South of Superior - Ellen Airgood [120]
Madeline read the rest of the entry. A mouse in my drawer of stockings. I caught it and put it outside. It will be back in tomorrow but it looked at me so pleading I couldn’t kill it. She turned a few more pages and then became very still. She’d come to a sketch, a drawing. It was a picture done in ink of a skunk with a sweet and mischievous expression on its face. “Oh,” she breathed.
Walter walked to the desk and leaned over her. “That’s Jim.”
“It’s wonderful.” She thought of the ink bottle she’d found, imagined Ada Stone dipping her pen into it, sketching, Jim emerging from thin air on the paper.
Walter sat back down on the bed and yawned again. “I’m hungry.”
“It’s almost suppertime, probably.”
“We’re having spaghetti, Ted said.”
“I love spaghetti.”
Walter nodded. “It’s messy.” He smiled at her then and said, “You can have Mama’s book if you want it.”
“Oh Walter, no. No, I can’t take it from you.”
“It’s okay,” he said, looking shy and pleased. “I want you to. There’s no one left but you and me.”
She stared at him, tears pooling in her eyes. He did know, more than she thought sometimes. “I’ll take it someday, then. Not now. I’ll just look at it when I come to see you, if that’s okay.”
“Okay.” Walter sat swinging his legs, his hands folded in his lap. “Joe always took good care of me, and Mama too.”
“I know. You’ve said.”
“When Mama got older we came to live with him in the winter. It was on Pine Street. Number Five One Two, Mama made me memorize it. It was a nice house, there was a bathroom inside.”
Ted tapped at the door and said that dinner was almost ready, and Madeline went to get Greyson. He and Randi were watching TV, Randi in her wheelchair and Greyson on the floor at her feet.
Greyson and Madeline ate supper with Gladys. After the roast and potatoes were gone, Greyson went to watch television, taking a slab of apple pie with him and promising not to spill it on the sofa. Madeline stayed in the kitchen. A fire was burning and the room smelled of pie and meat. It seemed timeless, a world apart. She poured coffee, cut slices of pie and slid them onto plates. How familiar she’d become here. Had it really been more than six months since she left Chicago? Even with their problems, she and Gladys kept dealing with each other. They had become, however wary, family. She told Gladys about Ada’s journal.
“Is that right? I never knew he had such a thing.”
“It was in his desk drawer. It’s fascinating—like I get to meet her, in a way.”
“I expect it is like that.”
“She had a sense of humor. She seems smart.”
“I’m sure she was. Joe was a very smart man. Not educated but smart.”
“Walter said Joe had them come spend winters with him when she got older, at the place on Pine Street.”
“It was awfully harsh for them back on Stone Lake in the winter, I think. They would’ve had to get all their supplies in before the snow got deep, or else snowshoe out. That was all before I knew Joe.”
“Did my mother grow Up there, on Pine Street?”
“Yes. Mostly. Joe never lived Up here Until he moved in with me.”
Madeline paused in forking Up a bite of pie. “Moved in with you?”
“Yes.”
Madeline narrowed her eyes. “You weren’t—Were the two of you married and you never told me?”
“No, we weren’t. I hope that doesn’t shock you. But I didn’t care to marry again. There came a time when it made sense for Us to share a house, and I wanted to stay here.” Gladys cut a precise triangle of pie and ate it.
Madeline was about to take a bite of pie herself, but she paused. “You and Joe got together after I was born, you said. And I was born here, my birth certificate says so. It doesn’t add Up.”
Gladys shifted in her chair and made as if to get Up, but Madeline leaned closer and said, “What, Gladys? What aren’t you telling me?
Gladys sighed. “Jackie got expelled from Crosscut in the tenth grade, so she came Up here to school. There was nowhere else. We still had a high school here in those days. She didn’t want to go to school at all but Joe insisted. He drove her back and forth every day, and then—well.”
“What?”
“You’re not