South of Superior (22 page)

“Oh, Stone Lake,” he said, nodding.

“Did you grow Up there?”

“Oh yes. Me and Joe and Mama and Father lived out there.”

His expression was pleased and matter-of-fact and it made Madeline feel good to see it. “So it was a happy time?”

“Oh yes. Joe liked to go all over the woods, he took me with him sometimes. Mama and Father liked Us to bring some game home for supper if we could get it.”

“What were they like, your parents?”

“Father ran the mail to Gallion. In the winter he took a dogsled. I liked the dogs but Father said they weren't pets, I had to stay clear of them. He caught a cold and died one winter. I was ten. Mama said I was a big boy now, I would have to help her out more with the chores. And Joe had to go out to work then, he couldn't stay at home.”

“Was it hard?” Madeline asked, gently. She liked it when Walter talked about the past, but she was always careful, not wanting to Upset him.

“Hard?” Walter said blankly.

She let it go.

She didn't stay with Walter long. She had to get to the bank now that the quote from the repair shop was in on Paul's truck.

 

 

Madeline left the bank
in shock. She'd gone in for a loan. She had the apartment for collateral, and while the mortgage wasn't completely paid off, there was a lot of equity in it, and she had good credit. The repairs to Paul's truck were going to cost almost five thousand dollars, and if she didn't get a loan she'd have to pretty much empty out her savings account, which was the money from Emmy's insurance policy, all the money she had in the world. That was a terrifying thought. She
counted
on that savings: she made the mortgage payments with it, paid the property taxes, the Utilities, and insurance. She hardly made enough with Gladys to do more than put
gas
in the car; the savings account had been a big piece of embarking on this adventure.

But the bank turned her down. There was a problem with her credit.

“But there
is
no problem with my credit.”

“You've been late on your payments two months in a row.” The loan officer consulted her computer screen. “Last year you had some problems too.”

“But I just forgot to mail the bills, that's all. And last year—Emmy died last year. It was a bad time. It wasn't that I didn't have the money. I did catch it all Up.”

“I Understand. But that tends to make it look as if there's some ongoing issue.”

“No! There's no issue. No one is more reliable than me, believe me. I mean, even when I go off the rails, I go just, like,
barely
off the tracks.” Madeline made a train going barely off the tracks motion, sliding one hand just a fraction away from the other. Her hands were shaking. She clenched them in her lap. “I'm just saying, I'm so conscientious that I can't even go wrong really properly. And I
need
this money.” She pressed her lips together to keep herself from saying any more.

The woman cleared her throat and looked down at a notepad she had in front of her. “It looks like there was some problem on this mortgage awhile back, too.”

“
No
. When?”

“Back about five years ago?”

Madeline began shaking her head, ready to explain. “Emmy was sick. She was so sick, she'd had another remission and I couldn't take all the best shifts at my job, and there were so many expenses with the medicines and treatments, and she couldn't work. She really never could work again, those last four years, not steadily. It took Us awhile to get things straightened around. But that was so long ago.”

“It casts some doubt on your record.”

“But Emmy is
dead
,” Madeline protested, knowing that this defense made no sense, no matter how plausible it seemed to her. That glitch in her payment history was so old that Emmy had been alive then. Alive and still trying to do her home-based bookkeeping business, and still making pancakes on Saturday mornings sometimes when she felt Up to it, still smiling her wonderful smile.
Oh, Emmy
.

The loan officer gave her a look of professional regret. “I am sorry. If you come back with proof of employment, something full-time, maybe then we could come to terms on some amount—maybe something less than what you're asking for here. Or if it was a capital improvement on your property.”

“No, it isn't. I don't have time to wait, and I have to have the money.”

“I'm sorry,” the woman said again.

Madeline left the bank. She'd have to take a cash advance on her credit card, that was all. She had that much available on one of them.

Only she didn't.

“What do you mean?” she asked the associate who finally took her call, pressing the receiver to one ear and covering the other ear with her hand so she could hear above the traffic whining by on the highway through Crosscut and the clang of equipment inside the tire repair shop where the pay phone was.

“Your credit line has been adjusted to a lower level. You were sent a notice.”

“I didn't get any notice.” Or didn't read any notice, was maybe closer to the truth. Madeline thought of all the mail she'd been tossing in a box for the last few weeks, meaning to get to it, never quite finding the time. That wasn't like her. None of this was like her. But other people did this kind of stuff, she knew they did, she was the only person she'd ever known who even opened her junk mail and tried to read it to make sure it wasn't important,
And to Hell with that
, she'd finally decided.
Life was too short.
She had better things to do, and surely she had a couple free passes due in life. But no.

“I'm sorry, ma'am, but the screen shows you were informed by letter.”

“When?”

“The letter went out over a week ago. When your payment was late again.”

“But I've never been late before.”

“I'm sorry, ma'am. Times are very tough, credit wise. I see here that the interest level on your existing balance was raised at the same time. Just to let you know.”

“To what?” Madeline asked hopelessly.

“Twenty-nine percent.”

“Twenty-nine percent.”

Madeline sagged against the wall, breathed in the odor of grease and gasoline and rubber. Good smells, somehow. Real smells anyway. “That's
robbery
.”

The associate gave an involuntary, commiserating laugh that he quickly turned into a cough. Madeline didn't blame him. It was easy to get fired. “Is there anything else I can help you with?” he asked.

“No.”

“I am sorry.”

“It's not your fault,” Madeline finally said, and carefully hung Up the phone.

A skinny man in greasy overalls walked out of the repair bay and took a second look at her. “You all right?”

“Not really.” Madeline pushed herself away from the wall and went to the car.

 

 

She sat at Gladys's desk
for a long time that night, staring at the phone. The phone was ancient, squat, and black, with a cloth cord and a rotary dial. The receiver was as heavy as a brick. She glanced around the room: love seat covered in nubbly, salmon-pink fabric. End tables with curvy legs and lace doilies beneath the lamps, which had plastic-covered shades. A small, lean easy chair with wooden armrests. A Zenith television in a wood case with screwed-on legs poking out from Under it. She breathed in the mothball smell she remembered from that first day. She was caught in a time warp, circa 1950.

Actually, she wished she were, because then she wouldn't have the problems she did. Problems that had piled Up so fast that she could hardly keep track of how it had all happened. But it had happened, and there was only one person who might be able to help her now. She was steeling herself to make the call. She could imagine how it would go.

“Richard? It's Madeline.”

“
Maddie
. Are you all right? Are you home?”

“No,” she'd have to admit. “I'm not all right. I'm not home. And I'm really, really sorry to be calling because I have to ask a big favor and I don't have any right to.”

Richard was the only person she knew who could afford to lend her five thousand dollars, and despite everything would just maybe do it. He wasn't truly petty and cold, as he'd acted those last days, she was sure of that. It had been anger and hurt talking, and who could blame him? Ending their engagement had been a very hard thing to do, and Madeline had been almost helpless to explain her decision. Partly it was just instinct, something saying
No
from deep inside her. It wasn't that she didn't like Richard. She liked him. But she wasn't sure she truly loved him.

She thought of their chronic petty arguments. Richard wrapped Up in his research in the Nelson Algren collection, fascinated with Algren's clear, Unflinching eye for Chicago's gritty Underside, and Madeline thinking that he knew nothing about the gritty Underside of anything, had no clue that some people were still raw from scraping along it. Richard wanting some fancy new place on the Loop for dinner, someplace where she'd have to haul out that slinky dress and high heels when all she wanted to do was go to Gino's. Richard giving her that look that meant
Please
when she pulled on her peacoat, a coat that Emmy'd bought before they knew she wasn't going to college. Madeline loved that coat, it was warm and familiar and it wore like iron, there was not a thing wrong with it. Which she had explained to Richard once but all he'd done was come home with a new coat for her, a peacoat, yes, but pink with embroidered red piping. What could she say? He just didn't get it. And to be fair, neither did she.

The problem was that Richard came from such a comfortable background that he could afford to buy a house in Evanston, and an expensive ring, and plan a wedding that involved fancy invitations, and talk easily about paying her tuition to art school, even though he had just started teaching. Because he came from money, he could do these things. And because she didn't, it had begun to seem to her like a wedge between them that would only expand with time.

“Oh no,” he would say sympathetically as she Unrolled her sad story on the phone, because he did have a kind heart. Or maybe it was because he had such a good imagination. He could imagine how hard times made people feel. He could
imagine
, but he couldn't really
know
. “Oh, Maddie. That sucks. See, I told you not to go Up there.”

“I know,” Madeline would have to answer. He would think this proved he'd been right, but the thing was, it didn't. The longer she was here, the more she knew she'd had to come, no matter how bad things were. If she hadn't, she'd never have known Walter. Never have seen Stone Lake (and never mind how badly that day turned out, it wasn't the lake's fault). Never would have fallen in love with the Hotel Leppinen (the clandestine visits to which she had become addicted). Never have tried to paint Lake Superior. Maybe never really tried to paint again at all, because Unbeknownst to anyone she'd never sent in the application for art school Richard had brought home for her.

She never would've met Mary or Emil or Greyson or Paul. Never known Arbutus or Gladys. Cranky, distant, steadfast Gladys who was sitting in the kitchen right now, staring at the paper but not reading it, holding Marley on her lap, looking about twenty years older and fathoms sadder than she had a couple of months ago. Something that was mostly Madeline's fault. If only she hadn't left Arbutus alone for so long that day.

“Do you have a bank account there, you want me to wire it to you, what?” Richard would probably ask.

“You'll really do this?”

“You need the help, don't you?”

“
Yes
, but—”

“So I'll do it.”

“But this doesn't mean I want to get back together, and I feel lousy for that. I know I shouldn't even ask.”

There might be a long silence. Then he would say, “Give it a chance. I still think you're—”

“Going through a phase,” Madeline would finish for him.

“I don't mean that to sound derogatory. I just think you're doing something you have to do, but that it's not a permanent
part
of you. When you're done, you'll come back home. This
is
your home, Madeline.”

“I don't want you to count on that. You have to know that if you're going to lend me money.”

“I know that,” he would say. But he wouldn't really believe it. And he might wear her down, because he was a decent person, and it would be so much easier to just give Up and go back and step into the tidy, pleasant life he held out like a carrot rather than see things through here.

In the end, Madeline never picked Up the receiver.

 

 

Gladys watched Madeline
sit before the phone and she wondered what she was thinking, who she was considering calling. Maybe there was no one, no one at all. Gladys hated to think of that. Hated to think how close she was to having no one too. If Arbutus was gone—oh, Gladys had friends, good friends, people she'd lived amongst her whole life. But she didn't have children. Had no one to leave her meager possessions to, no one to give her memories to, and no one really to turn to if she was in trouble, no one younger and stronger who could really
do
something for her.

Gladys didn't blame Madeline for being angry with her for not telling her about Walter sooner. And she didn't blame her for Arbutus's accident, either. She was just as much at fault as Madeline, had been gone just as long. And if Arbutus had shown a little sense for once and not stood on tiptoe to stow away a platter, none of this would have happened.