South of Superior - Ellen Airgood [3]
She bit her lip, her heart sinking. Then she said. “I’m sorry, but I am going. I have to. I’m not sure when I’ll be back.”
And suddenly there was nothing more to say. She gave his ring back. She’d been surprised at how relieved she felt when she called the bank to say that they wouldn’t be buying the house after all.
Maybe everyone was right, maybe she was crazy. But the thing was, she had nothing to lose. That shouldn’t have been so. Chicago was her home—Chicago, Spinelli’s, the dear old drafty apartment Emmy’d bought before she ever took Madeline in, the neighborhood that was so familiar Madeline knew every angle and shadow by heart. There was her job, her friends, Richard, all their plans, everything. But the emptiness inside was more real and more pressing than any of it.
So, she was going five hundred miles north to live with strangers, taking nothing with her but her beloved cat Marley, a miscellaneous assortment of bags and boxes containing sturdy, warm clothes and a lot of books, mainly, and the Buick she’d inherited from Emmy. The Buick. Emmy’s folly. What a heap. She’d bought it, Used, when Madeline was a senior in high school. She’d had ideas of taking little trips with it after Madeline was in college—Up to Madison for an annual bookkeepers’ convention, to Milwaukee to tour the breweries, to Decatur and Springfield and Hannibal on the trail of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Small, innocent dreams. None of it had ever happened, though they did drive Up to Lake Winnebago every autumn to see the fall colors. The rest of the time it sat in storage, gently decaying.
It was only running well enough to make this trip thanks to the local mechanic who’d always tuned it Up for them. Madeline had been serving Pete Kinney runny eggs on rye toast for as long as she’d been at Spinelli’s, and he’d become a friend over the years. He was also nearly the only person who didn’t think Madeline was crazy for leaving. He’d told her that he and his late wife had loved going north, that he envied Madeline the adventure. So that’s the line she began to take with people: this was to be an adventure. And it was to maybe fix what was broken in her, if anything could, but that fact she kept to herself.
On the day of her departure, Madeline left Chicago after midnight, hoping to avoid traffic. She drove slowly—the car was old and she was an inexperienced driver—but finally got through Green Bay. After that the cities and traffic fell away, the towns got smaller and shabbier and farther apart, and near dawn she crossed from Wisconsin into Michigan and was on a narrow two-lane highway that threaded through pines and cedars.
Lake Michigan crashed on shore to her right, acting wilder than it did in Chicago. She rolled down her window and sucked in the blustery air, and a shot of glee coursed through her, her excitement as involuntary as hunger. For better or worse, she was here. Before long her route curved north, away from Lake Michigan and toward Lake Superior, through more expanses of trees and swamps and scattered towns so small you hardly had time to notice you’d come into one before you were out again. She stopped often, as much to satisfy her curiosity as for the coffee, and her progress was slow, but she told herself that was all right. She could almost hear Emmy telling her to enjoy the journey, not to think ahead too much to its end.
At eleven fifteen she cruised through Crosscut—big enough to have a school and two gas stations and an auto supply store; not big enough for a McDonald’s or a Pamida, which seemed to be the north’s miniature version of Walmart—and turned north for the last leg of her journey. By