South of Superior - Ellen Airgood [68]
“I’m sorry, ma’am, but the screen shows you were informed by letter.”
“When?”
“The letter went out over a week ago. When your payment was late again.”
“But I’ve never been late before.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am. Times are very tough, credit wise. I see here that the interest level on your existing balance was raised at the same time. Just to let you know.”
“To what?” Madeline asked hopelessly.
“Twenty-nine percent.”
“What?”
“Twenty-nine percent.”
Madeline sagged against the wall, breathed in the odor of grease and gasoline and rubber. Good smells, somehow. Real smells anyway. “That’s robbery.”
The associate gave an involuntary, commiserating laugh that he quickly turned into a cough. Madeline didn’t blame him. It was easy to get fired. “Is there anything else I can help you with?” he asked.
“No.”
“I am sorry.”
“It’s not your fault,” Madeline finally said, and carefully hung Up the phone.
A skinny man in greasy overalls walked out of the repair bay and took a second look at her. “You all right?”
“Not really.” Madeline pushed herself away from the wall and went to the car.
She sat at Gladys’s desk for a long time that night, staring at the phone. The phone was ancient, squat, and black, with a cloth cord and a rotary dial. The receiver was as heavy as a brick. She glanced around the room: love seat covered in nubbly, salmon-pink fabric. End tables with curvy legs and lace doilies beneath the lamps, which had plastic-covered shades. A small, lean easy chair with wooden armrests. A Zenith television in a wood case with screwed-on legs poking out from Under it. She breathed in the mothball smell she remembered from that first day. She was caught in a time warp, circa 1950.
Actually, she wished she were, because then she wouldn’t have the problems she did. Problems that had piled Up so fast that she could hardly keep track of how it had all happened. But it had happened, and there was only one person who might be able to help her now. She was steeling herself to make the call. She could imagine how it would go.
“Richard? It’s Madeline.”
“Maddie. Are you all right? Are you home?”
“No,” she’d have to admit. “I’m not all right. I’m not home. And I’m really, really sorry to be calling because I have to ask a big favor and I don’t have any right to.”
Richard was the only person she knew who could afford to lend her five thousand dollars, and despite everything would just maybe do it. He wasn’t truly petty and cold, as he’d acted those last days, she was sure of that. It had been anger and hurt talking, and who could blame him? Ending their engagement had been a very hard thing to do, and Madeline had been almost helpless to explain her decision. Partly it was just instinct, something saying No from deep inside her. It wasn’t that she didn’t like Richard. She liked him. But she wasn’t sure she truly loved him.
She thought of their chronic petty arguments. Richard wrapped Up in his research in the Nelson Algren collection, fascinated with Algren’s clear, Unflinching eye for Chicago’s gritty Underside, and Madeline thinking that he knew nothing about the gritty Underside of anything, had no clue that some people were still raw from scraping along it. Richard wanting some fancy new place on the Loop for dinner, someplace where she’d have to haul out that slinky dress and high heels when all she wanted to do was go to Gino’s. Richard giving her that look that meant Please when she pulled on her peacoat, a coat that Emmy’d bought before they knew she wasn’t going to college. Madeline loved that coat, it was warm and familiar and it wore like iron, there was not a thing wrong with it. Which she had explained to Richard once but all he’d done was come home with a new coat for her, a peacoat, yes, but pink with embroidered red piping.