South of Superior (34 page)

“Some folks are just born to suck hind teat in life,” Mary said.

Madeline could have been one of those people if not for Emmy. And now she was following in Emmy's footsteps, something she would never have predicted. She'd never imagined raising a child. It was always something she thought she'd think about later, and never got to. Too scared, maybe. Guilty of what Richard had accused her of, back in April when she gave his ring back: holding herself apart, never trusting anyone but Emmy, never giving herself over to anything. Well, maybe he'd been right. But now here she was, the same person, but different. She felt herself smiling as Greyson headed back toward them, the bag of peaches clutched to his chest. He arrived puffing, with red circles on his cheeks.

“You're the little engine that could, aren't you?”

“Huh?”

“It's a story. I'll tell it to you sometime. Here, wash off three peaches.”

“Can Jack have one?”

“No, Jack can't have one,” Mary growled. Greyson shrugged and took the jug of water Madeline held out to him and poured it over three peaches, one at a time, causing a small river of mud to form at the toes of his ripped-out sneakers. She would have to look for a new pair for him next time she went out of town. She took the peach he held out and closed her eyes as she bit into it: the last taste of summer, juicy and sweet. Greyson leaned on her knees and when Madeline opened her eyes he held out his arms to be picked Up. She bundled him onto her lap.

They ate their peaches, juice dripping everywhere. Greyson hummed a song to himself. Mary stared off across the horizon.

Madeline studied her from beneath the brim of her hat, wondering what her thoughts were. Mary and Albert had kept showing Up at the empty lots, selling what they could before the sheriff ran them off. Mary argued every time, telling the sheriff to go to Hell before she shoved her syrup and fish and lawnchairs in her truck and roared away. Albert argued too, waving a license in the sheriff's face, showing him it said he could peddle his fruit anywhere in the state, shouting that he was a disabled veteran and his license superseded any local municipality's ordinances, stumbling a little over the officious words but dogged in his surety. He'd shown Madeline the piece of paper, and it did say exactly that, but it made no difference to the sheriff.

She wondered how they could face the conflict over and over. She thought she would have folded Up her tables and gone away with much less fight. But she was learning. She'd have to, if she was going to stay, because it appeared that a great part of victory—or at least survival—was simply a dogged hanging on.

Madeline sighed, content for the moment to do nothing at all. The lake rolled into shore, the sun shone hot on the top of her head, and Greyson lounged heavy in her lap, a small parcel of person with whom she was inexorably connected. The flies buzzed, lazy and indolent, and time seemed suspended. McAllaster seemed ageless, infinite, eternal. It was a hard feeling to pin down with words, but it was a good feeling, a big feeling.

Then the sheriff arrived and the small battle waged itself again and Madeline thought how paradoxical this place was: the best place, the worst place, all at once.

 

 

Pete was puttering
Under the hood of the Buick when Madeline and Greyson got to Bessel Street that evening. (Pete was invited to dinner often, and Gladys made a point of inviting Madeline and Greyson too. It was all part of making Grey feel secure, that his entire world hadn't evaporated with Randi's accident, nothing to do with Gladys forgiving Madeline, sadly.) Arbutus sat in a lawnchair on the sidewalk, her ankles crossed, a sun hat with a wide ribbon tipped back on her head, the walker nearby. She was wearing a flowered dress and had her book in her lap, but Madeline didn't think she'd been reading.
Smitten
, she thought. It was sweet. Also inspirational. Maybe someday, some far-off day, she might have this too, for as much as she liked to deny it, at heart she was a romantic. And what was
this
, after all, but hope, a declaration that life did not end at seventy or eighty, that anything could happen.

Greyson ran Up the walk into the house and Madeline followed. She smiled at Arbutus, who gave her a merry look in return. Pete didn't have a chance, he was snagged. Lucky Pete.

 

 

“You know that hotel
is one in a million,” he said after dinner.

“It is,” Madeline said. She was tired and felt less certain than she did sometimes, but grateful for the encouragement.

“You're a big help,” Gladys said. “I keep telling her to give Up before she's put anything more than elbow grease into it.”

“Ah, now, don't say that. A certain kind of person's going to flock to it. People will come. They'll pay more than you think, too.”

“But it's just a few months of the year that people like that come here,” Arbutus said, and Madeline heard in her voice that she found them well-meaning but naïve. “Those busy months have to stretch out over the quiet ones, and they stretch thin. You can't imagine how thin.”

“She doesn't want a big living. Do you, Madeline?”

“No.”

Gladys leaned forward. “Do you have any idea what it'll take to get open? Really? To keep it all going? I still say the place'll do you in.”

Madeline wondered if that was what Gladys hoped for.

“I'm pretty handy,” Pete said. “And that building looks sound, it's standing straight. Wouldn't do that if it had been built shoddy. Might not be so bad as you think.”

“Oh,
fizzle
. You two are not listening.”

“Learned it from you,” Madeline said, hoping to make her smile, but Gladys frowned instead.

“I thought maybe you'd come to your senses once you'd spent a little time in there. But it doesn't look like that's going to happen. I've said it all before, but I don't want you to waltz into this without warning you. Do you know how long it will take to make your first dollar? I mean, make it over and above the cost of keeping it all going, if you can even manage that?”

“Oh, fifteen or twenty years, probably. Maybe longer, maybe never.”

Arbutus was studying Madeline, her expression solemn and anxious.

“Do you know you're not kidding?” Gladys asked.

Madeline shrugged. “As much as you can know anything before you really do it.”

Greyson wandered in from the parlor where he'd been watching television. He came to Madeline and with a deep sigh leaned into her legs. He always seemed at his most vulnerable in the evening. “Can't I stay at the hotel with you tomorrow?” he asked. “I hate school.” She said no, he couldn't, but that she'd pick him Up after and they'd fix lunch in the hotel's old kitchen. It'd be like camping out, sort of. “Sound like fun?”

He considered this, his narrow face so serious that Madeline wanted to hug him. “Can we have hamburgers? With potato chips?”

She smoothed his hair. “Sure thing.”

“Are you sure about this?” Gladys asked.

“About the hotel?” Madeline felt Greyson's weight against her. “Yes.”

“Well, then.” Gladys nodded once. “I'm sure you'll be fine.”

Madeline smiled at this sudden capitulation. “You think?”

“Look at me and Butte. We've managed. We're still getting Up in the morning, anyway; they can't take that away.”

Madeline smiled at her gratefully and Gladys's expression seemed less remote than usual.

A week later there was an offer on the apartment. “It's fair,” Nathan said over the phone. “I think you should take it.”

“All right,” Madeline said, and felt dizzy.

Pete offered to follow Madeline down to Chicago and take the Buick into the garage for an overhaul and it seemed natural to accept. He was so much like family now. They left a few days after Nathan's call. She kept him in sight in her rearview mirror as she drove south along the same route she'd traveled in April. They stopped at gas stations and fast-food places together, his sedan easing off the highway right behind her every time she pulled in somewhere. Madeline loved it. She'd accidentally acquired something like a father.

It was evening when she pulled across the hose that made a bell clang at the service station. She climbed out, gazed at the red-winged Pegasus, the old Coke machine. Funny to think that in a way her journey had started here, with Pete fixing Up her car.

Pete pulled in after her. “What a change,” he said. She nodded. Bumper-to-bumper traffic on a maze of streets and highways, the noise and smell and sound of it, houses and offices and apartments and stores on every inch of ground, people everywhere, so much of everything. It seemed outlandish.

“Won't take me but a few days to get her shipshape.” Pete patted the Buick in that fond way he had. “I expect you've got plenty to do in the next while.”

“Yes. I don't know how I'll get to everything.”

“You'll manage. We'll be headed back north in no time, you'll see. I have to remember that portable air tank I've got, I want to blow those lines out in your plumbing, and see what I can do about the radiators, too.”

“You're too good to me.”

He grinned. “Keeps me out of the tavern.”

“Keeps you close to a certain lady I know,” Madeline said and his blue eyes sparked brighter.

 

 

She spent a harried week
emptying out the apartment, shipping what she wanted north, setting aside some things for friends, donating the rest to Salvation Army. She was going through the drawers of her nightstand when she found the scrap of paper her friend Ramona had written the lost word on at Emmy's funeral. There it sat, scrawled in black ink in Ramon's strong hand:
tzadik
. Madeline sat looking at it for a long time. The word that had launched this whole fleet of events, in a way. The trait that made Arbutus so compelling and inspired Madeline to leap into the Unknown. She taped the piece of paper into her sketchbook, finally, and went on with her packing and cleaning. She'd emptied out the kitchen before she left, and barely restocked it now, so she ate at Spinelli's half a dozen times, sitting in the back at the break table to talk to her friends when they had time, especially Dwayne, who'd been there when Madeline started.

“You met some man Up there or something?” he asked one afternoon when it was just the two of them. He pulled his cook's cap off and rubbed at his scalp.

“No. A boy, though.” She told him about Greyson and he listened as closely as ever. She wondered if Dwayne and his wife, Estelle, and daughter Candice might ever come see her. Wouldn't that be something. There weren't many black people Up north. A few, in the cities. A worry pulled at her. How would it really be, living in such an insular world?

“You excited about staying?”

“Mostly. Scared sometimes in the middle of the night. But yeah—I want to do this. I have to, somehow.”

Dwayne gave her a broad smile. “You'll be all right. Don't doubt it.”

It wasn't a platitude. He was the kind of person who somehow always seemed to know more about you than you knew of yourself.

“You should see the sky Up there. Out over the lake—it's so beautiful.”

“Worse reasons to move to a place. You gonna paint it?”

“I'm going to try.”

“Well, then. Sounds like you hit the jackpot.”

 

 

Gladys put Greyson
on the phone one day and he told Madeline he'd colored a picture for her, Purple Man on a mission in the city, flying over skyscrapers. It occurred to Madeline that he'd never seen a skyscraper except for on television, that the Hotel Leppinen was the tall building in his world, the tallest he'd ever seen besides the old brick six-story Ojibway Hotel in the Soo.

“I can't wait to see it.”

“I miss you, and Mr. Pete. I was going to help him fix your car, he said I could. He said he'd show me how the engine works, but now he's doing it all himself.”

“Oh, I wouldn't worry about that. That car will always need fixing.”

“But you've been gone for
ever
.”

“We'll be back before you know it.”

“I miss my mom, Gladys only took me to see her once so far.”

Madeline's heart sank as it did sometimes with the renewed realization that she was setting herself Up for heartbreak with this child, but what else could she do? In looking after him she was bound to love him. For his part, he was bound to love his mother, and she would not have had it otherwise. “I'll be back soon,” she promised.

M
adeline loved her attic rooms. There was a small old-fashioned bath with a claw-foot tub, the big sitting room with its windows looking out over the water (this was where the fire had done all its damage), and two bedrooms, one empty except for a small bed and dresser, the other furnished with a spindle bed, an armoire, an oak highboy, and a rocker with no arms. A sewing chair, Gladys called it. It had been her grandmother's, like the old couch, which Madeline had to have hauled away to the landfill in Crosscut after the fire.

The attic was shabby, really, except for the new wall (Paul had hung drywall on it while she was gone), and Emmy's Oriental rug in the center of the sitting room floor, but the romance of it made Up for everything. The sitting-room windows had the view of the bay and the lake, and the bedroom windows looked down—far down—on what Gladys said had once been the kitchen garden. It would be again, Madeline decided. Once there was a kitchen.

The kitchen was a world Unto itself. The burners on the mammoth stove worked, but the oven didn't, and for now it was going to stay that way. It was the same with everything: a refrigerator circa 1950 or so that didn't keep cold, the dangling lightbulbs in the ceiling that didn't cast any really useful light, one electrical plug down near the floor that didn't provide enough juice to run anything more than a toaster. There was an enormous oaken icebox with double doors that smelled of must but did, Madeline discovered, hold the cold if provided every other day with a new block of ice in its tray. She was surprised to realize she could buy these blocks at the gas station for two dollars each. The icebox was too big for the few things she'd keep on hand for Greyson and herself, but for now, like everything else, it would work well enough to get by.