South of Superior (28 page)

She sat Paul down on the horsehair sofa—no doubt Gladys Hansen's mother's best sofa once Upon a time, before it was relegated to the attic—and flung herself at him. The moment she leaned in toward him—possibly a kiss would happen, was she crazy to think that?—he shot Up off the couch and dashed down the stairs. She'd followed, suddenly quite a bit more sober. She played it cool at the door.

“Hey, no hard feelings, right? About this I mean. Because obviously you have, and have a total right to, hard feelings about the other—about the truck. Which I will fix. I'm working on getting the rest of the money.”

“I'm seeing Randi, Madeline.”

“What?”

He shifted Uneasily. “I'm seeing Randi. I thought I should tell you.”

She stepped back from him, gave him an imperious, clueless look. “Why? Why should you tell me, particularly? I don't care.” She closed the door in his face and straggled back Up the stairs, clinging to the banister, the brandy having quite suddenly caught up with her.
So you're with Randi, so what. I'm buying the hotel, what do you think of that?
Before she got all the way to the attic she turned around and straggled back down. She was going home. She didn't want to stay here tonight, drunk and alone.

Gladys was sitting
at the kitchen table with Marley, who was the very worst kind of traitor.

“What's the matter with you?” Gladys asked, and Madeline told her nothing. Or rather,
noshing
. Gladys's eyes narrowed. “Are you
drunk
?”

“Yes!” Madeline said, suddenly Unrepentant. Yes she was, and she wasn't sorry, either. She was thirty-five years old, thank you very much, she guessed she had a right to go out and get sloshed every now and then if she wanted.

“Unbelievable,” Gladys said, shaking her head. Madeline erupted.

“
Really?
And why is that? I mean, considering my mother, why is it so surprising, huh? And Joe? Good old Joe, was he a teetotaler? I doubt it. Emil told me they'd tipped a few back together down at the Trackside. Hard to imagine an old toughie like Joe taking it easy on the booze. Maybe that's why Jackie was such a—” Even drunk and furious, Madeline could not quite say “fuckup” in front of Gladys. “Mess,” she finished lamely.

“Joe was not a drunk! That's not true! I'll not have you saying such things. Why, you're no different from her. Just say whatever you want to suit your own ends.”

“How would I know what's true and what isn't? I'm not so different from her, huh? I wouldn't know, because no one's ever seen fit to tell me.”

“Blood tells,” Gladys spat.

“Why don't
you
tell? Just go ahead and tell me what happened. Tell me all about it. What are you afraid of anyway?”

Gladys glared at her, her mouth pulled down into a pinched and worried frown.

Something woke Gladys up,
she didn't know what. Did she smell smoke? Maybe. She peered at her bedside clock. Two in the morning. She sniffed again and decided she did smell a very faint hint of smoke. Kids having a late-night bonfire on the beach, probably. She lay in bed for a while, hoping to get back to sleep, but that was impossible. She kept thinking of Madeline's accusations. Some of them were right on target. Gladys was afraid to tell the whole truth.

Finally she got Up and put on her bathrobe, went into the kitchen. For lack of anything else to do she warmed Up a cup of coffee from what was left in the pot on the back of the stove. She drank too much of the stuff, she knew. “Hello there, cat,” she said to Marley when he jumped in her lap, and wondered how she'd ever done without him. Half an hour later she was yawning, thinking of getting back into bed, when a knock came at the kitchen door.
What on earth?

She opened the door to find John Fitzgerald, wearing his fireman's clothes.

“Hoped you might be Up,” he said, his round face creased with worry. “Saw your light. Hate to be bringing bad news, but I figured you'd better know right away.”

“Know what?”

“It's the hotel. There's a fire.”

Gladys was dressed and out the door with John in minutes. She couldn't take in anything he was telling her. Couldn't get past those first words.

The fire was out by the time John got her there. Someone coming out of the bar had seen flames in the attic window and called the volunteer fire department. There was really, thank goodness, very little damage. A curtain had caught fire and led the flames Up the wall to the ceiling. The old wallpaper was burning, and the lathe beneath the plaster was getting hot, and things were just about to explode when the fire department got there.

The damage was contained to the attic sitting room. Right now everything was dripping and smoky, but it could be fixed, John said. There was no structural damage. They hadn't even broken any windows because the front door had been open. Setting it all back to rights would be an Unholy mess, but it could've been so much worse. The whole place would've gone Up like a tinderbox once it really got going; the volunteer firemen with their one small pumper truck would never have been able to put it out.

Gladys felt shaky at the thought of it. It was August, hot and dry, the whole town might have caught fire. “But I don't Understand,” she kept saying. “How did it start? The place is empty. I haven't been in there in weeks.”

“Ah, well. Someone has, though, you see. Someone had candles burning.”

“That's impossible!”

“Kids broke in, maybe,” John said. “Or maybe not kids. Not with the front door wide open. No booze bottles lying around, either.”

“It doesn't make any sense.”

John looked very troubled. “There's pictures propped against the walls. Canvases, like. Paintings. Those anything of yours?”

Gladys couldn't answer. She felt as if all the air she'd ever breathed had just been sucked out of her.
Madeline couldn't have done this, she
couldn't
, she
wouldn't
.
But in her heart Gladys knew that she had.

“Gladys?”

“I want to see for myself what the damage is.”

“No. You are not going in there right now and that's final.”

“But I am. It's my place.”

“No one's going Up those stairs Until we know full well the fire is one hundred percent out and there's not going to be any problems with the propane or anything else. Don't argue with me about this.”

“Fine. I'll wait.”

“I'll take you back home,” John said, gently then. “I'll come by later and let you know what the situation is.”

“I'll wait here.” Gladys crossed her arms over her bosom and stared Up at the attic windows, and John let her be.

I
want to go home,” Madeline told Mary. They were sitting in the yard, snapping the ends off a bushel of green beans Mary'd bought from Albert, getting them ready to freeze. “Lately I just—I miss Chicago.” She laughed nervously.

Mary glanced over at her. “I thought you were going to buy the hotel.”

“I was. But now maybe not. The fire, you know.”

“I thought it didn't do much damage.”

“It didn't. Except for between Gladys and me.”

“Mmm,” Mary said, because she knew that was true.

“I just—I want to go to a movie.”

As if that was what was really on the girl's mind. But Mary went along. “So drive over to the Soo, they got lots of movies.”

“That's exactly it. I don't want to drive a hundred miles one way to see a movie. I just want to go. I want it to be easy. I want to go to a jazz club, maybe. And shopping! Wouldn't that be something? I want some bustle, some traffic. And I miss—anonymity. You know? I miss that more than anything. I would love for no one to know who I am for just, like, a
day
.”

“Mmm,” Mary said again.

And again Madeline skittered away from anything resembling what her real trouble was. “And bagels. God, I would kill for a real bagel with real deli cream cheese. With chives! And Ethiopian food. And
Thai
. I want to take a class, maybe. I could learn to tango. I want to go to a baseball game, and the museums, and the zoo. I want to listen to the radio, for God's sake, that's all.”

Mary kept snapping the ends off beans.

“Is that so much to ask?”

“It's quite a lot.”

Madeline's laugh was wavery and Unconvincing. Maybe the place had just gotten to be too much for her. It was for most people. Too lonely, too remote. Not for Mary. But people got to feeling trapped, she knew. Even with all the modern things people had here nowadays—phones and computers and televisions and cars (and Mary could still remember when a lot of people traveled in wagons, it wasn't that long ago)—McAllaster was not quite in the modern world.

Madeline was rambling on again. “I just want—I don't know what. I feel like I'm in prison. My car barely runs, I'm broke, everyone hates me, I've read all the books in the library, I haven't shopped anywhere but a grocery store or a hardware or even had a
hair
cut since I left Chicago. I look like an old mop.”

“Nobody hates you. And you don't look like a mop.”

“Gladys hates me,” Madeline said.

Mary scooped more beans from the sack at her feet. “She'll get over it.”

“She kicked me out.”

Mary knew that. She thought Gladys was a damned fool for it too, but you couldn't tell her. Gladys Hansen had fretted about Madeline Stone for thirty years. She'd heaped guilt on herself when it wasn't hers to heap, convinced herself that a good part of Jackie's problems, and Madeline's, had been hers to fix and prevent, plagued herself with regrets and recriminations, and then once she got the girl Up here and had a chance to make things right, she threw it away. Foolish.

Madeline looked woeful. “Nothing's the way I expected, now.”

“Ha,” Mary said. She didn't mean to laugh at the girl but if that wasn't the story of life, nothing was.

“I thought I wanted to stay here. I did want to. But now it seems like everything is ruined and maybe I should just cut my losses, you know?”

Mary stretched her legs out and flexed her feet. Her bunions ached. Something about Madeline—she looked so much like Ada Stone—tugged at her. She tried to think of a way to explain. “It ain't everybody who can live here,” she said finally. “You'll live poor. Like a farmer plowing old, stony ground. You'll never have much of nothing. Except troubles. They'll come, and they'll be hard to fix.”

“Don't you like it here?” Madeline asked, looking bewildered.

Sure she liked it here, she'd been here all her life. But what choice had she had? Some ways, she'd just been stuck here and made do. “I guess I do. Can't imagine any other place. Couldn't leave if you pointed a gun at me. That don't change the facts any.”

Madeline nodded. Maybe she Understood, maybe she didn't. It was hard to explain. Mary gave a piercing whistle that brought Jack running and put a hand on his head. Much as she'd groused to John Fitzgerald, the truth was that a dog was a good thing to have. A dog steadied you. Just the smell of a dog, the feel of its fur, the way a dog lived, Up front and simple. She stared at her feet. And then she said, “What you have to do here, you have to
accept
. You have to—lay down before the way things are.”

Madeline went still, her hands at rest in the pan. “I'm not sure what you mean.”

“If you want to have things your way, the way
you
want them, you don't want to stay here. That's not how it is. BUt if you can accept the way things are—well, then.”