South of Superior - Ellen Airgood [131]
“Mine is anyway.”
“Will you go back Up north in the spring?”
“You know I took this job for the long term.”
She shook her head. “Your heart is not in the back office of Jimmy’s company.”
“Yeah, well, it wasn’t in pizzas, either.”
“Are you sure?”
Paul wasn’t sure. Now that Garceau’s had caved in, he wasn’t sure he hadn’t loved the place. And after six weeks of managing Jim’s paperwork, he wasn’t sure his own business had been so bad. Maybe he’d paid too much attention to the downside, never gave the positives their due. He’d broken even, eaten well, been warm, had a car and a truck. What else had he needed? He shrugged in answer to his mother’s question. “I was killing myself trying to do two jobs. The show must go on, that’s what I thought. And you know what? The show doesn’t have to go on. The place fell down and the world hasn’t stopped.”
His mother was giving him the same look she always did when he said he didn’t blame himself for the accident. Her silence made him feel defensive.
“I thought you liked having me back.”
She grinned. “Yes and no. It’s a little like living with a caged bear.”
He stared at her, speechless at the injustice of this.
She came around the table and gave him a quick hug. “Paul, Paul. What am I going to do with you?” She went into the kitchen and he heard her clanking dishes in the sink. “What about that boy you told me about whose mother’s in so much trouble, and the woman who’s looking after him?” she asked. “Seems to me like there are some people who need you.”
Paul fiddled with the place mat. It was woven in stripes of bright pink and orange, sky blue and lime. It was cheerful, not garish. His mother had an eye for things like that. “And you don’t?”
“We’re fine, Paul.”
“I can’t go back to the prison,” he said, loud enough to be sure she could hear him over the dishwater. “I can’t do that.”
“Of course not. But you have to do something.”
He stared at the place mat. “Do I? I was thinking it’s pretty easy just to float.”
“You’ll soon get tired of that,” she called back to him cheerfully.
He raised his eyebrows at the place mat, which stared back at him blankly. Right again, Ma. The phone rang and his mother picked it Up, and he could hear by her side of the conversation that it was good news, great news. He went in the kitchen and she grabbed him.
“Tom’s coming home!” she cried, her face shining.
In McAllaster, the winter was like living in a painting. Starting at Christmas the snow poured down, and the wind blew, and the cold got deeper. By the middle of January, icebergs were building Up along the shore. Madeline went to her attic windows every morning to look out over the rooftops of the tiny town huddled beside the immense lake. To the north was water for almost two hundred miles. To the south and west and east, thousands of acres of swamp and forest blanketed in snow in almost Unbroken expanses.
On clear nights, she went out to see the stars, and she really could see them, even from her own porch in town. That never happened in Chicago. Sometimes she’d leave Greyson asleep Upstairs and walk the few blocks to the beach to get an even better view. It still amazed her that all of this was safe: leaving him asleep, walking alone in the dark, wandering the beach. She was learning a few constellations: Orion and the Pleiades, Cassiopeia and the Big Dipper, which was really just part of the great bear. Often when she stepped outside she’d hear coyotes howling from a few blocks away, where town ended and the woods began. Their eerie, thrilling voices always made her shiver.
It had been exactly like this when Ada Stone lived on Stone Lake. The photos Gladys gave Madeline for Christmas, two sepiatoned prints taken at the Stone Lake lumber camp in 1933, sat in a place of honor on a bureau in the sitting room. She gazed at them again one