South of Superior - Ellen Airgood [12]
She turned away from the window. What she saw: a fluorescentlit store bright with packaging, clean, neat, and somehow featureless. She saw a very conventional woman with an Understandable gripe that she nonetheless did not sympathize with. It was not so much that Terry Benson was wrong. It was just that these other things—Gladys’s staunchness, the endless roll of the lake—felt so right, so rare, and so much more interesting.
“Well? Are you paying or not?”
“Not,” Madeline said, giving the woman a flicker of apologetic smile. She glanced at the man who’d come to stand next in line. Already she’d be getting a bad reputation in this tiny town. Arguing with the proprietor, refusing to pay a bill. But the man—about her age, dark-haired and brown-eyed with a little goatee—gave her a conspiratorial wink and Madeline felt herself smile in return.
“I’ll be sending a bill,” Terry snapped.
Madeline nodded and went to get in the car with Gladys. Her heart was pounding and she put her hands—which had turned ice cold—up to her flushed cheeks to cool them. The man who’d winked at her came out of the store and Madeline watched him walk off down the street with a very slight limp.
Gladys was triumphant on the return trip to the house. “Pompous so-and-sos. Foolish little name tag, who does she think she’s kidding, she’s not in the city. Cutting off Mary Feather, I never heard the like. I hope you didn’t give her an ounce of satisfaction.”
“No,” Madeline said.
“That woman had better cut back on the bread and cookies, she wants to keep what’s left of her figure. Maybe she better start walking to work instead of driving, I never saw such people for driving. Four blocks from the store they live, and here they come by the house every morning in the car, and she comes back to run the kids to school every day to boot. It wouldn’t hurt those kids to walk to school, we always did.” She flicked on her turn signal and made a right onto Bessel Street with no apparent sense of irony. Madeline cut a sideways glance at her.
Gladys gave a little shrug. “I had the groceries, that’s my excuse.” She pulled in the drive at 26 Bessel, and then she shocked Madeline by patting her hand. “Sometimes you have to take a stand, that’s all. Now. You go look in on Arbutus, I’m going down to the gas station for milk, we’re out.”
Madeline expected her to drive away but instead Gladys got out and set off down the walk at a brisk pace, her feet churning like two small engines.
4
Madeline came downstairs the next morning, poured her coffee, sat down across from Gladys, and said, “So. I’ve been wondering, which house in town was Joe Stone’s?”
It was impossible for her to say “my grandfather’s.” She really couldn’t think about him without a wave of dislike washing over her, but she was here and ought to learn at least a little about him. She assumed Gladys would be a little more forthcoming after yesterday. They’d had that bonding moment in the car. But Gladys gave her an Unreadable look. “None of them.”
“Really.” Madeline was Unable to keep the irritation out of her voice. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“And how would you know what makes sense and what doesn’t?”
Just like that, Madeline saw red. It wasn’t like her, or rather, wasn’t like who she’d always been Until recently, but she gave in to it. “Whose fault do you think that is? Mine, or your old sweetheart, Joe’s?” She scraped her chair away from the table and exited through the kitchen door, managing not to slam it behind her.
She went to the water and along the shore for half a mile before the cold seeped into her bones and sent her back to town. She dawdled in