South of Superior - Ellen Airgood [107]
“You excited about staying?”
“Mostly. Scared sometimes in the middle of the night. But yeah—I want to do this. I have to, somehow.”
Dwayne gave her a broad smile. “You’ll be all right. Don’t doubt it.”
It wasn’t a platitude. He was the kind of person who somehow always seemed to know more about you than you knew of yourself.
“You should see the sky Up there. Out over the lake—it’s so beautiful.”
“Worse reasons to move to a place. You gonna paint it?”
“I’m going to try.”
“Well, then. Sounds like you hit the jackpot.”
Gladys put Greyson on the phone one day and he told Madeline he’d colored a picture for her, Purple Man on a mission in the city, flying over skyscrapers. It occurred to Madeline that he’d never seen a skyscraper except for on television, that the Hotel Leppinen was the tall building in his world, the tallest he’d ever seen besides the old brick six-story Ojibway Hotel in the Soo.
“I can’t wait to see it.”
“I miss you, and Mr. Pete. I was going to help him fix your car, he said I could. He said he’d show me how the engine works, but now he’s doing it all himself.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that. That car will always need fixing.”
“But you’ve been gone forever.”
“We’ll be back before you know it.”
“I miss my mom, Gladys only took me to see her once so far.”
Madeline’s heart sank as it did sometimes with the renewed realization that she was setting herself Up for heartbreak with this child, but what else could she do? In looking after him she was bound to love him. For his part, he was bound to love his mother, and she would not have had it otherwise. “I’ll be back soon,” she promised.
24
Madeline loved her attic rooms. There was a small old-fashioned bath with a claw-foot tub, the big sitting room with its windows looking out over the water (this was where the fire had done all its damage), and two bedrooms, one empty except for a small bed and dresser, the other furnished with a spindle bed, an armoire, an oak highboy, and a rocker with no arms. A sewing chair, Gladys called it. It had been her grandmother’s, like the old couch, which Madeline had to have hauled away to the landfill in Crosscut after the fire.
The attic was shabby, really, except for the new wall (Paul had hung drywall on it while she was gone), and Emmy’s Oriental rug in the center of the sitting room floor, but the romance of it made Up for everything. The sitting-room windows had the view of the bay and the lake, and the bedroom windows looked down—far down—on what Gladys said had once been the kitchen garden. It would be again, Madeline decided. Once there was a kitchen.
The kitchen was a world Unto itself. The burners on the mammoth stove worked, but the oven didn’t, and for now it was going to stay that way. It was the same with everything: a refrigerator circa 1950 or so that didn’t keep cold, the dangling lightbulbs in the ceiling that didn’t cast any really useful light, one electrical plug down near the floor that didn’t provide enough juice to run anything more than a toaster. There was an enormous oaken icebox with double doors that smelled of must but did, Madeline discovered, hold the cold if provided every other day with a new block of ice in its tray. She was surprised to realize she could buy these blocks at the gas station for two dollars each. The icebox was too big for the few things she’d keep on hand for Greyson and herself, but for now, like everything else, it would work well enough to get by.
The hotel was heated with radiators and potbelly woodstoves scattered here and there, one in the lobby, one at the end of the second- and third-floor halls, and one in the corner of the attic. Madeline was pleased by this, and imagined she wouldn’t mind the chore of hauling