South of Superior (30 page)

Randi slid in and climbed over into the front. Her skirt rode Up as she swung her long legs over the seat. She tugged the skirt down, heeled off a sandal, and propped her bare foot Up on the dash, wiggling her toes. The nails were painted pink, and she wore a narrow silver toe ring that had cut into her skin. She sighed and lifted her river of tiny braids Up off the back of her neck. “It's
hot
. Am I glad you came by, I thought I was gonna be stuck walking all the way.”

Madeline nodded, her mouth tight. “Where's Greyson?”

“He's in Halfway, he spent the night, we've gotta stop and pick him Up.”

“I see.”

Randi rolled down her window and held her braids Up on the top of her head with one hand, her elbow resting on the seat back, her eyes closed, the pink-nailed toes tapping on the dash. “Can we turn on the radio?” she asked after a while.

“No.” Madeline was not in the mood to be more than just barely civil. But eventually she said, “It doesn't work, it quit last week, I don't know why.”

“Bummer.”

“Yeah.”

“Paul could maybe fix it for you, he's pretty handy,” Randi said.

“Is that so.”

They rode on through miles of swamp and fir, tamarack and poplar and birch. An osprey flew out of a dead tree. Madeline soon heard a faint snore, which annoyed her even more. “Wake Up,” she said, giving Randi a jab when they neared Halfway.

Randi dropped her braids and opened her eyes. “Wow, I dozed off, sorry. I stayed Up
way
too late.” She stretched her arms, flexing her shoulders and twisting her wrists. She was like a cat, lithe and easy in her skin. Graceful. In fact she was beautiful. She had youth and animal magnetism and a weird kind of charm that Madeline wasn't completely able to resist, which made her feel grouchier than ever. “Grey's at the Trackside, it's Up on the right—” Randi began.

“I know where it is.”

Randi gave Madeline a friendly, quizzical smile. “Right. Sorry.”

Madeline's silence was overpowering in the confines of the car.

“I'm always cranky when it's hot,” Randi offered. “I think it gets to everybody.”

Madeline clenched her teeth to stop from saying that it wasn't hot at all compared to what she knew from Chicago, and she wasn't cranky, either.

At the Trackside, Randi slid back over the seat and trotted toward the door. Madeline followed. She was in time to see Randi swing behind the bar and disappear into the back, giving a big smile and a wave to Greyson on her way past. A man and woman sat at the counter, hunched over their glasses with the focus of career drinkers. They turned when the door slammed shut, and after giving Madeline a long, flat gaze, turned away again and sat in silence except for the clunk of glass against wood each time they set their drinks down.

Greyson sat on the grimy floor, playing with a baby, a toddler wearing nothing but a diaper. The baby held a pink flyswatter in her hand and was batting at the air.

Greyson scrambled Up. “Hi, Madeline. Did you bring my mom to get me?”

Madeline nodded grimly, then remembered to smile and say, “Yes.”

“This's Andrea,” he said, pointing at the baby, who was chewing now in a contented way on the handle of the flyswatter. “She's two. She's a baby.”

“Yes, so she is.”

“I stayed here last night and taked care of her.”

“Did you,” she said, thinking,
You probably did.

“She hardly cried at all and she ate all her vegetables I gave her.”

“That's great.”

Randi reappeared. “Hey, guys!” she said to the couple at the bar.

“'Lo, Randi,” the man said. The woman offered a harsh smile, ground the stub of her cigarette out in an ashtray, said nothing.

Randi swooped down to scoop Up Greyson, giving him a loud smacking kiss on his neck. He giggled and wrapped fistfuls of her braids in his fingers.

“Ready, Peanut?”

“Ready!”

“Did you have fun?”

“Mmm-hmm, I got to feed Andrea. And Annie washed Up that flyswatter, Andrea couldn't keep her hands off it, it was funny.”

“Really?” Randi headed for the door, bouncing Greyson to make him giggle.

“What about that baby?” Madeline asked as the door clacked shut behind them.

“Oh, Roscoe's in the back. She's fine.”

A wave of despair rolled through Madeline. Randi might be right. The baby might be fine, Roscoe and Annie might be fine, even the two at the bar might be fine, might be drinking water and not vodka, might actually be watching that baby to some degree, they might be her grandparents and in there for that exact purpose for all Madeline knew. She was aware that she was making judgments she didn't have the right to. Even so—but there was nothing to do.

“I thought you worked at Paul's on Thursdays,” Madeline said as they pulled out on the road. Thursday Used to be one of her days, and it was a delivery day too. Not a day you'd want to be on your own, especially not in the last week of August, which was busier than ever from what Madeline could see. People everywhere, grabbing their last chances at summer vacation.

“Yeah, I was supposed to be Up there. But my plans got changed at the last minute. I called Kat, she's going in, Paul's covered.”

Madeline frowned but she didn't say anything because it was none of her business and she had no room to talk.

There was a chirping noise and then a faint jangling melody and Randi pulled her cell phone out of her bag. “Hey,” she said. “Yeah? Sure, yeah. I can do that. I got a ride, I'll meet you there.” She flipped the phone shut.

Before Randi could say anything, Madeline said, “What?”

“I have to meet somebody. I was wondering, could you drop me off? It's right Up here a couple of miles, it's—”

Madeline didn't want to know. “Sure,” she said. They rode along in silence Until Randi pointed out a trailer in a little clearing. Madeline pulled off, and Randi climbed over the seat to the rear door. Greyson was about to follow when Randi said, “Hang on a sec, Peanut.”

Madeline was gazing out her side window, but her head snapped back at that. Greyson froze in mid-climb. The look on his face was wrenching. So anxious and forlorn, and so quickly erased.

“I was wondering, would you mind taking Grey home with you? This won't take long, but I don't think—well, it'd be better if you could take him.”

Greyson sank back, biting his lip.

Madeline stared at Randi. She was smiling, but there was something pleading in her eyes, something sad and determined, and Madeline wondered what she was Up to. It had to be nothing good. She had the impulse to try to talk Randi out of this stop, but she didn't do it. It wouldn't work, she could feel it in her bones. Instead she made herself smile in return. “Sure, no problem.”

Greyson sank back into his seat.

“Scoot over and put on your seat belt,” Madeline told him. “I'm staying at Arbutus's house, you know where that is?”

Greyson nodded as he worked to get his belt buckled.

“I made brownies yesterday, do you like brownies?”

He nodded again, not looking Up at her. Madeline got back on the highway. “I'm glad you're coming over,” she told him. “I've been kind of bored. What do you want to do? Know any good games?”

“What about hangman?” he said, tentatively. “I like hangman. Do you?”

“Love it,” Madeline said.

A
rbutus was a stickler for her exercises, she did them every day just like the physical therapist in the hospital had told her to, and she was in the parlor right now, standing at her walker, swinging her leg back and forth.

“You be careful,” Gladys scolded from the kitchen. “That doesn't look safe.”

“I'm fine. I have to do ten of these on each leg in sets of six, Pat said so.”

Gladys made a face. She heard those words,
Pat said so
, half a dozen times a day. Not that she was complaining. But it was strange how Arbutus had changed in that month in the hospital. Gladys wasn't sure she liked it, but of course that was wrong. The people there had helped Arbutus heal Up so that she could come home. And because it was a hospital stay, Medicare was covering most of the cost. Which made it even more aggravating that Arbutus had got this bee in her bonnet about selling her house.

“I promised Pat I wouldn't give Up the exercises and I haven't.”

Gladys grumbled as she worked at the stove. Arbutus would be in a leotard next.

“There is no point in being such a sourpuss,” Arbutus said, switching to swinging her other leg. “You brought your troubles on yourself.”

This was about their only topic of conversation anymore. But Gladys was having none of it. “I did
not
try and burn the hotel down, I'll thank you to remember!”

“Madeline didn't, either. She singed one wall, and it was an accident.”

“Some accident! She stole my keys! She's just like her mother. Completely irresponsible.”

“That's a crock of beans. She made a mistake.”

“She got drunk and deliberately set the hotel on fire!”

“She got tipsy and forgot those candles were burning. It could happen to anyone.” Gladys could hear Arbutus counting beneath her breath between sentences.

“As if you ever took a drink in your life.”

“You know what I mean. Things happen.”

“You're too forgiving. I'm not like you.”

“I know that,” Arbutus said, her voice laden with meaning. “Truer words were never spoken. Imagine how it would be if you were.”

Gladys glared down at the sauce she had simmering, powerless to make any retort. Arbutus's forgiveness for selling Grandmother's kicksled came with a price.

“It was a hard day for Madeline,” Arbutus said. “You weren't there to hear Tracy, you were already outside. It affected her, it really did. It's not been easy for her here, not since the start. She's had a lot on her mind.”

“She was here to look after you, nothing else.”

Arbutus rolled her eyes, kept counting leg swings. When she'd finished she said, “I told you to tell her about Walter right away.”

Gladys didn't answer. She had lunch to fix.

Arbutus started in on her arm exercises next, pumping them slowly Upward, like she was lifting weights. “Would you have given her the keys if she asked?”

Gladys refused to answer that too, she knew a trick question when she heard it.

Arbutus came and sat down when she'd finished. “She's not like her mother, Gladys, and you know it. And even if she was, so what?”

Gladys rustled around in the cupboards getting dishes out.

“Look at that picture she painted of Us, she wouldn't have done that if she didn't care.” The picture was propped Up on the bureau in Arbutus's room, and Gladys had looked at it more often than Butte was to know. Arbutus snagged a fried apple out of the dish Gladys sat on the table and Gladys swatted at her hand. “It's Us but in a way it isn't Us. It's more than Us. Don't you think?”

Gladys finished putting lunch on the table. A piece of baked fish, broccoli with cheese sauce, a loaf of
nisu
to go with the fried apples.

“I still say you're cutting off your nose to spite your face,” Arbutus said after they'd said grace.

Gladys didn't want to talk about it. “I guess Emil figures he's safe, these days,” she said. “Hasn't heard any more from that zoning board.”

“His plan worked, then.”

Gladys speared a piece of fish off the platter and laid it on her sister's plate. “Seems to have. Though I wouldn't rest too easy if I was him. I still think Cal Tate's got plans for that land Up there.”

“Probably. I think I'll like the apartments, though. Unlike Emil. It'll be nice having the shoveling looked after, and people just down the hall. Less to worry about.”

“You're making a mistake,” Gladys warned. “Once the hotel sells, you'll wish you had your house back. I wish you'd listen to reason.”

“I'll be fine. My mind's made up. I'm tired of worrying.”

Gladys rolled her eyes but kept still. Arguing with Butte was a waste of breath.

Arbutus ate a little more, studying Gladys all the while, and then she said, “Nathan says Madeline's still got her apartment listed with him.”

“Well, good for her.”

“She hasn't withdrawn her offer on the hotel, either. It's contingent on her place selling, is all.”

“La-di-da. I won't sell it to her.”

“Well I will. And if you won't, you'll have to pay a big fee.”

“What?”

“We drew Up all those papers with Nathan, remember? Once you list with real estate you have to accept the offer if it meets your price, or else you have to pay a penalty. My realtor in Crosscut said the same thing, she said make sure you're sure, you can't just change your mind.”

“Nathan wouldn't dare.”

“Of course he would. I told him he should.”

Gladys slammed her fork down. “Arbutus Hill, I don't believe you.”

Arbutus shrugged. “Business is business.”

Gladys stabbed a chunk of broccoli and ate it. Then she said, “It'll never happen anyway. She'll think better of it. It doesn't make any more sense now than it ever did. She probably just forgot to withdraw that offer. She's forgotten everything else—bills, candles,
asking
for permission to make herself at home in the hotel. You watch, next time you talk to Nathan it'll be different.”