Mary glanced over at her. “I thought you were going to buy the hotel.”

“I was. But now maybe not. The fire, you know.”

“I thought it didn’t do much damage.”

“It didn’t. Except for between Gladys and me.”

“Mmm,” Mary said, because she knew that was true.

“I just—I want to go to a movie.”

As if that was what was really on the girl’s mind. But Mary went along. “So drive over to the Soo, they got lots of movies.”

“That’s exactly it. I don’t want to drive a hundred miles one way to see a movie. I just want to go. I want it to be easy. I want to go to a jazz club, maybe. And shopping! Wouldn’t that be something? I want some bustle, some traffic. And I miss—anonymity. You know? I miss that more than anything. I would love for no one to know who I am for just, like, a day.”

“Mmm,” Mary said again.

And again Madeline skittered away from anything resembling what her real trouble was. “And bagels. God, I would kill for a real bagel with real deli cream cheese. With chives! And Ethiopian food. And Thai. I want to take a class, maybe. I could learn to tango. I want to go to a baseball game, and the museums, and the zoo. I want to listen to the radio, for God’s sake, that’s all.”

Mary kept snapping the ends off beans.

“Is that so much to ask?”

“It’s quite a lot.”

Madeline’s laugh was wavery and Unconvincing. Maybe the place had just gotten to be too much for her. It was for most people. Too lonely, too remote. Not for Mary. But people got to feeling trapped, she knew. Even with all the modern things people had here nowadays—phones and computers and televisions and cars (and Mary could still remember when a lot of people traveled in wagons, it wasn’t that long ago)—McAllaster was not quite in the modern world.

Madeline was rambling on again. “I just want—I don’t know what. I feel like I’m in prison. My car barely runs, I’m broke, everyone hates me, I’ve read all the books in the library, I haven’t shopped anywhere but a grocery store or a hardware or even had a haircut since I left Chicago. I look like an old mop.”

“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 easy to leave here and go to Chicago? She wasn’t a good mother, I know. She made a whole lot of bad choices, I guess. But even then you have to admit, she had spirit.”

“Well, that’s one way to look at it.” Madeline snapped the ends off a few beans. “I guess she never set fire to anything, huh?”

“It was just a fire. Not even a big one. It’s not the end of the world. Look at me—I burned my own house all the way down and I survived.” She gave Madeline a grin and eventually Madeline looked less glum and broody.

“You can always come stay with me if you need to,” Mary said as Madeline was leaving. “I got that old camper, you’re welcome to it. I spent a winter in it, it wasn’t so bad. Heats Up real nice.” The camper wasn’t much, but Madeline gave her a quick hard hug and said thank you like it was the Taj Mahal and Mary waved her away feeling unaccountably good.

She went in and put a pot of coffee on, then mixed Up a batch of brownies. In the last two weeks she’d kept the lawn mowed and weeded the flower beds, cleaned every scant square foot of the place with a toothbrush, shined the windows, replaced the gaskets on the leaky faucets, washed the rugs, cleaned the linens and hung them out to dry, reorganized the closets and cupboards, painted the bathroom and kitchen, polished the pine paneling in the living room and bedroom, moved the furniture into an arrangement that gave the illusion of more space, and kept the little jugs of flowers she’d placed here and there changed and fresh. Now there was nothing left to do but wait.

For what she wasn’t completely sure. She was here only because Arbutus had pleaded with her to be. For obvious reasons, that hadn’t been her plan. She’d done enough damage. But Arbutus wore her down. It was impossible to refuse her anything after what had happened.

First Arbutus talked her out of leaving McAllaster the morning of the fire, and then talked her into staying at her house. She said she wanted Madeline there when people went through. She thought the house would sell faster if someone was living in it, making it smell good and look inviting (hence the brownies and flowers), and she couldn’t stand the thought of being the one to let people in herself, nor to have them poke through her things with the realtor, who was a stranger from Crosscut. She wanted Madeline there. Would Madeline do that for her?

Madeline took the brownies out of the oven and glanced at the clock—half an hour yet before a guy was due to come look at the place. It would be a waste of time because so far, of the dozen or so people who’d trooped through, no one had any real interest. Most of them were just sightseeing, and the few that weren’t, lost whatever interest they’d come with pretty fast.

The house was tiny and unassuming. It was quaint, but on all practical levels it was a mess. The plumbing and septic and wiring were old, as were the fixtures and counters and cupboards—nothing had been Updated since the house was built back in the forties. Plus it had a foundation of cedar posts that were rotting at different rates, giving the floors an interesting sloping pattern that alarmed people once they were thinking about plunking money down on it.

Madeline wished these weren’t the facts because she knew Arbutus wanted the ordeal over now that she’d made Up her mind to sell. When it did she could begin to pay off her medical bills. And when the hotel sold—whenever that was, to whomever it was—the burdens would really lift from her shoulders. She would go and live in the senior apartments, she said. It would be nice. Clean and convenient and modern, easy to get around with her walker, and friendly, with neighbors all along the hall. She wouldn’t have to impose on Gladys every hour of the day, and they’d be able to go back to what they’d Used to be, loving sisters with homes very near each other.

Madeline didn’t know what Gladys thought of all of this because Gladys would not speak to her and left the house each time Madeline cautiously knocked on the screen and went in to see Arbutus, but she could imagine. Arbutus’s mind was made Up, however, so that was that.

Madeline opened the newspaper she’d picked Up at the gas station. Maybe she could find a job in Crosscut. An apartment too, because the current arrangement could not go on forever. There was a notice that the prison was looking for kitchen help. She was thinking about that—the prison, Paul hated working at the prison, she wondered how he was doing, how he and Randi were coping with the summer trade, all the hours and craziness, and why did she wonder, it was none of her business, and even if the prison was awful it’d be good to get a job like that, it’d be year-round, with benefits, a decent paycheck—when a knock came at the door.

“Hello?” a man’s voice said. “Anybody home?”

Madeline went to the door and at first she was very confused. “Hi. My gosh, what are you doing here? This is such a coincidence. Or are you looking for me?” She racked her brain trying to think of a reason why Pete Kinney should be there.

Pete looked baffled too. “Hello. I wasn’t looking for you, no, though I planned to, later. Thought I’d see this place and maybe ask whoever was showing it if they knew you, knew how I could find you. I guess that worked out.”

“But, Pete, what brought you here? Why are you looking at a house?”

He shrugged, seeming bashful. “Daydreaming, maybe. I was roaming around on the Internet, looking at properties Up here—I do that sometimes—and I saw this one listed. I liked it, so I made an appointment.”

“Well, this is weird but nice.”

Pete nodded his agreement. He looked the same as always: a trim, slightly formal man somewhere in his seventies in a worn but clean work shirt the color of split-pea soup, with matching trousers. His hair had once been black but was now well salted with white, and his eyes were sapphire blue. He’d been so kind back in Chicago. When she took the Buick into his shop—old-fashioned, like him, the building sided in porcelain tile, the advertising sign a red-winged Pegasus, the pop machine so old that it dispensed small glass bottles from behind a narrow glass door—he’d told her she needed a new set of tires, an oil change, the points cleaned, the timing checked, the hoses replaced. She’d started to fear the car wouldn’t be Up to the trip but he assured her he’d get it into shape.

His eyes had twinkled when she protested that the bill was far too small. “I like the idea, you going way Up there. Wish I could go with you. Eunice has been gone now close to four years and it’s still hard, living in our house without her. I think of selling but my kids say no, I shouldn’t.”

Madeline knew how that was. So many people had ideas of what you should and shouldn’t do, but in the end you had to decide for yourself. A moment of pure Understanding had passed between them. And now here he was. Madeline stood in the doorway holding the screen open and could not think what to say.

“How’s your car holding Up?” he asked.

“It got me here.” He looked dismayed and she hurried to reassure him. “You did some kind of miracle, considering how it’s fallen to pieces since. If it wasn’t for you I’d probably still be sitting in Milwaukee, waiting for a tow.”

“So it needs some work, does it?”

“Well, in an ideal world, sure. But the way things are—” Madeline decided not to elaborate. “So you came all this way to look at this house?”

“It was just a notion I had.”

She waited for him to say more, but he didn’t. “Here, what am I thinking, come in. Let me get you some coffee.”

“Things going all right for you, then?” he asked after she poured him a cup.

“It’s been interesting.” She heard how ambivalent that sounded and added, “It’s beautiful.”

“It seems mostly like I remember. Lots of new houses down on the water, though—mansions, aren’t they? Where do people get that kind of money, I wonder.”

“They bring it with them I guess. You’re sure not going to make it once you get here.” They smiled at each other.

“Going to stay awhile, then?”

“I—don’t know. Maybe. I’m thinking of buying a place, a hotel, to run it again as a business. But there’ve been some—complications.”

“Ah. Well. Sounds like an Undertaking. Good luck to you.”

“Thanks. I think I’m going to need it.”

When he’d eaten a brownie and finished his coffee (he paused to inhale the aroma steaming off the surface before he took a sip, and Madeline remembered that about him, how appreciative of small things he always was), she showed him the house and yard. “Are you really thinking of buying something here?” she asked when they’d finished and were outside beside his car.

“Yes.” He drew a voluminous handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed at his nose. “Life hasn’t been the same without Eunice. I expect you Understand.”

“I think so. After Emmy died, nothing was right.”

“The two of Us, we always said we’d maybe retire Up here one day. It was mostly a daydream. But she did love it here, we both did. Ever since I fixed Up your car I’ve been thinking, why not come see it again? So I told my son I was taking two weeks—the shop’s his now really anyway—and put my toothbrush in a bag, and here I am.”

“Nice.”

“Yup.” Pete surveyed Arbutus’s yard and house with a considering gaze. “Eunice would have loved this. I like it too. It suits me. Not too big, not too fancy, just about the right size for one.”

“Are you really serious about it?”

“Maybe. It may just be that I am.”

She went to the prison to fill out an application—at least that job would let her rent a decent place—and the human resources person told her there would be no decisions made for at least three weeks. Okay, she said, feeling crestfallen.

Next she went to 512 Pine Street. She did this almost every time she came to Crosscut. The house held a horrible fascination. It was so grim. She could not imagine having grown Up here; something about it made Jackie Stone real in a way she never had been before. Madeline could never bring herself to knock on the door and draw the shrieking woman from within the depths and say, Did you happen to know my grandfather? Do you mind if I look around? She came, she looked, she left.

She went and visited with Walter after that but before long she took herself and her burgeoning headache back Up the highway.

She ran into Randi hitchhiking a few miles out of Crosscut. Randi appeared to have set out on a thirty-mile walk in her party clothes—a gauzy top, velveteen miniskirt, strappy sandals. Madeline let off on the accelerator.

“Hey!” Randi said, trotting Up to the window. “How cool, nobody’s been by at all, not going north anyway.”

“You have to get in the back and climb over the seat if you want to sit Up front, the passenger-side door doesn’t open.”

Randi slid in and climbed over into the front. Her skirt rode Up as she swung her long legs over the seat. She tugged the skirt down, heeled off a sandal, and propped her bare foot Up on the dash, wiggling her toes. The nails were painted pink, and she wore a narrow silver toe ring that had cut into her skin. She sighed and lifted her river of tiny braids Up off the back of her neck. “It’s hot. Am I glad you came by, I thought I was gonna be stuck walking all the way.”

Madeline nodded, her mouth tight. “Where’s Greyson?”

“He’s in Halfway, he spent the night, we’ve gotta stop and pick him Up.”

“I see.”

Randi rolled down her window and held her braids Up on the top of her head with one hand, her elbow resting on the seat back, her eyes closed, the pink-nailed toes tapping on the dash. “Can we turn on the radio?” she asked after a while.

“No.” Madeline was not in the mood to be more than just barely civil. But eventually she said, “It doesn’t work, it quit last week, I don’t know why.”

“Bummer.”

“Yeah.”

“Paul could maybe fix it for you, he’s pretty handy,” Randi said.

“Is that so.”

They rode on through miles of swamp and fir, tamarack and poplar and birch. An osprey flew out of a dead tree. Madeline soon heard a faint snore, which annoyed her even more. “Wake Up,” she said, giving Randi a jab when they neared Halfway.

Randi dropped her braids and opened her eyes. “Wow, I dozed off, sorry. I stayed Up way too late.” She stretched her arms, flexing her shoulders and twisting her wrists. She was like a cat, lithe and easy in her skin. Graceful. In fact she was beautiful. She had youth and animal magnetism and a weird kind of charm that Madeline wasn’t completely able to resist, which made her feel grouchier than ever. “Grey’s at the Trackside, it’s Up on the right—” Randi began.

“I know where it is.”

Randi gave Madeline a friendly, quizzical smile. “Right. Sorry.”

Madeline’s silence was overpowering in the confines of the car.

“I’m always cranky when it’s hot,” Randi offered. “I think it gets to everybody.”

Madeline clenched her teeth to stop from saying that it wasn’t hot at all compared to what she knew from Chicago, and she wasn’t cranky, either.

At the Trackside, Randi slid back over the seat and trotted toward the door. Madeline followed. She was in time to see Randi swing behind the bar and disappear into the back, giving a big smile and a wave to Greyson on her way past. A man and woman sat at the counter, hunched over their glasses with the focus of career drinkers. They turned when the door slammed shut, and after giving Madeline a long, flat gaze, turned away again and sat in silence except for the clunk of glass against wood each time they set their drinks down.

Greyson sat on the grimy floor, playing with a baby, a toddler wearing nothing but a diaper. The baby held a pink flyswatter in her hand and was batting at the air.

Greyson scrambled Up. “Hi, Madeline. Did you bring my mom to get me?”

Madeline nodded grimly, then remembered to smile and say, “Yes.”

“This’s Andrea,” he said, pointing at the baby, who was chewing now in a contented way on the handle of the flyswatter. “She’s two. She’s a baby.”

“Yes, so she is.”

“I stayed here last night and taked care of her.”

“Did you,” she said, thinking, You probably did.

“She hardly cried at all and she ate all her vegetables I gave her.”

“That’s great.”

Randi reappeared. “Hey, guys!” she said to the couple at the bar.

“’Lo, Randi,” the man said. The woman offered a harsh smile, ground the stub of her cigarette out in an ashtray, said nothing.

Randi swooped down to scoop Up Greyson, giving him a loud smacking kiss on his neck. He giggled and wrapped fistfuls of her braids in his fingers.

“Ready, Peanut?”

“Ready!”

“Did you have fun?”

“Mmm-hmm, I got to feed Andrea. And Annie washed Up that flyswatter, Andrea couldn’t keep her hands off it, it was funny.”

“Really?” Randi headed for the door, bouncing Greyson to make him giggle.

“What about that baby?” Madeline asked as the door clacked shut behind them.

“Oh, Roscoe’s in the back. She’s fine.”

A wave of despair rolled through Madeline. Randi might be right. The baby might be fine, Roscoe and Annie might be fine, even the two at the bar might be fine, might be drinking water and not vodka, might actually be watching that baby to some degree, they might be her grandparents and in there for that exact purpose for all Madeline knew. She was aware that she was making judgments she didn’t have the right to. Even so—but there was nothing to do.

“I thought you worked at Paul’s on Thursdays,” Madeline said as they pulled out on the road. Thursday Used to be one of her days, and it was a delivery day too. Not a day you’d want to be on your own, especially not in the last week of August, which was busier than ever from what Madeline could see. People everywhere, grabbing their last chances at summer vacation.

“Yeah, I was supposed to be Up there. But my plans got changed at the last minute. I called Kat, she’s going in, Paul’s covered.”

Madeline frowned but she didn’t say anything because it was none of her business and she had no room to talk.

There was a chirping noise and then a faint jangling melody and Randi pulled her cell phone out of her bag. “Hey,” she said. “Yeah? Sure, yeah. I can do that. I got a ride, I’ll meet you there.” She flipped the phone shut.

Before Randi could say anything, Madeline said, “What?”

“I have to meet somebody. I was wondering, could you drop me off? It’s right Up here a couple of miles, it’s—”

Madeline didn’t want to know. “Sure,” she said. They rode along in silence Until Randi pointed out a trailer in a little clearing. Madeline pulled off, and Randi climbed over the seat to the rear door. Greyson was about to follow when Randi said, “Hang on a sec, Peanut.”

Madeline was gazing out her side window, but her head snapped back at that. Greyson froze in mid-climb. The look on his face was wrenching. So anxious and forlorn, and so quickly erased.

“I was wondering, would you mind taking Grey home with you? This won’t take long, but I don’t think—well, it’d be better if you could take him.”

Greyson sank back, biting his lip.

Madeline stared at Randi. She was smiling, but there was something pleading in her eyes, something sad and determined, and Madeline wondered what she was Up to. It had to be nothing good. She had the impulse to try to talk Randi out of this stop, but she didn’t do it. It wouldn’t work, she could feel it in her bones. Instead she made herself smile in return. “Sure, no problem.”

Greyson sank back into his seat.

“Scoot over and put on your seat belt,” Madeline told him. “I’m staying at Arbutus’s house, you know where that is?”

Greyson nodded as he worked to get his belt buckled.

“I made brownies yesterday, do you like brownies?”

He nodded again, not looking Up at her. Madeline got back on the highway. “I’m glad you’re coming over,” she told him. “I’ve been kind of bored. What do you want to do? Know any good games?”

“What about hangman?” he said, tentatively. “I like hangman. Do you?”

“Love it,” Madeline said.