South of Superior - Ellen Airgood [46]
Gladys shoved her hands deeper into her coat pockets and Madeline thought she looked cold. “Are you ready to go back?” she asked, and Gladys nodded.
11
The next afternoon Madeline popped the Buick’s hood and wiggled the battery cable, a trick Arbutus had suggested, saying she’d never owned a car Under twenty years old in her life and knew all the tricks. The engine turned over and Madeline felt a rush of satisfaction. She shut the engine off again and headed across the empty lots to see Mary.
Mary was lounging beside her display, her feet propped on a crate, carrying on a conversation with a man Madeline had waited on at lunch. He was an investment banker from Manhattan who’d come north for the trout fishing. “Pull Up a stump,” Mary told Madeline, pointing at a spare lawnchair. “You want a pop, there’s some in with the fish. Jack, you keep away from there.”
All perfectly illegal, Madeline thought contentedly. No way was it USDA approved to sell home-caught fish from an iced-down cooler you had to swat your dog away from, but one good thing about McAllaster was, nobody cared, or almost nobody. The tourists loved the local color, and the locals would live and let live, mostly. The Bensons and people like them, people who wanted things more modern, more homogenized, more like wherever it was they’d come from, well, to Hell with them. Maybe they were within their rights—and Madeline had to admit she still thought that cutting off credit on delinquent accounts was not Unreasonable, no matter what Gladys said and no matter how much she herself disliked them personally—but the Bensons’ influence didn’t extend this far, at least. Not yet.
Maybe McAllaster could resist gentrification. The north side of Chicago hadn’t, as Madeline knew from Emmy’s own experiences struggling to stay in their apartment as the price of everything soared. A working-class neighborhood went Upscale and pretty soon the people who’d made it what it was had to leave, Unable to afford the cost of living and the homes they’d grown Up in, homes where they’d raised families of their own. But here—maybe the harshness of the landscape and weather and economy would stop some of that, or slow it down. And besides, it wasn’t all bad. She liked pesto and hummus, and if Gladys hadn’t been at war with the Bensons, she’d have been in there buying those things.
Madeline shucked off her shoes. It had been busy today, challenging, and she felt pleasantly worn out. She smiled at the banker but didn’t join in the conversation. Working at Garceau’s, she was seeing that McAllaster was nowhere near as remote as she’d thought. There’d been a movie star out on Desolation Bay the other day, holed Up on his oceangoing yacht. He hadn’t gotten off the yacht, but still. Today alone she’d waited on a tiny indie rock band from Detroit, an elderly Japanese woman who spoke no English, and a rodeo clown from Wyoming, as well as this Manhattanite.
He and Mary were delighted with each other. Watching him lean toward Mary, his eyes bright with appreciation of the story she was telling, Madeline wished she’d brought her sketchbook. Maybe she could’ve shown how they were the same and different all at once. She half-drowsed while Mary talked to a couple of retired schoolteachers from Detroit who remembered her from last year. They bought two gallons of syrup and three fillets of fish, and Mary tucked seventy dollars into the front snap pocket