South of Superior - Ellen Airgood [106]
Madeline shrugged. “As much as you can know anything before you really do it.”
Greyson wandered in from the parlor where he’d been watching television. He came to Madeline and with a deep sigh leaned into her legs. He always seemed at his most vulnerable in the evening. “Can’t I stay at the hotel with you tomorrow?” he asked. “I hate school.” She said no, he couldn’t, but that she’d pick him Up after and they’d fix lunch in the hotel’s old kitchen. It’d be like camping out, sort of. “Sound like fun?”
He considered this, his narrow face so serious that Madeline wanted to hug him. “Can we have hamburgers? With potato chips?”
She smoothed his hair. “Sure thing.”
“Are you sure about this?” Gladys asked.
“About the hotel?” Madeline felt Greyson’s weight against her. “Yes.”
“Well, then.” Gladys nodded once. “I’m sure you’ll be fine.”
Madeline smiled at this sudden capitulation. “You think?”
“Look at me and Butte. We’ve managed. We’re still getting Up in the morning, anyway; they can’t take that away.”
Madeline smiled at her gratefully and Gladys’s expression seemed less remote than usual.
A week later there was an offer on the apartment. “It’s fair,” Nathan said over the phone. “I think you should take it.”
“All right,” Madeline said, and felt dizzy.
Pete offered to follow Madeline down to Chicago and take the Buick into the garage for an overhaul and it seemed natural to accept. He was so much like family now. They left a few days after Nathan’s call. She kept him in sight in her rearview mirror as she drove south along the same route she’d traveled in April. They stopped at gas stations and fast-food places together, his sedan easing off the highway right behind her every time she pulled in somewhere. Madeline loved it. She’d accidentally acquired something like a father.
It was evening when she pulled across the hose that made a bell clang at the service station. She climbed out, gazed at the red-winged Pegasus, the old Coke machine. Funny to think that in a way her journey had started here, with Pete fixing Up her car.
Pete pulled in after her. “What a change,” he said. She nodded. Bumper-to-bumper traffic on a maze of streets and highways, the noise and smell and sound of it, houses and offices and apartments and stores on every inch of ground, people everywhere, so much of everything. It seemed outlandish.
“Won’t take me but a few days to get her shipshape.” Pete patted the Buick in that fond way he had. “I expect you’ve got plenty to do in the next while.”
“Yes. I don’t know how I’ll get to everything.”
“You’ll manage. We’ll be headed back north in no time, you’ll see. I have to remember that portable air tank I’ve got, I want to blow those lines out in your plumbing, and see what I can do about the radiators, too.”
“You’re too good to me.”
He grinned. “Keeps me out of the tavern.”
“Keeps you close to a certain lady I know,” Madeline said and his blue eyes sparked brighter.
She spent a harried week emptying out the apartment, shipping what she wanted north, setting aside some things for friends, donating the rest to Salvation Army. She was going through the drawers of her nightstand when she found the scrap of paper her friend Ramona had written the lost word on at Emmy’s funeral. There it sat, scrawled in black ink in Ramon’s strong hand: tzadik. Madeline sat looking at it for a long time. The word that had launched this whole fleet of events, in a way. The trait that made Arbutus so compelling and inspired Madeline to leap into the Unknown. She taped the piece of paper into her sketchbook, finally, and went on with her packing and cleaning. She’d emptied out the kitchen before she left, and barely restocked it now, so she ate at Spinelli’s half a dozen times, sitting in the back at the break table to talk to her friends when they had time, especially Dwayne, who’d been there when Madeline started.
“You met some man Up there or something?” he asked one afternoon when it was just the two of them. He pulled his cook’s cap off and rubbed at his scalp.
“No. A boy,