South of Superior - Ellen Airgood [74]
At first the hotel had been a daydreamy place, an escape, a stage to play out her desire to be a painter. But lately it felt empty as much as anything. It needed people and voices, life, to fill it. It needed to be open. Of course the idea was crazy—what did she know about running a hotel?—but her conviction was like her certainty about coming north: bone-deep, Undeniable.
Madeline rode to Crosscut with Gladys in the morning. They didn’t talk on the way. Gladys drove. Madeline stared out the window, her stomach fluttery. She had to be sure that what she was thinking was right. When they arrived, Arbutus looked sad, but resigned.
“Nothing’s worth all of Us at odds like this. If you really think the Bensons are the only ones who’d want the hotel—”
“I’d be interested,” Madeline said, slowly.
All eyes—Nathan’s included, he hadn’t left yet—turned to her.
“What on earth are you saying?” Gladys asked. “Have you gone out of your mind?”
“Maybe.”
“Well this is no time for playing around. I do not appreciate practical joking.”
“I’m not joking. I’ve been thinking about it ever since you sent me in there for the—” Gladys was giving her a venomous look and Madeline skidded to a stop on that sentence. “I’ve been thinking about it for a while.”
“Well, it’s just not possible. You have no idea what you’re saying. Romantic fantasies, that’s all.”
“You’re probably right. But nevertheless, I really am interested.”
“You can’t afford it! You can’t even afford to fix that old wreck of a car you’re driving—and last I knew, you lost your job. It’s ridiculous.”
“No, that’s true. But I do have an apartment in Chicago.”
“That is neither here not there, now don’t—”
“An apartment—how many bedrooms?” Nathan asked.
“Two. It’s on the North Side. An old building, but nice. It’s on the third floor.”
“Not bad. Property values are high Up there.”
“There’s no elevator,” Madeline said, wondering if that would make a difference.
He shrugged that off. “You have clear title?”
“I inherited it. Emmy—the woman who raised me—left it to me, and we lived there my whole life. I’ve got a mortgage on it, but there’s a lot of equity.”
“Everybody has a mortgage, that’s no problem. What’s the heating system like?”
“Boiler in the basement. I think it’s pretty old, but—”
“Madeline!” Gladys cried. “Stop it this instant. You’re talking like a maniac. You cannot sell your home to buy the hotel!”
Madeline felt a slow smile spread across her face. “Watch me.”
Nathan took Madeline’s keys back to Chicago with him, as well as a contract giving him six months to sell the apartment. If she let herself think too hard about it she got panicky.
Gladys continued to maintain that the whole idea was foolish and worse, and in a way Madeline knew that everything she said was true. The hotel would cost a fortune to heat, the wiring was ancient, the roof hadn’t been reshingled in fifty years, and she didn’t have a clue how bad the water damage from the leak in the roof really was. There were already cabins and motels in town, maybe plenty of them, but the hotel was too big to be a house and McAllaster was too small and quiet, even in the summer, to support it as a store. And how many more stores did McAllaster need, anyway? There was already a grocery and gas station, an antique shop and the craft market. The tourists weren’t that plentiful. Or were they? Madeline didn’t know. She didn’t know a lot of things she should have, she Understood that. Yet she would not be swayed. The hotel was going to reopen and she was going to be the one to do it.
“Oh my dear, you can’t rush into this,” Arbutus said, whenever Madeline and Gladys visited. “We can’t let you do that. You don’t realize.”
“You’ll lose your shirt!” Gladys said. “I don’t want that on my conscience.”
“Well then I’ll lose it. But I’ll lose it doing something I wanted to. I may go down in flames, but I’ll go down trying.”
“It’s not that simple,” Arbutus insisted. “Why, you could very well wind Up with