal party,” she said with her icy smile, “is a paradigmatic symbol of progressive democracy?” When that produced a blank stare from Mrs. Hopper, Annie jabbed her with a finger. “I’ll rephrase. Drop the g.d. subject of my wedding right now, you racist bitch.”

  Mrs. Hopper wailed, “Daddy Alton!” and sobbed convulsive tears. The tears brought Brad running, followed by Daddy Alton as fast as he could get there, drunk, with his oxygen tanks weighing down his wheelchair.

  Brad’s mother cried that Annie’s remark had “devastated” her; she was no racist; she made turkey sandwiches for the homeless and served them herself in her church community room.

  Brad asked both bride and mother to apologize, “just to smooth things over this little bump.”

  Mother and bride stared at him ominously, their eyes warning: “You think this is a ‘little’ bumpy? Stand back.”

  At 1 a.m., Georgette (unaccustomed to heavy drinking) succumbed to alcohol poisoning, throwing up on Mama Spring after spinning both D. K. and Daddy Alton around in circles in their wheelchairs to an MTV number on the television above the bar. She’d been working hard to get a little dancing going—the Vietnamese restaurant was not really made for dancing—an excuse that did not make Brad’s mother feel any better about being vomited on.