“Quit fretting,” Gladys told her after Arbutus was back in bed for the night. “It might’ve happened anytime, and she’s perfectly fine, not even a bruise. You can’t be here every living minute. Now, are you going to help me with these packages?”

Madeline started writing address labels, but she kept glancing at Gladys. Finally she cleared her throat and spit out what was on her mind. “I have to ask you something. Why didn’t the Bensons cut off your credit? When they did everyone else?”

Gladys’s first reaction was to clam Up, refuse to discuss it. But that was suddenly too much effort. She said huh in a mirthless way. “They want something from Us.”

“What?”

“The hotel.”

Madeline nodded and Gladys wondered at her lack of surprise. “But what will they do with it?” she asked, very intent.

“They’ll tear it down, they’ve already said so. They want to expand the store and put in a parking lot.”

“That’s a terrible idea. You can’t let them.”

Gladys was touched by Madeline’s dismay, but startled too. What on earth had gotten into her? Probably she was still worked Up over Butte’s tumble. But Butte’s tumble was right at the heart of the matter: they could not go on this way. “I don’t have much choice. That’s the truth of it, no matter how I fuss.” Gladys fiddled with a package, frowning. “Eventually this loot will run out. And I’m just scraping along. All my big talk is just that: talk. I swore Up and down I wouldn’t sell, wouldn’t this, wouldn’t that, but—” She shrugged. “I don’t see what else to do. Look at what happened today. If Butte gets hurt, really hurt I mean, we’re finished here.”

“Oh, Gladys.” Madeline looked truly Upset, which was decent of her.

Gladys took a breath and then she said, “I went down to Crosscut the other day when you thought I was just at Mabel’s. Went to see if I could get a loan against my house. They turned me down. Said I was too old, and no income.”

“Oh, Gladys. I’m sorry.”

“I didn’t want Butte to know. Or you, either. The fact is I don’t see what else to do but let the hotel go. It makes sense.”

She picked Up an old metal sign advertising tinned Moroccan anchovies. It was going to a woman in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, who had paid thirty-eight dollars for it. Gladys remembered the days when they Used to sell anchovies at the hotel. They’d sold all kinds of things, anything to bring a nickel in. Cigarettes, peppermints, matches, woolen socks, chocolate bars, newspapers. To her the sign was as real as anything, as common as a can opener (but not Unloved for that), a tiny gear in the business she once ran, but to some stranger halfway across the country, it was an antique, a curiosity.

“That’s where you get all this stuff, isn’t it? From the hotel?”

“Most of it. I sold all those alarm clocks, you know, but I didn’t get as much as I wanted.” She shrugged. “The place is full of junk. Might as well clean it out.”

“It’s not junk.”

Gladys made a face.

“Mary Feather told me that your parents ran it.”

“Yes, and my grandparents before them. They built it. Eighteen hundred and eighty-six they put in the cornerstone, it’s cut into the cement, you can see.” Gladys began to tidy the wrapping paper, blinking tears away, furious at herself.

“So you ran it too?”

“Frank and I did. Hansen’s General, we tried to call it, but that never took. The Hotel Leppinen it was and always remained.”

“I love the place, you know. I have to tell you, I’ve even—” Madeline broke off, picking Up the rooster pepper shaker and rubbing its red comb with her thumb. Gladys had done that a million times herself. Something about the dull glossy red of that comb, you just wanted to touch it. Madeline probably expected to be snapped at for prying into this business of theirs. Gladys knew herself. She had a sharp tongue. It was just her way. Some people were sweet, like Arbutus, and some were sour. It didn’t mean she didn’t have feelings. It just meant she didn’t—couldn’t—indulge them. But now she smiled wistfully.

“I love it too. I guess that’s why I’ve hung on so long.”

“Did you close it when Frank died?” Madeline asked. She had set the rooster down and had her chin on her hand and looked all dreamy-eyed. As if this was a wonderful make-believe story.

“Heavens no, I had to make a living, didn’t I? Mostly I ran it myself anyway, Frank was working in the woods. Oh, Arbutus came and lived with us for a spell, after Nathan’s father died, but that was just for a while, before she married her second husband, Harvey Hill. It was when my Frank Junior was small. Those boys were the best of friends, back then. Hard to believe how greedy Nathan got as he grew Up.”

“Frank Junior?” she said, sitting Up straight, the dreaminess gone.

“My son. He was killed. In Vietnam.”

“Oh, God. Gladys, I don’t know what to say. I had no idea—I’m so sorry.”

Gladys could not bear to talk about it. “It was a long time ago.” She picked a package Up, resmoothed the tape carefully. At last she could look at Madeline again. “I closed the hotel not too long after your grandfather died. I just lost heart, I guess. It seemed like it’d got to be too much for me. The roof sprang a leak and that was the last straw. I patched Up the hole but I couldn’t see repairing the damage.” She shook her head. “I decided to cut my losses. I thought it might be nice for once in my life to not be so tied down and I wasn’t making enough to shake a stick at anyway. I thought I might as well let myself have a little freedom.” She made the scissors cut the empty air. “But now where do I go? Nowhere.”

“Do you ever think of reopening?”

“Not a chance. Things have changed too much. Back in my day, and my mother’s, the tourists weren’t so fussy. They’d share the bathroom at the end of the hall and didn’t need anything in the rooms but a bed and a dresser. It’s different now. Of course, every generation says that. I put an electric sign in the window that said ‘Rooms to Let,’ and my mother was fit to be tied. She thought it was tacky.”

“ ‘Rooms to Let,’ ” Madeline repeated, as if that was the most wonderful thing ever.

“I was thinking I’d put it on eBay, I’ll bet it brings quite a bit.”

“Oh, no, you can’t sell it! Please don’t.”

“There’s no reason not to.”

“Of course there is!”

“And what would that be?” Gladys asked, giving Madeline the skeptical look she deserved for all this folderol.

“Well—I—it’s your history, you just said so. And you might want to reopen. If you had help, say.”

Gladys aimed the scissors at Madeline and shook them a little to make her point. “No. There’s too much that needs doing. I don’t know what it would take to fix the water damage. More than I’ve got. Besides which the place needs cleaning like you can’t imagine, and the plumbing needs work, and the outside painted. I looked into that, it’ll cost a fortune. A real fortune. Then there’s the roof, and the heat, and the wiring, and a dozen other things. What it would all cost boggles the imagination.”

“But it’s so beautiful. You can just feel it wanting to reopen and run again. It’s such a shame that it just sits there.”

Gladys gave Madeline a long, quelling look and shook the scissors at her again. “A shame? What it is, is old and out of fashion and expensive as Hades to keep open. And that’s after repairs.”

“I suppose,” Madeline said, looking crestfallen, as if Gladys had blasted some cherished dream of hers out of the sky. “I guess you’d know.”

Gladys felt a little sorry then for being so severe. She had the same romantic notions about the place as Madeline, or she wouldn’t have hung on to it all these years. “It would never bring in much and people want that nowadays, no one’s content with just a living,” she said more gently. “It’s a grand old building, but it’s too much for Us. I’m tired of fighting it. I’m afraid the decision is made.”

“But, Gladys, how can it be that simple? That final? There must be some way—”

“It’s got to be done,” Gladys cut her off. “And the Bensons seem very serious about their offer.”

“If it was anyone but them,” Madeline said. She seemed so worked Up. Gladys could only think it was nerves. The best thing to do about nerves was to ignore them.

“One good thing, I suppose they’ll let the grocery bill go,” she said.

“So it goes.”

“But you’ve held out this long. What about your history?”

“Madeline, stop,” Gladys said, abruptly tired of the girl’s naïveté. “I haven’t a choice. I’ve been nickel-and-diming my way along for months now, and it isn’t working. The summer taxes will be due in September. More money I haven’t got. I only just got the winter taxes paid, and then they were late. And history?” She swept a pile of paper scraps into the garbage can that sat at her feet. “History doesn’t pay the bills. History won’t feed Us or keep Us warm. It’s just something that’s over and done with.”

Madeline seemed to have deflated in front of her. Again Gladys felt an Unexpected stab of sympathy. “Do you want to take a walk?” she asked. She knew how Madeline liked walking. Gladys liked walking too. Funny that they’d not done any of it together.

“Isn’t it awfully late? And what about Arbutus?”

“Sound asleep,” Gladys declared. “And late? What’s late? I’m an old lady, I don’t sleep anyway. And you’re a young one, full of vim and vigor.”

A reluctant smile spread across Madeline’s face.

“We made all our own rugs, every one, out of rags. Flannel shirts and dungarees and bedsheets that were beyond mending. Those things’ll survive the next ice age. Lord, the work of it. Bang! that shuttle on the loom would go all evening long. My grandma could never sit without working. The loom’s in the shed out back of the hotel. Dismantled, but all there. And the kicksled, why, I Used to Use it myself.”

“What is it, anyway?”

“It’s for the winter, to get around in the ice and the snow, do your errands. See, look.” Gladys stopped on the sidewalk and demonstrated, grabbing at an invisible waist-high handle with both hands, making a kicking motion with one foot. “You pushed yourself along, carried your parcels on the seat. See?”

Madeline nodded. For a moment she saw it all—ice, snow, the wooden kicksled, a tiny, robust woman in warm woolen clothes out doing her errands. “Handy.”

“A man with an antique store offered Us a lot of money for it, but we said no.”

“Of course you did.”

“Now I don’t know what to do. I had made Up my mind to sell it, but maybe I oughtn’t. Maybe once the hotel’s sold I’ll wish I’d kept it. But once we’re dead and gone, where’ll it go?”

“You’ll find somewhere. A museum, maybe? Or even Randi.” In her sadness Madeline was feeling beneficent and unjudging.

“Not Randi. She’d probably just hock it for the cash. Or worse.”

Madeline blinked. “Well, you shouldn’t sell it, you’d never forgive yourself.”

“Probably not.” Gladys began walking again.

“The hotel is really wonderful,” Madeline said as they headed Up the street, the clatter of the tavern growing fainter. “It’s—I’ve—” She meant to confess to Gladys, both her Unlikely daydreams and her unauthorized prowls through the place, but somehow she couldn’t. The time wasn’t right.

“Hard to believe it’s come to this. But I don’t know what else to do.”

Their feet scuffed on the pavement. After a while Madeline said (not sure why she did, but led into it by their unaccustomed camaraderie, the dark, the quiet), “I went to Pine Street that day. You know, that day you told me where he—Joe—lived.”

Gladys nodded. “I supposed you did.”

“It was awful.”

“Lots of poor people down in Crosscut. Real poor. Joe sold that house.”

Madeline waited for Gladys to add more and when she didn’t, she said, “I don’t know how to ask you about him.”

There was only the sound of their shoes on the sidewalk Until at last Gladys said, “And I don’t know how to tell you. He wasn’t a bad man.”

Objection rose in Madeline, from her marrow. “But I was his granddaughter.” She felt so much about it still, after all this time, after all that Emmy had given her, and wished she didn’t. She couldn’t seem to stem the tide of protest, though. (And maybe the protest was in a way impersonal. It wasn’t so much that this abandonment had happened to her; it was that it had happened at all. It was a philosophical question. Maybe one she should ask Paul, who seemed to be posting each one of Nietzsche’s seemingly endless aphorisms on his chalkboard a day at a time. Today it had been, He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.) “I was only three. What kind of a person can do that, just—refuse someone? A child.”

Gladys kept her eyes on her shoes. “People do what they have to. It’s different Up here. Hard. People don’t know, out in the rest of the world, what it’s like.”

“But he didn’t even consider it.”

“He couldn’t consider it,” Gladys said softly. “He just didn’t have it in him.”

Unexpectedly, tears filled Madeline’s eyes. This was so final, so damning in one way but exonerating in another. Maybe it was the only real answer, and if so, then her search for meaning in the situation would be over. And then what?

Gladys went on. “I met him at the fiddle jamboree. Well, met—it’s not like we didn’t know each other. But we started sparking at the jamboree. It was July of 1977. My Frank had been gone for years, and Joe—He sure could play. And a man playing a fiddle the way he did?” Gladys put a hand to her heart. “Oh my.”

Despite herself, Madeline smiled.

“He was always good to me,” Gladys said simply.

Madeline realized, really realized for the first time: Gladys had loved him. She was both touched and infuriated. “So why wasn’t he good to me?”

Gladys shook her head, seeming either not to know or not to know how to say.

“He abandoned me. He and Jackie both did. She at least was young and all screwed Up. He was old enough to know better. And no one cares.”

“It’s not a matter of caring. It’s a matter of the way things are. It’s over and done. Here you are, you’re fine. And I’d think you were better off as you were.”

The truth of this was Undeniable, even though it resolved nothing.

They came to a stop in front of McAllaster Crafts, which had opened the weekend before. Even though it was well after midnight there was a woman inside. She was heavyset, with long black hair that cascaded down her back. Madeline had seen her riding an old bicycle around town, or driving a rusting truck sometimes. She worked at a table by the glow of a lamp, weaving reeds around a frame to make a basket. They watched as she picked the half-made basket Up and turned it in one hand to check its balance, then bent over the work again. After a moment, they continued on.

The woman lingered in Madeline’s mind. She was making art, of course that had caught her attention, but it was something else too. The innocence of it, maybe, the lack of expectation. She was so engrossed in her work, seemed satisfied to be where she was. The basket might sell for twenty dollars, or it might not. The shop never seemed busy and the things in it weren’t sophisticated. The basket would never make her famous or end up in a museum. The best part of it was the making of it, sitting at the table weaving while outside the lake crashed into shore and the seagulls roosted somewhere for the night and two women stopped for a moment to watch.

Maybe Madeline hadn’t missed so much, skipping art school, after all.

Lately she’d been working on a picture of Gladys and Arbutus at their morning coffee. She yearned to show their sisterness, their northernness, their old-fashionedness, the Unearthly remoteness of it all. She wanted to paint Arbutus’s sweetness, Gladys’s resolution, their devotion to each other. Was it possible? Maybe, maybe not. Probably not, but what harm would there be (except to herself, in disappointment and frustration and the stirring Up of old dreams) if she tried? How long had it been? Fifteen years at least. How was that possible?

Emmy always said she must’ve been born drawing. Madeline still remembered the picture she’d been coloring the day Jackie left: Winnie the Pooh with a jar of honey. Emmy’d encouraged her right from the start: sketch pads, crayons, finger paints, watercolors. And then, on her eighth birthday, a crow-quill pen and a bottle of Higgins ink. It had made her feel so grown-up. Emmy must’ve gone to an art supply store and asked what to get. The crow-quill pen was great. The nib was flexible, so more pressure gave you a thicker line; less, a thin one. Madeline remembered realizing that, experimenting with it. She could see herself sprawled on her stomach on the Oriental rug in the living room, drawing thick lines and thin ones, over and over.

Emmy always took her seriously. She didn’t even get mad when Madeline knocked the ink bottle over on the rug—one of the few expensive things she owned. She looked at the stain, frowning for a long moment, and then said, “You like working down there on the floor?”

Yes, Madeline said. She did. It was where she did her best thinking.

“That’s where you have to be, then. The stains will wash out.”

They had washed out, more or less, every time, because of course that wasn’t the only ink to spill or seep through the paper. If you turned the rug over you could see the stains on the other side.

At first Madeline kept drawing when she turned down her scholarship to art school, but not for long. Emmy’s cancer was slow-moving but insistent, and art didn’t seem to matter anymore. Working the busiest shifts at Spinelli’s to bring home as much money as possible mattered. Taking care of Emmy, going with her to all her doctor’s appointments, trying to beat the monster that was living inside her—that mattered. Remembering to keep living, to let themselves forget for hours and sometimes whole days that she had a disease that was killing her. That mattered, and it took everything Madeline had to do it. There had been nothing left for art. But now—now maybe things could be different.

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.