South of Superior - Ellen Airgood [18]
“Oh.”
“You got her eyes, and that same dark hair, though she always wore a cap, I can’t recall if I ever saw her without it. You got her build, too—” Mary made a shape with her hands in the air.
“Square,” Madeline said glumly and a smile flickered over Mary’s face.
“Sturdy,” she said. “Real pretty, in her own way.”
There was a long moment of silence and then Madeline said, very softly, “What was her name?”
Mary frowned. Didn’t this girl know anything? “Ada. Ada Stone. You give me a start when you got here. I always liked her real well, so I remember.”
“I—I didn’t know. I don’t know anything about them. Joe Stone didn’t want me. The authorities tracked him down but he said no.”
“Oh well, a man. It don’t surprise me. Course he probably could’ve found somebody to help out, if he tried. Jackie’s ma took off on him when Jackie was pretty young, and Ada would’ve passed on by the time you came along. I expect he was too proud to go asking.”
Madeline bit her lip, and then she said, like she was admitting to something she might rather not’ve, “I looked in Gladys’s phone book. It said it covers this whole area, three counties. There weren’t any Stones. I just thought maybe—you know.”
Mary nodded. There wouldn’t be any Stones in the book, she could’ve told the girl that. She studied Madeline, sizing her Up, considering saying something more, but in the end she didn’t. It wasn’t her place. If Gladys and Arbutus hadn’t told Madeline about her family, it wasn’t Up to her to butt in.
Madeline saw in her rearview mirror that Mary watched Until she was out sight. The rain beat down, smoke drifted from the chimney. Jack danced at her ankles but she seemed Unaware of him. Her loneliness and independence seemed absolute. Maybe they went hand in hand.
Madeline bumped down the narrow two-track, peering through the increasing rain. She turned the windshield wipers on high, but before she’d gone a quarter mile the driver’s-side blade peeled away from its clip and fell along the road. She stopped and searched in the weeds, the rain pelting on her back, Until she found the pieces. The rubber had rotted and there was nothing left but two cracked, broken halves.
She tossed the chunks aside. She started the car Up again but stopped right away. The metal of the blades was screeching against the windshield, scratching the glass. She sat and thought, then climbed out and kneeled in the mud to search on the floor Under the seats Until she found an old, long-cuffed knit glove, each finger a different garish color, a many-years-old and not very well-liked gift from someone or other. Wet and cold and muddy now, she leaned grimly over the windshield to fit it over the naked blade and made her way back to 26 Bessel, the glove waving gaily.
“Lonely!” Gladys scoffed when Madeline got back. “Mary Feather doesn’t want a thing or soul on earth but what she’s got, she’s not lonely.”
Madeline didn’t say what she really thought: Everybody’s lonely, who are you kidding?
She might have said it to Emmy and she wished for her with a sudden intensity. Emmy with her gray braids and pretty smile, her blue felt hat with the yellow daisy on it, her Birkenstocks and cotton smocks, her fresh vegetables and herb tea and never a cigarette ever. How could she die of cancer and how could Madeline live without her? Oh Emmy. Her grief sliced as sharp as when it was new. It Unnerved her, that Mary Feather had known her grandfather, spoke of him so easily, revealed these things—the fiddle, the drawing (and she couldn’t even think about the fact that they had this in common) —as if they were nothing more than comments on the weather. Unnerved her to think that she looked like him but more like his mother. In her heart she went running for safe harbor, for Emmy.
“Mary knew my grandfather,” she blurted out, and was instantly angry at herself, and yet could not stop. “She said he played the fiddle. And that he liked to draw.”
“He did,” Gladys said coolly. “He was good.”
Madeline waited for her to