South of Superior by Ellen Airgood Page A

smoke drifted from the chimney. Jack danced at her ankles but she seemed Unaware of him. Her loneliness and independence seemed absolute. Maybe they went hand in hand.
    Madeline bumped down the narrow two-track, peering through the increasing rain. She turned the windshield wipers on high, but before she’d gone a quarter mile the driver’s-side blade peeled away from its clip and fell along the road. She stopped and searched in the weeds, the rain pelting on her back, Until she found the pieces. The rubber had rotted and there was nothing left but two cracked, broken halves.
    She tossed the chunks aside. She started the car Up again but stopped right away. The metal of the blades was screeching against the windshield, scratching the glass. She sat and thought, then climbed out and kneeled in the mud to search on the floor Under the seats Until she found an old, long-cuffed knit glove, each finger a different garish color, a many-years-old and not very well-liked gift from someone or other. Wet and cold and muddy now, she leaned grimly over the windshield to fit it over the naked blade and made her way back to 26 Bessel, the glove waving gaily.
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    â€œLonely!” Gladys scoffed when Madeline got back. “Mary Feather doesn’t want a thing or soul on earth but what she’s got, she’s not lonely.”
    Madeline didn’t say what she really thought: Everybody’s lonely, who are you kidding?
    She might have said it to Emmy and she wished for her with a sudden intensity. Emmy with her gray braids and pretty smile, her blue felt hat with the yellow daisy on it, her Birkenstocks and cotton smocks, her fresh vegetables and herb tea and never a cigarette ever. How could she die of cancer and how could Madeline live without her? Oh Emmy . Her grief sliced as sharp as when it was new. It Unnerved her, that Mary Feather had known her grandfather, spoke of him so easily, revealed these things—the fiddle, the drawing (and she couldn’t even think about the fact that they had this in common) —as if they were nothing more than comments on the weather. Unnerved her to think that she looked like him but more like his mother. In her heart she went running for safe harbor, for Emmy.
    â€œMary knew my grandfather,” she blurted out, and was instantly angry at herself, and yet could not stop. “She said he played the fiddle. And that he liked to draw.”
    â€œHe did,” Gladys said coolly. “He was good.”
    Madeline waited for her to say something more but she didn’t. So Madeline said, “Well. Goodnight.” She didn’t care if she seemed abrupt. No one here cared that Joe Stone had not had the decency to look after his own granddaughter, had refused to even really acknowledge her existence. And that was fine because she’d been better off without him. Clearly his had been a bleak, mean life lived in a bleak, mean town, and there was nothing to be gained by considering it. She headed for the stairs.

5
    P aul Garceau stood in the general store in Halfway, sipping a cup of coffee. He didn’t have time for the stop, really—there was never enough time for things—but he liked Lily Martin, who owned the place. She cheered him Up. She wasn’t trying to. It was just that she never complained, and she could have. The store had to be nearly profitless, the building was desperate for repairs, and most of the merchandise was old. But Lily took life as it came, never seeming to wish things were different.
    Paul found this humbling, and tonic. It reminded him that his own problems were probably not that bad, and if they were, he’d survive them. So despite his chronic shortage of time, he sometimes stopped for coffee on his way from one job to another. Besides which, as far as stops went between Crosscut and McAllaster, this was it—this or the bar next door. Halfway was just a wide spot in the road, a place where the trains Used to