South of Superior - Ellen Airgood [10]
Madeline raised her eyebrows. “I only asked a simple question.”
Gladys slapped a bag of kidney beans onto the counter. Then she said, “It’s people who haven’t paid on time, if you must know. People who—tend not to.”
“Oh.”
“Yes.” Gladys’s shoulders slumped and she sat in the closest chair and plucked Up the rooster pepper shaker. She frowned at it. “I got this from the grocery in 1953. Jack and Irene Whistle had the store then. They gave out Green Stamps, and you could get things with them. I got that set of nested mixing bowls in the cupboard too, the yellow Pyrex.”
“Those are nice.”
“One year when Frank was out of work, Jack and Irene didn’t charge me a penny. Frank was my husband, he passed on in seventy-one, you know, his heart.” Madeline made a sympathetic face and Gladys sighed. “How time flies. I never got anything extra, just flour and sugar and coffee, a little meat and cheese. They let me pay it off when I could. Mary Feather brought Us fish all that summer.” She rubbed the rooster’s painted red comb. It needed washing. “That was how things were always done, when I was a girl. Nobody had enough to make it through the winter. Everybody ran Up their bill. They had to. It’s not so different now. Not for some people. Not for the real people.”
“Who are the real people?” Madeline asked quietly.
“I didn’t come here with a retirement, you know,” Gladys said, feeling querulous even though there had been nothing but Understanding in Madeline’s voice. “I’ve been here my whole life.”
“I know,” Madeline said.
Gladys frowned and ran her thumb over the rooster’s comb again. It was hard to say who the “real” people were. She didn’t have anything against most of the new people, not the retirees or the summer people or tourists or even the snowmobilers, not on a case-by-case basis, except that they tended to expect too much, to assume too much. But they paid their taxes and kept their lawns mowed and volunteered at the school and spent money in the local stores and had as much right to be here as Gladys did, she realized that. And McAllaster had always been a tourist town, a resort town; her own parents had made a living off that fact.
But things were changing fast, now. Too fast. Half a dozen new summer places got built on the beach every year, and no one was content with a regular house, everyone had to have a mansion. At this rate she wouldn’t be able to afford the taxes on the house she’d lived in for more than fifty years, and any of the young kids who’d grown Up here and wanted to stay, forget it. There was almost nothing they could afford to rent, certainly nothing they could afford to buy. And worse than that was that people were changing, the rules of life were changing. Money to pay, indeed. Fury began to roil in her gut again.
“What are you going to do?” Madeline asked after a moment.
“Take these groceries back for starters. I mean to let them know how I feel.”
It only took a minute to load the things in her car. She climbed in the driver’s seat and waited, but Madeline hesitated. “Coming?” Gladys asked, flicking the visor down.
“Arbutus will be awake soon.”
“She’d be with me in a heartbeat if she knew about this.”
“I don’t really think—”
“Oh, fizzle.” Gladys clicked on the ignition and pulled off in a splash of gravel.
Madeline felt gutless in the wake of her leaving. She checked on Arbutus (still sleeping), and set off for another walk, down Bessel Street in the opposite direction of Gladys. What did it matter if she hadn’t taken a stand on this, she told herself, striding along the Uneven sidewalk. How false it would have been to seem decisive. She didn’t know these people. Boy oh boy, did she not know these people. She’d been here two weeks, and every day she felt more like a square peg in a round hole. Probably this move had been a mistake. But she was here and Arbutus needed her, so here she would stay.
She marched past the rows of houses that had been put Up by the mill at the height of the lumber boom, according to Arbutus. She liked the way the small old houses,