The Four Corners Of The Sky (27 page)

Annie felt disconcerted to hear her views so brutally summarized. “You make me sound like
Ayn Rand for Dummies
.”

“I’m not kidding. You nailed it. And Hopper Jets’s doing great now. The tax breaks we’re getting? It’s like Fort Knox is your personal shopper. Still, I’m in the Reserves; they could haul me back. Ali Al Saleem, when I got assigned, you remember? Naval Forward Engagement? Man, I did not want to go.”

She gave his hand a rub. “Everybody’s scared.”

“Oh, I wasn’t scared. I was just having too much fun at the base.” He grinned. “I’m strictly off the pills. Long time now.”

“Good…” They’d always pretended the problem was not a problem.

They talked for a while about jet planes, about the successor to the Boeing FA-18E Super Hornet; about the old superstar, the Blackbird SR-71. Talking the language of planes had been the closest they’d gotten to intimacy. She thought about telling him she had just been chosen to do a test flight of a new F-35 Lightning II.

The waitress was pretty in a hefty, gold-electrolyted way. Brad, as was his habit, began to flirt with her, telling her about his having once met Laura Bush, although he kept referring to the First Lady as Laurel Bush. Annie listened, puzzled that she’d never before registered how loudly Brad spoke, taking up public space as if unaware that anyone else was in it.

Hearing that he was a pilot, the waitress pointed at Lindbergh’s Monocoupe D-145’s bright orange under-wings, suspended in air. Last night, she said, the cleaning crew had noticed a man in a security uniform, standing atop a hydraulic lift that was raised to the height of that airplane. This man had crawled into its cockpit.

Annie interrupted. “Which man? Who was he?”

“Well, that’s the whole point,” said the waitress. The cleaning women had assumed the man was airport personnel when he’d ascended on the lift and climbed into the plane. They’d watched him, figuring he was going to dust off the plane or something and then suddenly he’d crawled back out of the plane onto the lift and had started to do a kind of Latin dance to the Muzak, like a mambo or a salsa, right there on the little platform of the hydraulic lift. When he’d lowered himself to the floor, one of the cleaning women had told him that he was a great dancer. He’d put his arm around her and led her around the floor in big waltzing circles. Then he’d kissed all three cleaning women. He’d run away when one pointed out that he wore a baggage crew jumpsuit, which appeared to have nothing to do with maintenance of the Monocoupe. “Wasn’t that weird?” the waitress asked Brad and Annie.

“Very,” Annie agreed. She did not believe in that much coincidence. While she wasn’t sure why her father had been dancing around in air, she knew for certain that he’d been the man doing so. She pressed for further details but the waitress could give her none.

As they waited for the check, Brad pointed out an ad for Hopper Jets on the wall. “Got our hub in Atlanta, plus new offices in Miami, Houston, and Nashville. Fleet of three-fifty. Leather, marble, whole top of the line, A.”

“Wonderful.”

“Learjet 45s, these new Cessna Citation Mustangs.” He leaned toward her. “Quit the Navy. I’d hire you in a nanosecond.” He grinned with his old seductiveness. “You could jet a lot of celebrities around. We’ve flown stars you couldn’t even imagine.”

“Courtney Love.”

“Who? What’s so funny?”

Annie shook her head. “You had your picture taken with Courtney Love, but it turned out to be a male impersonator.”

Brad stared at her. “I don’t remember that.”

“Sam’s got the picture of you and Courtney in one of her photo albums.” She snatched the check from the waitress who was offering it to Brad. “This is on me.” She pulled out the roll of hundred dollar bills that she’d found behind the lining of her father’s flight jacket.

Brad pushed her hand down. “Annie, Jesus! You don’t want to be flashing that kind of wad!” Holding the money beneath the table’s edge, he looked at it. “You back to the poker?” Annie had played a lot of cards at Annapolis and had invested all the winnings in IRAs that Brad’s divorce lawyer wanted “put on the table” of their settlement. Brad said, “You didn’t use to carry so much cash.”

She shrugged. “People change.”

“I guess. These VIPs we jet around never carry a cent. They are living the sweet life. But I tell you this, doesn’t buy happiness.”

“I thought you were sure it did.” Annie glanced at his hand. He still wore the thin gold band she’d put on his finger at their wedding. It seemed a long time ago.

“No,” he insisted, “Money can’t buy you love.” Brad said he had just sold a jet to a gorgeous country-western superstar who had confided when he’d taken her on a test-flight that her whole life was miserable. “All that gold dust was just sand in her eyes.”

“Is that one of her songs?”

“No, I made it up.” He added, “Mama Spring likes to meet the big names. I hate to disillusion her with how fucked up they are.”

“Your mom sent me a Christmas card.” Spring Hopper stenciled her own holiday greetings and had mailed one to Annie, signed “Mama Spring.” In her note was the news that Brad was “seriously involved” with the daughter of a friend. “She said you were seriously involved with a friend’s daughter.”

“Who? No, I’m not.” He frowned. “Mama Spring’s having trouble. It’s angina.”

“I’m sorry.” The tasteless coffee reminded Annie of all the cups of coffee she had stared into, day after cold winter day, in the first months after she’d left Brad, when she’d awakened at four in the morning and had sat playing solitaire until dawn released her. She pushed aside the coffee and stopped herself from wondering if he had slept with the unhappy country-western star to whom he’d sold a jet. To her surprise, the prospect didn’t hurt that much. Wasn’t such a revelation in itself worth the whole flight to St. Louis? She no longer wanted to choke Brad. It was a great relief.

He was saying, “Yeah, and my sister Brandy’s doing totally okay. Sam told you about her twins?”

No, Sam hadn’t mentioned it and the news gave Annie a strange spasm behind her breastbone. Once, shortly after they’d married, she had thought she was pregnant. Brad had been terrified by the prospect.

“Boys,” he grinned. “Back in February.”

She nodded, forcing cheerfulness into her voice. “Twin boys, wow. Tell Brandy congratulations. Funny, we used to wonder if you and I’d have twins—your grandmother and you being a twin—and here they are. Twins. I told you Brandy would have kids before we did.”

He didn’t remember that either. It was as if they had traveled through their marriage in separate tunnels under the sea, parallel but invisible and inaudible to one another. He was holding his wallet open to show her a picture of two fat little blond babies in blue knit jumpsuits. “Brandy had a rough time last winter. She woke up Christmas Day and Dylan had left her.”

“
Left
her?” Annie was shocked. Her sister-in-law’s husband had always seemed too passive to choose a piece of chicken off a platter, much less desert his wife on a major holiday.

“But hey she’s got her kids.” Brad pointed at the fat babies. “That one’s named Bradley for me and that one’s Bobby. Cute?”

“Very,” she agreed. “Brad, Brandy, Bradley, and Bobby. Now if you ever have twin girls, will they be Babs and Brenda?”

Hurt by her sarcasm, Brad closed the wallet. “Family’s why you come home. We shoulda had some kids, babe.”

She looked away.

“Not too late.”

“Yes it is.”

“I’m never going to stop loving you.”

She didn’t want to argue with him about whether he’d ever loved her at all. She changed the subject. “So your mom’s basically okay though?”

He flipped the wallet back open to a photo of Spring Hopper smiling at an oversized check she was holding. “Ever since Daddy Alton died, she can’t sit still. Spring Hopper, Inc.’s in the Hundred Million Club now. Just in the last year she’s sold seven luxury homes in this new golf community Windermere Rise. She got elected president of the Atlanta Women’s Realtors Club.”

“Well, Mama Spring always said she loved to close a deal so much she’d sell her own house if she didn’t need it to sleep in.”

Brad looked puzzled. “She was joking.”

Annie doubted it.

“It really worries me about the angina. I sure don’t want to lose her.” He stared around the corridor nervously as if someone might be going to steal Mrs. Hopper from him right then. “You know how I feel about that lady.”

“Yes, I do.” Annie noticed that Brad’s hands were trembling. And there was a little line of sweat by his ear. “You okay?”

“Just hot in here.”

Annie felt his forehead. It did feel hot. “Drink some water.”

On the floor beside her, Malpy managed to twist and wriggle out of the opening of his carrier case. Before Annie could grab him, he raced away from the bistro and took off in the crowded terminal. Annie and Brad gave chase but the little Maltese was quickly lost in the mass of passengers.

Brad trotted after him, turning back as if he expected a football pass, calling, “You need a leash for this dog!”

As Annie ran in and out of storefronts, searching for Malpy, she saw that the good-looking stranger in the blue T-shirt was now standing at a nearby
ATM
machine. He was in the midst of a phone call on his mobile phone that had apparently upset him. Spinning about in a tight circle, he flung his arms into the air.

Suddenly the little white Maltese sprinted toward Annie, turning back to bark at Brad who was in pursuit. Malpy raced at her, leaping into her arms and she gave him a hard shake and stuffed him into the cloth case.

“Get him a leash.” Brad stopped, hands on his knees, breathing hard. “Be back.” With a wave, he hurried into the nearby men’s room entrance. She suspected he’d gone in there to take a pill or sniff a powder.

She waited. The man in the T-shirt finished one phone call and answered another.

Brad was smiling on his return, rubbing his well-shaped head. He surprised her with a question as they walked along. “You think life’s ironic?”

“Brad, life’s so ironic that after nearly twenty years my dad suddenly sends a FedEx to Emerald saying he wants to see me before he dies. Then he cons me into flying here through a twister, then he blows me off and disappears. Then Sam cons you into flying my dad to Miami. Now here you and I are, chasing Malpy. Yes, I think life’s ironic.”

Brad’s handsome face turned defensive. “I didn’t fly Jack anywhere. Personally.” He crumpled with sympathy. “I guess he’s a little mixed up from being so sick and then getting the crap beat out of him.”

Annie said “Ah.” She recalled that she’d often said “Ah” when married to Brad; he’d never appreciated the variations she could play on the short syllable. “How do you know he was beaten up? And did Sam tell you
who
beat the crap out of him?”

He shook his head vigorously. “Probably muggers.” He couldn’t hold her gaze. “Annie, losing your dad’s a tough assignment, take it from me. Look, hell with it. I’ll fly you to Miami myself, right now.”

His sudden decision surprised her. “You will?”

Brad slowly nodded, pleased by his generosity. He’d fly her in the new Cessna
VLJ
that he’d just brought here from Charleston. He’d enjoy showing her what it could do. They could be at Miami International Airport in a few hours. True, he had been scheduled to spend the Fourth of July with his mother in Atlanta but Mama Spring would understand. Annie and he could have a blast in Miami; catch a Marlins game, scuba, stay at the Biltmore in Coral Gables—

She interrupted the fast burst of talk that was another indication that he was high. “I’ve flown the Citation Mustang.”

He nodded in a rush. “You can fly anything. Anything.”

Annie looked closely at his eyes. His pupils were now pinpoints. On their wedding day, he had promised that he was quitting drugs for good. When she’d found out otherwise, he’d allegedly gone cold turkey but six months later he had blamed his infidelity on amphetamines.

She patted his flushed face. “Listen to me, you need to get some sleep. Lend me your jet. I’ll fly it to Miami and bring it back Friday.” He winced skeptically at her. “Okay, look, I’ll make a deal. We’ll fly together to Atlanta. But then you go to your mom’s. I’ll go on to Miami alone. You need to get home and go to bed.”

“You’re a riot.” He patted her hand. “Lend you my jet.”

She felt his pulse. It was racing. “Come on, do this for me, Brad, come on.”

He stared at her hand on his, then looked her up and down again, head to foot. “You just look great. Life treating you okay, Annie? Well, I don’t mean now, with losing your dad…”

“I’m okay.”

“Sam says you could marry somebody else on the rebound from me.”

“Sam said what?” Annie glanced over at the
ATM
. The man in the blue T-shirt was no longer standing there. After a search, she spotted him in the crowd by a distant gate, walking away, speaking into his cell phone. “Brad, I’m not getting married again for a long time.” The man turned down a corridor and was gone.

Brad grinned at her. “Don’t get a divorce and then you won’t need to get married again for a long time. Good plan?”

She gave him a rueful smile. “Don’t you think I need a break?”

He looked hurt. “What happened wasn’t so bad.”

“Yes it was.” She gave his hand a quick squeeze. “Come on, I’ll drop you in Atlanta. Lend me the jet.”

Brad brought out the ring box from the pocket of his Italian suit jacket, showing her the diamond. “Marry me again?”

It was a much larger diamond than the first one he’d given her, which she’d liked and had, in fact, missed looking at after she’d returned it. Annie wore very little, and very good, jewelry—a small string of pearls, a plain gold bracelet. This new diamond setting was the sort of thing she didn’t want, and amazingly enough she was beginning to feel absolutely sure that she didn’t want Brad either. He had come to win her back, was even really helping her, but it was over. She shook her head slowly. “I’m sorry. No.”

“Okay,” he grinned. “But can we have sex?”

It made her laugh, as he’d hoped. “No. No sex either. Keep on being the good guy here.”