South of Superior - Ellen Airgood [2]
Brown eyes stared back at her bleakly. A serviceable, capable person with a heart like a volcano, one that was spewing out a lava of rage and confusion and grief. Oh, no one would ever guess it. Her customers would never believe her capable of such fury and desolation, the Unending baffled confusion she felt as to how to go on living without Emmy. She was like an animal who’d been blinded and maimed, clawing and flailing in a cage. She hid this well, she knew. She was ever the sensible and steady one, the cheerful, dependable one, the one who made everyone laugh but always kept their orders straight. But beneath the surface, down in the tunnels of the real Madeline, a train wreck had happened. Madeline felt from moment to moment that there was no telling what she might do.
Her gaze caught the crumpled letter from Gladys Hansen. She stared it down for a moment. Let it lie there, damn it. But she couldn’t. It was Untidy, for one thing. Also it looked helpless. Helpless and reproachful. Madeline bent and picked the letter Up, smoothed it out, propped it against the small lamp on the library table next to the door. Then she reached for the old navy peacoat she’d had since the fall she almost went to college—one thing she would not do was be cold all evening—and the doorbell rang and she buzzed Richard in.
1
Madeline left Chicago three weeks later, on a windy night in the middle of April. It hadn’t taken long to arrange things, once she’d decided. Almost before she knew it she’d quit her job, packed her belongings, said her goodbyes, taken one last look at everything. Of course she’d be back eventually, but for now she was headed for the middle of nowhere.
The general consensus—and it was a popular topic at Spinelli’s, where she’d worked for so many years—was that this was a terrible idea, she’d lost her judgment, and she was going to wake Up in Timbuktu feeling very, very sorry. Richard (whom she’d met at Spinelli’s, back when he was working on his dissertation and liked to come in with his laptop and sit at the counter drinking coffee for hours) thought that too, with a fury. The size of his anger had surprised Madeline, though it probably shouldn’t have.
“Look,” she’d told him toward the end of yet another argument about her decision. “Our plans—they’re your plans, really.”
“They’re good plans,” he fumed. “And we’ve practically signed the papers on the house. Why are you making things so complicated? All this Upheaval—it’s for nothing. You’re afraid to actually live your own life, now that you can.”
She couldn’t tell him that the nearer it came, the idea of the life they were supposed to lead together in that sweet little Victorian a few blocks from campus—him teaching at Northwestern, her in art school finally, on his dime, their friends (his friends?) coming over for casually gourmet dinners that involved lots of talk about books and films and music—made her Uneasy. Uneasy and curiously flat. Confined instead of secure, angry instead of happy. But then, she was angry almost all the time now.
Madeline stared at his craggy face, that shank of dark hair that fell over his eye. At first, when he was a doctoral student and she was a waitress who’d once dreamed of being an artist, the differences between them hadn’t been so apparent. But that would change. It was already changing. They came from such different worlds.
Richard’s parents still lived in