South of Superior (23 page)

Except for the accident with Paul Garceau's truck, of course. That was bad, and Gladys wished she could help, but she didn't have a red cent, so there was no Use going down that road. Instead she gently pushed Marley to the floor and headed toward her bedroom. She squeezed Madeline's shoulder as she went past the desk. “Things have a way of working out,” she said, because it was the kind of thing Arbutus would have said.

“Huh,” Madeline said disbelievingly.

“I told Emil we'd go to the housing office with him on Monday.”

“Oh?”

“He wants to put in that application for the senior apartments you helped him fill out.” That was the only time Madeline had shown any spirit at all in the last two weeks, and Gladys hoped maybe Emil's predicament could rouse her again.

“He's really going for it, then.”

“He hoped they'd back off if he even started talking about moving there, but they haven't. He says he's ready to move in. Sometimes I think he's serious.”

“He'd hate it there. And they'd hate him.”

“Hard to see those old women sharing a washing machine with Emil.”

“That's what Mary said.”

“So, things do work out.”

“Maybe,” Madeline said.

M
oney evaporated as fast as Paul could earn it. Mortgage payments, utilities, insurance, suppliers, repairs. The heating and cooling guy who'd driven Up from Crosscut said he couldn't fix the pop cooler and charged him two hundred dollars for the visit. Perfect. With delivery, the new one came to two thousand seven hundred eighty-six dollars and nineteen cents. Plus a seventy-five-dollar fee at the landfill in Crosscut to dump the old one. He couldn't spare that kind of money, but he didn't have a choice.

Paul told himself to concentrate on what he was doing before he sliced a finger off. It was late and he was tired and that was a good way to have an accident, but an accident was nothing but carelessness and there was no excuse for that.
Ah, lighten up
, a voice in his head suggested, and Paul made a sound, a sort of chuff of acceptance. He was forever having these arguments with himself.

“What?” Randi said.

He looked Up. “I didn't say anything.”

“You laughed, kind of.”

“Just thinking.”

“About what?”

“Nothing,” he answered reflexively. After a moment he said, “Actually, money.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah.”

They were quiet for a while, Randi washing dishes, Paul prepping. One thing about Randi and him, they Understood certain basic truths about each other's lives. Eventually she said, “I think about Grey's dad sometimes.”

“Yeah?”

She splashed the dishwater with the spray hose. “I wonder who he was.”

“You're not sure?”

She shook her head. “Not one hundred percent. Pretty bad.”

Well, who was he to say? He'd made plenty of mistakes. Randi was doing her best, just like anyone. She was working for him and at the bar and paying Fran Kacks to look after Greyson. A few months ago—a few weeks ago, even—he wouldn't have predicted she had all that in her. “Not so bad, probably. Things happen.”

“Sometimes I think I should get out of here, you know? Get a new start.”

“Yeah?” They'd gotten close even faster after Randi stepped in for Madeline on the Fourth, something about being in the trenches together, and Paul thought maybe this statement of hers should give him more pause than it did.

Randi spun around and squirted the spray hose at him. “Gotcha.” She was grinning. “I'm not going anywhere, where would I go?” Paul took off his glasses and dried them on his T-shirt. Her moods changed fast, sometimes.

Paul remembered another conversation he'd had in this kitchen, with Madeline, a week or so before he fired her. She'd told him that her ex-fiancé hadn't wanted her to come to McAllaster. “We were engaged,” she said. “I got cold feet, I guess. Well. Gladys asked me to come Up here, and I decided I would, and Richard thought it was a terrible idea. He had all kinds of opinions about it. We had a whole series of nasty arguments and in the end we called everything off.”

Paul had been slicing peppers, green and red and yellow ones, admiring the look of them in their slender colorful rows. It was one of his favorite things about making pizzas, the colors and shapes of the ingredients. It wasn't the kind of thing you said to anyone, but it was one of those tiny things he loved about life. “What kind of opinions?” he asked Madeline, thinking maybe he would tell her about the peppers.

“Mainly that I was sabotaging myself. You know, destroying good chances because I didn't think I deserved them, that I was determined to keep myself down.”

“Oh, so he was the one right answer on the test.”

“Yes! That's how it made me feel. Nobody got that. I guess because it all seemed so nice. Well, it
was
nice. We were going to buy a little house in Evanston, it was really sweet, and he was going to help me go to school—everything lined Up.”

“Only it didn't?”

Madeline shook her head no. She turned to lean against the sink and face him and pulled her mouth into an upside-down smile. “Maybe it
was
crazy, but I just decided: I would come Up here. And Richard took it so personally. Like he couldn't have waited a few months or whatever it turned out to be?”

Paul wasn't sure what he was supposed to do: sympathize, offer some kind of fix-it solution, just listen? “I'm sorry,” he said.

Madeline shook her head, so he'd guessed wrong. “I'm glad, now. It wasn't going to work. I don't miss him as much as I should if we were going to be married. Everything with Richard was too easy. Where was the challenge? And we were from such different worlds. His family was rich. Well, not rich. But
very
comfortable. And me, well—Emmy picked me Up in a church basement because my druggie runaway mother abandoned me there. I'm not complaining. Emmy was an angel in my life, she went through hell and high water to keep me.”

“You were adopted, then?”

“More like signed over.”

Paul made a face. “What, like a package?”

“I know. It sounds bad, but apart from the fact that I will forever think my grandfather was a rotten bastard, it was pretty great. Emmy was great.”

“So how did she get you? I mean, what, she just carried you home?”

“Crazy, huh? She found me sitting there long after lunch was over, coloring in a book my mom left me with. I remember that. I remember the crayons, how they smelled, and I remember thinking if I just kept coloring, nothing bad could happen. But I was scared. I was so, so scared. I knew something was wrong.
Really
wrong.”

Paul nodded, imagining it.

“Emmy always told me we took to each other right away. She was the only one I'd calm down for. She thought maybe my mother would come back a few days down the road, want me back, and somehow she convinced the pastor and the guy who ran the soup kitchen not to ship me into the system right away. And then when she got me home, she found a letter in my little parka, all folded Up tiny in one of the pockets. It was from my grandfather to my mother. She must've written him for help and he wrote back and told her no. So, we always knew who I was and where I came from. And my mother never did come back.”

“Wow.” Paul stared at her, the peppers abandoned.

“Yeah. My grandfather didn't want me, but the State wasn't so sure about handing me over, either. Good thing possession's nine tenths of the law. Emmy had to hire attorneys which I'm sure she couldn't afford, though she never said that, and get him to sign off on it. It was forever before it was all final. Signing off was the only thing Joe Stone ever really did do for me. But anyway. Richard and I—our whole baseline outlook was different. Way different. There was going to come a day when that was a big problem, you know?”

“I can imagine.”

“So what's your story?” she asked, turning back to the dishes.

His story. How did you answer a big sloppy question like that? He told her he'd grown Up downstate, near Saginaw. His mom was a schoolteacher, his dad worked at Steering Gear, he had three sisters, all of them older. He'd come to McAllaster more or less by chance, and he'd been here ever since.

Madeline raised her eyebrows. “Well. Thank goodness you're not holding anything back. I mean, I just poured out my entire story and soul, so of course you're going to do the same. I'm so touched.”

So he told her a little more. “I was running away, I guess. Trying to make myself feel better. Change of scenery, change of pace. I'd just gotten divorced. Her idea. She hooked Up with somebody else.”

“Oh. Ouch.”

He shrugged. “We got married too young. My parents tried to tell Us, but we wouldn't listen. The whole thing was probably doomed from the start.”

“Still—ouch.”

“Yeah.” He told her a little more about the trip, the breakdown, the loaner car.

“Where were you going to go, before you got stranded?”

“Nova Scotia.”

“
Really
. Why?”

He grinned, hoping he looked dashing. “Family history. I'm a Garceau, right? An Acadian. My great-great-grandparents came from France and settled there, at Port Royal, and then during the French and Indian wars, they got deported. They wouldn't swear an oath to the British crown. They ended Up in Upstate Maine. Over the years the family wandered out from there. I was going to swing through Canada on the way there, and down through all the places I could trace them on the way back.”

“You're a romantic, then.”

Was
he a romantic? “Kind of a dumb idea,” he said.

“Why? I think it sounds great. An adventure. What else is life for, anyway?” She smiled over her shoulder at him. He was going to tell her about Manny then. He suddenly wanted to. But the phone rang and she pulled her hands from the dishwater to answer it, then held it out to him.

Randi said, “Hey, Paul, are you busy? Do you think you could help me out with Greyson tonight? He'd just be sleeping, I'd have him in his pajamas.”

Madeline had finished Up and left while he was talking.

And now here he was, here they were, he and Randi. If you'd told him that night they'd end Up together, he wouldn't have believed it. Paul felt bad now for firing Madeline so fast. The thing with the truck had been an accident. Anyone could have an accident, and the truck was just a thing. Wasn't that his goal in life, to live in the moment and not get too attached to things? But damn it, she'd done
exactly
what he asked her not to: shown Up late and wrecked the truck. He had been tired and stressed to the bottom of his soul, coping with the busiest day—week, month—of the year. He hadn't had the time or energy to be Understanding.

When Madeline got
to Arbutus's room one afternoon there was a stout, fiftyish man with thinning hair dressed in rumpled khakis and an oxford shirt standing at her bedside. Nathan. He'd been a couple of times before but he never stayed long and Madeline had always missed him, which she didn't mind because she had a feeling he blamed her for his mother's being here, and pretty much he was right. Arbutus was beaming Upon him and Gladys was scowling and he looked weary, more than anything.

“Madeline, Nathan's here!” Arbutus put a hand on his arm. “And Nathan, you remember Madeline, from Chicago. Remember she came over to the apartment?”

“Yes,” Nathan said in a neutral tone. He went back to the conversation her arrival had interrupted. “Mother, you have to take this offer. Think how much easier it would make everything.”

“But I don't need all that money all at once right now. I'm going to sell my house.”

“Mother,” Nathan said tiredly as Gladys cried, “
Butte
.”

“Well I am. And I don't think it's right, to sell the hotel to the Bensons. I don't mind selling it, but not to them. Couldn't we put something in there, a stipulation that it can't be torn down? That's our history, Glad's and mine, and yours too.”

“History doesn't pay the bills, I'm sorry to say, Mother.”

“I thought we had this all decided,” Gladys said, irritated. “We agreed.”

“Well, I've changed my mind. If the hotel is so valuable, why can't we take a loan out on it?”

“A mortgage?! At our ages?” Madeline was sure Gladys would never admit she'd already looked into this. “What has gotten into you? We
decided
. Let's just do it and get it over with. I can't stand this shilly-shallying.”