The Four Corners Of The Sky (42 page)

“Support your troops,” she reminded him.

“Go to bed. I’ll call you in the morning,” he promised. “By morning I mean like ten, eleven o’clock.”

“Trevor, you’re sleeping your life away.”

He laughed. “How can I with you calling me all the time?”

A well-muscled man Annie’s age—with expensive beachy clothes—leaned in, took a crayon from a basket, and wrote a big green question mark on the paper tablecloth. “Waiting for a boyfriend?”

She didn’t reply. He grinned in what he clearly hoped was a winning way. He had better teeth than anyone could honestly come by; they were as white as a sink. “Tonight is ours, could be. How ’bout I sit down, buy you a drink?”

Glancing up, Annie said, “How ’bout you don’t?”

“Large mistake,” he told her.

“Chance I have to take.” She smiled with an insincerity he couldn’t miss.

He picked a tomato slice out of her guacamole salad and sucked it between his teeth in a belligerent reply. Annie grabbed his wrist, compressing nerves with an accuracy that the Navy had taught her. “Don’t put your hands in my food,” she advised him, her mouth tight. When she flicked his arm away, he cursed her but left.

A short voluptuous Latina woman wearing the requisite La Loca turquoise T-shirt with pedal pushers and stacked-heel sandals, strode through the crowd. As she approached the booth, Annie recognized her as Chamayra, Raffy’s helpful friend from Golden Days. She glared at Annie suspiciously. “Are you spying on me?”

Surprised, Annie asked, “Aren’t you the nurse at Golden Days?”

“Nurse technician. I fill in here late nights. I already told Raffy I can’t do nothing for you two till tomorrow.” Placing small strong hands on the table—Annie noticed a snake bracelet and a gimmick ring with a little pink blinking heart—she demanded to know, “You not trying to get Raffy in trouble, are you?”

“No, I’m doing everything I can to help him!”

Chamayra didn’t like this answer either. “Why? You know he’s seeing me, almost a year now?”

“He’s all yours.”

“He gave me this.” The waitress pulled an ornately worked heavy gold necklace out from under her tight La Loca T-shirt.

“That’s a lot of gold.” Annie made a whistling sound.

“His mama made it.” She slipped the necklace back under her shirt, shook herself so it would fall into place. “I want to help Raffy but your daddy is trouble for him. Me, too, if I lose my chance at Golden Days. I’m subbing.”

Annie nodded. “I understand. I just want to keep my father out of prison while I look for some decent health care for him.”

Chamayra made a face. “Don’t look in this country.”

“Listen, have you ever heard of a Sgt. Daniel Hart? Miami Police. I was told he comes in here every night.”

Overhearing the question, another waitress, African American, big, good-looking, thrust herself at the booth edge. “You Melissa? ’Cause if you are, you beat it, you hear me?”

Taken aback by the woman’s hostility, Annie stood up. “Excuse me?”

“You wasted a nice guy. Just leave the man alone.” She leaned sideways to get a better look. “Oh, you’re not Melissa. I saw her picture.”

Upset, Annie snapped. “Did I say I was Melissa?”

The waitress rocked back and forth. “No, but Danny told me Melissa was a bitch, so I made the mistake.” She huffed away.

Sliding back into the booth, Annie said to Chamayra, “Let’s start over.” Daniel Hart, she explained, was investigating her father. She wanted the detective’s help but he kept blowing off appointments he’d made with her. How ill was her father? Shouldn’t he be in a good hospital? To her astonishment, Annie found herself tearing up.

Softened, Chamayra turned sympathetic. “Be easy, hey.”

“I’m sorry. It’s exhaustion, that’s all.”

Chamayra sat down in the booth, put her arm around Annie. “I lost my mama last summer. She’s asleep in her bed, just don’t wake up. I grab her arm; it’s like a tray of ice. She’s dead. I walk out in our backyard and go down on my knees and I’m making weird noises loud as I can. My son runs out and makes me come back in the house, says I’m setting off dogs up and down the block.”

Annie blew her nose. “I’m sorry about your mother’s death.”

“
La muerte
. It comes to us all,” sighed the nurse, apparently under the influence of the philosophical Rafael Rook. She stood again, wiping the booth with an automatic efficiency. “Sometimes, face it, life sucks. I got two kids, my ex-husband gets laid off, eighteen years on the same job, you believe that? He can’t help with money for the kids no more. Aw yeah, what you gonna do? You want my advice for the world?”

Wary, Annie nonetheless nodded yes.

Thumbs and forefingers together, Chamayra pantomimed positioning a rectangular sign in air. “Hang out the Love sign and do what you can.” She flipped the invisible sign upside down. “Hang out the Closed sign when you gotta put your feet up.” She took the imaginary sign from its place in the air and tossed it over her shoulder. “Yeah, I know Dan. He’s not here now.”

“Sergeant Hart?”

“We’re open six nights; he’s in here six nights. Raffy can’t stand him but I think Dan’s a good guy. He was good to my little boy.”

“Well, I wish he’d answer his phone.”

The plump waitress spun her finger beside her head. “Right now Dan’s a stress case. His marriage busted up.”

Annie asked, “Today?”

“No, no. Two, three years back. Sit still. I’m gonna locate him for you.” She took away Annie’s soda glass. “I’ll bring you a mojito.”

Annie said she didn’t drink.

“You ain’t drank my mojito.”

Annie’s white Navy jacket was lying on the bench with her Navy hat. Chamayra gestured at them, made a face. “I got a brother joins the Army. I’m like, don’t go, Luis. He’s like, ‘Hey, you know, it’s better’n laying asphalt in this neighborhood, and I like get myself popped in some fuckin’ Haitian drive-by.’ I go, you know what? You’re right, it’s a living. So what happens? His jeep rolls over and he like loses a leg. Fuckin’ Kuwait. I’ll be back.”

The minty drink was very good. As Annie sipped it, she studied the fake business cards she’d found hidden inside the lining of her father’s leather flight jacket. These cards had different typefaces and introduced different men:

Henry Frank

Antiques and Artworks Appraised

Jarvis J. Rochard
III

Deputy Under Secretary, Department of the Interior

Edward Fettermann

Vice President

Southern Hemisphere Mining Corporation

Different addresses were inscribed at the bottoms of the cards. There’d even been a card with the name Clark Lewis Goode.

None of the cards told the truth. Not one of them said,

Jack Peregrine

Confidence Man

It had been on the backs of cards such as these that her father had long ago written out the words by which he’d taught her to read: Cat. Hat. Annie. Dad.

Now with a crayon, Annie wrote single words on the backs of the fake calling cards. She wrote
con
on one. She wrote
art
on a second. Then on a third card she found herself writing the word
love
—as if she were making a little version of that Love sign the waitress Chamayra had advised the world to hang out.

She studied the three cards, silently playing with them as she waited for Chamayra to bring her back news about where Dan Hart might be.

Con
. It meant at odds, opposed to, contra; as in
pro and con
. But to “con” something also meant to study it. Her father had conned his art, was a pro at the con. On the other hand, he was not always enough of a pro, since he was also an ex-con. Annie wryly tore the
con
card in two.

Art
. Raffy had claimed her father’s cons were works of art, that Jack had enough confidence in that art to save the whole city of Miami.
Confidence
. It meant “with faith.” But her father’s faith was specifically that he could con others into believing his lies. Even if the lie was his love. Hadn’t he conned her that way? Hadn’t she believed in the love he’d betrayed by disappearing? She looked a while at the
love
card, then she set her mojito down on it, sliding her glass around until the word blurred.

While
con
meant
against
, in Italian it was the word for
with
. So
con amore
was what Ruthie Nickerson had written on the sheet music of “Lara’s Theme” from
Doctor
Zhivago
that was in Sam’s piano bench at Pilgrim’s Rest—“with love.” With love to whom? For whom? Jack? Or had some old piano teacher just written that the song should be played passionately?

Annie might as well admit it; like Sam, like Raffy, like who knows else, she had loved the con man Jack Peregrine. But it was from him that she’d learned that love was the biggest con there was; he would make you feel confiding, confidential love, then when you loved him back, you got left in the road in the rain. You were conned by a pro and the art of it was you never saw it coming.

To hear her father tell the story, the only person who’d been able to resist this con-art love of his had been Annie’s mother, who’d walked away.

She looked at the unsigned postcard her father had given her, with the
Life
cover photo of Claudette Colbert smoking on the tropical balcony.

Claudette died today. Here’s to a great lady.

I’m fine. Hope you’re ditto. Better this way.

Reach for the sky…

Taking the flowery birthday card from her purse, she compared their handwritings. As she suspected, they had the same Greek final
e
’s, the same wide capital letters with their curving loops like smoke rings. She had little doubt that her father had written both in a fake hand.

Annie’s phone rang although it took her a while to hear it in the noise of La Loca. Georgette was calling from Emerald, where she was in bed reading about the Roman ruins at Baalbek. She just wanted to check in to hear the news from Miami. Annie gave her the highlights, then asked if Georgette knew what had happened to her mysterious aunt Ruthie, the one who’d run off with a married man when she was still a teenager.

Georgette found her friend’s interest in this distant past strange, given all that had happened to her in these last few days. Why would she ask about an aunt of Georgette’s that no one had seen or heard from in well over a decade? Annie explained how the woman at Golden Days yesterday had reminded her of images of Ruthie in the Nickerson house. Georgette thought it highly unlikely that her aunt Ruthie had flown first to St. Louis, then to Miami, merely to catch a glimpse of Jack Peregrine, particularly if—according to Kim—she had chewed him up and spit him out back when he was a teenager.

“Your mom didn’t stay in touch with Ruthie?”

“No way.” Georgette’s mother Kim had disliked her sister-in-law intensely, consistently calling her a “cold fish,” a “ball buster,” someone who “could care less about her family,” and who had ruined the life of the married man from Emerald with whom she’d “eloped,” abandoning him within weeks. (His wife had taken him back and they’d moved away.) By some unexplained means Ruthie had gotten herself admitted to an Ivy League college on a mysterious scholarship. After graduating, she had climbed some unknown ladder to success. According to Kim, she’d never given her only brother, Georgette’s father George, the time of day. In fact, when George had died of a sudden heart attack, all Ruthie had done was send flowers with a message that she was out of the country and unable to attend the funeral. Kim had vowed then never to forgive her and presumably never had.

“How old is Ruthie now?” Annie asked.

Georgette had to compute it: somewhere around forty-three or forty-four or forty-five.

The only time Georgette had ever known Ruthie to come back to Emerald had been when Annie herself had met her, when they’d been in ninth grade.

“I sort of remember that,” Annie said.

She let the memory form, enlarge: they’d driven home from school that day with Georgette’s mother. Georgette was in tears because she’d been hit in the face with a field hockey stick. Pacing in the Nickerson drive near a rental car was a tense, well-dressed, attractive woman clearly waiting for someone to come home.

With shocking curtness, Kim did not even greet this woman but told her, “There’re three cartons in the garage. The other stuff you can box yourself. It’s all in the front bedroom upstairs. I’m sure you’re too busy to stay for dinner.”

Kim hurried inside the house. The woman looked at the teenagers with deep-blue eyes unfathomable to Annie, then calmly introduced herself as Georgette’s aunt Ruthie.

Later that night, at home at Pilgrim’s Rest, Annie raced downstairs with her algebra notebook; studying for her final exams, she couldn’t solve a problem with which Clark would have been useful had he been there. She had little hope that Sam could help her with the math; she expected only sympathy.

Ruthie Nickerson sat at the kitchen table with Sam, drinking wine. The Scrabble game that Annie and Sam had been playing after dinner was still on the table. As Annie entered the room, the stranger was saying something about Clark, how she was sorry he had to stay late at the hospital tonight, how she would like Sam to tell him hello from her. Sam, with a tug at her short nut-brown hair, introduced the woman as Georgette’s aunt, visiting next door.

The woman said, “We already met. Hello again, Annie.”

Sam took Annie’s hand, proudly squeezed it. “Jack’s daughter I was telling you about.”

The woman raised her glass. “Where is he?”

Annie raised her eyebrow. “My bet is, jail.”

Ruthie toasted Annie with the wine. “Good guess, babe. Listen, sorry. Sam said that’s your sky puzzle. While she was on the phone, I did a little of it.”

Annie shrugged. “It just sits there.”

Taking a praline from a candy box labeled “New Orleans,” Ruthie bit into it with beautiful white teeth. “So, how do you like life here in Emerald?”

Annie shrugged again. “Okay.”

“I hated it.” Deftly, the strange woman slid three Scrabble squares onto the board, moving down from a
j
in the word
rajah
to form the word
jack
. “I didn’t know Jack had a kid. We lost touch a long time ago.” She started spelling
ruth
off the
r
in
rajah
. “The good old bad old days.”