South of Superior - Ellen Airgood [88]
“Nobody hates you. And you don’t look like a mop.”
“Gladys hates me,” Madeline said.
Mary scooped more beans from the sack at her feet. “She’ll get over it.”
“She kicked me out.”
Mary knew that. She thought Gladys was a damned fool for it too, but you couldn’t tell her. Gladys Hansen had fretted about Madeline Stone for thirty years. She’d heaped guilt on herself when it wasn’t hers to heap, convinced herself that a good part of Jackie’s problems, and Madeline’s, had been hers to fix and prevent, plagued herself with regrets and recriminations, and then once she got the girl Up here and had a chance to make things right, she threw it away. Foolish.
Madeline looked woeful. “Nothing’s the way I expected, now.”
“Ha,” Mary said. She didn’t mean to laugh at the girl but if that wasn’t the story of life, nothing was.
“I thought I wanted to stay here. I did want to. But now it seems like everything is ruined and maybe I should just cut my losses, you know?”
Mary stretched her legs out and flexed her feet. Her bunions ached. Something about Madeline—she looked so much like Ada Stone—tugged at her. She tried to think of a way to explain. “It ain’t everybody who can live here,” she said finally. “You’ll live poor. Like a farmer plowing old, stony ground. You’ll never have much of nothing. Except troubles. They’ll come, and they’ll be hard to fix.”
“Don’t you like it here?” Madeline asked, looking bewildered.
Sure she liked it here, she’d been here all her life. But what choice had she had? Some ways, she’d just been stuck here and made do. “I guess I do. Can’t imagine any other place. Couldn’t leave if you pointed a gun at me. That don’t change the facts any.”
Madeline nodded. Maybe she Understood, maybe she didn’t. It was hard to explain. Mary gave a piercing whistle that brought Jack running and put a hand on his head. Much as she’d groused to John Fitzgerald, the truth was that a dog was a good thing to have. A dog steadied you. Just the smell of a dog, the feel of its fur, the way a dog lived, Up front and simple. She stared at her feet. And then she said, “What you have to do here, you have to accept. You have to—lay down before the way things are.”
Madeline went still, her hands at rest in the pan. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“If you want to have things your way, the way you want them, you don’t want to stay here. That’s not how it is. BUt if you can accept the way things are—well, then.”
“That sounds harsh.”
“Maybe.” Mary gave herself a shake, tossing away the mood. “Don’t listen to me. Probably it’s not that way for most folks now, retired folks with pensions and such. They’re rich, even if they don’t know it. They got money. Choices.”
“I’m not rich,” Madeline said, morosely.
“Not even once that apartment sells? People are saying it’ll bring a lot.” Mary eyed Madeline with frank curiosity.
“Oh, it’ll bring some money. But there’s a mortgage. Once that’s paid, and the hotel’s bought—if Gladys will still sell it to me, which she says she won’t now, but we did have a contract, wouldn’t that be awful, if we ended Up in court over it? And if I still want it, which I’m not sure I do—and the roof and the wiring and everything else is fixed, there won’t be anything left over. There won’t really be enough. She told me in the beginning that it needs a lot of work, and it does.”
“So you accept that, or you don’t do it.”
“But I don’t know what to do. Everything is all screwed Up.”
“Oh, pshaw. Everything is always all screwed Up. You want me to tell you stories about what other people have done? I wouldn’t worry about it.”
“Right.”
After a bit Mary said, “You’ve got the guts for it. Runs in your family.”
Madeline ran a hand through her hair—it had gotten a little shaggy, but it didn’t look bad to Mary. “Does it?”
“Sure it does. Ada, she was a character. A survivor. And Joe, too. He was a hard man, some ways, but he wasn’t a bad one.”
“Gladys said that.”
“Because it’s true. And Walter—well, he’s got his own kind of courage.”
Madeline smiled. “He does.”
“Even your mother had nerve. You think it was