He filled his shopping basket at Dave’s Finest Food, doing what he thought of as a gas-station stop—milk, eggs, bread, apples, cheese, cookies. Just some food. He’d do a real one later. As Shadow moved around, Chad Mulligan said hello to people and introduced Shadow to them. “This is Mike Ainsel, he’s taken the empty apartment at the old Pilsen place. Up around the back,” he’d say. Shadow gave up trying to remember names. He just shook hands with people and smiled, sweating a little, uncomfortable in his insulated layers in the hot store.
Chad Mulligan drove Shadow across the street to Lakeside Realty. Missy Gunther, her hair freshly set and lacquered, did not need an introduction—she knew exactly who Mike Ainsel was. Why, that nice Mr. Borson, his uncle Emerson, such a nice man, he’d been by, what, about six, eight weeks ago now, and rented the apartment up at the old Pilsen Place, and wasn’t the view just to die for up there? Well, honey, just wait until the spring, and we’re so lucky, so many of the lakes in this part of the world go bright green from the algae in the summer, it would turn your stomach, but our lake, well, come fourth of July you could still practically drink it, and Mr. Borson had paid for a whole year’s lease in advance, and as for the Toyota 4-Run-ner, she couldn’t believe that Chad Mulligan still remembered it, and yes, she’d be delighted to get rid of it. Tell the truth, she’d pretty much resigned herself to giving it to Hinzelmann as this year’s klunker and just taking the tax write-off, not that the car was a klunker, far from it, no, it was her son’s car before he went to school in Green Bay, and, well, he’d painted it purple one day and, ha-ha, she certainly hoped that Mike Ainsel liked purple, that was all she had to say, and if he didn’t she wouldn’t blame him ...
Chief of Police Mulligan excused himself near the middle of this litany. “Looks like they need me back at the office. Good meeting you, Mike,” he said, and he moved Shadow’s shopping bags into the back of Missy?€hmther’s station wagon.
Missy drove Shadow back to her place,’where, in the drive, he saw an elderly SUV. The blown snow had bleached half of it to a blinding white, while the rest of it was painted the kind of drippy purple that someone would need to be very stoned, very often, to even begin to be able to find attractive.
Still, the car started up on the first try, and the heater worked, although it took almost ten minutes of running the engine with the heater on full before the interior of the car changed from unbearably cold to merely chilly. While this was happening, Missy Gunther took Shadow into her kitchen—excuse the mess, but the little ones just leave their toys all over after Christmas and she just didn’t have the heart, would he care for some leftover turkey dinner? Well, coffee then, won’t take a moment to brew a fresh pot—and Shadow took a large red toy car off a window seat and sat down, while Missy Gunther asked if he had met his neighbors yet, and Shadow confessed that he hadn’t.
There were, he was informed while the coffee djipped, four other inhabitants of his apartment building—-back when it was the Pilsen place the Pilsens lived in the downstairs flat and rented out the upper two flats, now their apartment, which was taken by a couple of young men, Mr. Holz and Mr. Neiman, they actually are a couple and when she said couple, Mr. Ainsel, Heavens, we have all kinds here, more than one kind of tree in the forest, although mostly those kind of people wind up in Madison or the Twin Cities, but truth to tell, nobody here gives it a second thought. They’re in Key West for the winter, they’ll be back in April, he’ll meet them then. The thing about Lakeside is that it’s a good town. Now next door to Mr. Ainsel, that’s Marguerite Olsen and her little boy, a sweet lady, sweet, sweet lady, but she’s had a hard life, still sweet as pie, and she works for the Lakeside News. Not the most exciting newspaper in the world, but truth to tell Missy Gunther thought that was probably the way most folk around here liked it.
Oh, she said, and poured him coffee, she just wished that Mr. Ainsel could see the town in the summer or late in the spring, when the lilacs and the apple and the cherry blossoms were out, she thought there was nothing like it for beauty, nothing like it anywhere in the world.
Shadow gave her a five-hundred-dollar deposit, and he climbed up into the car and started to back it up, out of her front yard and onto the driveway proper. Missy Gunther tapped on his front window. “This is for you,” she said. “I nearly forgot.” She handed him a buff envelope. “It’s kind of a gag. We had them printed up a few years back. You don’t have to look at it now.”
He thanked her, and drove, cautiously, back into the town. He took the road that ran around the lake. He wished he could see it in the spring, or the summer, or the fall: it would be very beautiful, he had no doubt of that.
In ten minutes he was home.
He parked the car out on the street and walked up the outside steps to his cold apartment. He unpacked his shopping, put the food into the cupboards and the fridge, and then he opened the envelope Missy Gunther had given him.