South of Superior - Ellen Airgood [135]
Paul heard a vehicle pull in the drive, heard the kitchen door open and close, heard his mom talking to someone. He got Up to see who it was. His nephew Tom, improbably grown into a man, a man who’d been to and returned from a war. He was thin but strong-looking, and quieter than ever. He’d been home a week now.
“Hey, Uncle Paul,” Tom said.
It was always a strange feeling when his sisters’ kids called him “Uncle,” especially this weary soldier. “Hey. What’re you up to?”
“Just came to say hi to Grandma.” Tom’s eyes met Paul’s briefly and traveled on. He looked pale, drawn. “Guess I’ll get going now.”
“Don’t take off,” Paul said. “The last time I saw you, you were perfecting some God-awful thing you thought Up, popcorn shrimp and peanut butter on a Ritz cracker, I think.”
Tom’s grin seemed inadvertent. “Yeah, that was pretty bad.”
“I’ve had crazier ideas.” Paul put Greyson’s kaleidoscope on the counter and grabbed two beers from the fridge. “Would you believe bleu cheese is great on a pizza?”
Tom picked the kaleidoscope Up and looked through it, turning the base slowly. “I ate some pretty strange stuff in Baghdad. A lot of the guys wouldn’t try anything, but I figured, Hell, I was there. Might as well make some kind of sense out of it. I liked the kabobs. Good spices.”
Paul’s mother squeezed Tom’s shoulder on her way toward the living room. “You two catch Up. We’ll be in watching Jeopardy! if you get bored.”
“What do you think of winter now?” Mary Feather asked one morning. Madeline was in Mary’s woods trying out the snowshoes she’d found in the hotel.
The sun was shining after endless days of wind and snow. The winds had blown without pause, gusting sixty miles an hour, howling around the attic and sucking the warmth out of everything. Madeline had never been so cold. For the duration of the storm she never took off her hat, indoors or out. It was a watch cap of black wool, a gift from Mabel. (“Knitted you a chook,” she said at Christmas, handing the hat to Madeline without ceremony.) She stayed bundled Up in long johns and the insulated Carhartt pants she’d found at the thrift shop in Crosscut, and two wool sweaters over layers of shirts. A pair of fleece-lined slippers that Arbutus and Pete gave her for Christmas had become her most prized possession, as well as her goose-down comforter. She thanked Emmy nightly for having gotten them each one, years ago.
Madeline put Emmy’s blanket on Greyson’s bed and he pronounced it snuggly but really he seemed unfazed by the fact that as long as the winds blew she could not get the temperature in their attic rooms much above fifty. He had grown Up in this wind-battered town, and took it for granted. The fuel she burned keeping the hotel just bearable made her cringe even as she turned her hands over and over above the potbelly stoves and radiators. But even cold and worried, she could not resist the storms. She always hovered at the windows to gaze out at them, or bundled Up to go out into them.
But now the most recent storm was over. She’d jumped that morning when the county truck roared by: enormous and orange, with a plow big enough to scoop Up a small house. Sparks flew from the blade as it rumbled down the street. A few minutes later a deer wandered past, its delicate black hooves click-clacking on the newly scraped pavement like high heels. Now the sky was a bright, clear blue, and the wind for once was still. The temperature was only ten degrees below freezing.
“I love winter,” Madeline told Mary, bending to buckle a snowshoe.
“You still think so this far in, then you’ll make it,” Mary said.
“Emil wants to take Greyson out rabbit hunting. I don’t know if I want him to.”
Mary raised her brows. “Why not? You can trust Emil with a gun, he likes to drink but he’s no fool. He’s hunted his whole life, made his living off it you might say, he’d never mix business with pleasure.”
“It’s not that so much. It’s just—the idea of it. Rabbits make me think of the Easter bunny.”
Mary made a dismissive