Free The High Divide by Lin Enger Page B

allowed her to see her life in ways she couldn’t see it otherwise. She walked down past a grain elevator to the lake, where a pair of mallards glided off toward the moon’s reflection. At the shoreline she crouched to touch the water with her fingers. She cupped her hands and took a drink. The tang of vegetation was strong, and she spat it out. A fish turned itself over in the shallows. She walked back up the dirt street toward the depot, around the last car of the train, and then out of the rail yard toward the empty commercial district. The small town was silent except for occasional animal sounds, and Gretta thought of her mother’s night walks in Copenhagen, especially during the year that her husband was gone, how she’d walked north from their place near Tivoli Gardens, crossed the canal bridge, and strolled the grounds behind the library. Gretta, sixteen then, followed her mother many times, wondering if she was going off to meet someone, suspecting it might even be her husband, Gretta’s father, who’d gone to live in the Nyhavn district with a woman he’d known during his sailing years. But in fact her mother never rendezvoused with anyone, never went to fetch her husband either, but waited for him to come home of his own accord. And when he did, she took him back, commencing to feed him as she’d always done, launder his clothes, and even receive him in her bed, though Gretta always sensed her mother’s bitterness toward him. It wasn’t long after, when he died, that Gretta left for America, unable to bear the thought of living any longer with someone who by turns was either angry or sad.
    She came round a corner that brought the depot back into sight. I won’t come begging on my knees, and I won’t play the fool, she thought. I have my dignity, after all. And damn it, I won’t let you just come back and take my boys away.
    The repair took longer than the porter’s estimate, but at least Gretta was able to sleep again, and by the time she woke, morning had arrived and the train was curving through the hills of St. Paul, the city larger and louder and richer than she remembered, nearly unrecognizable after so many years gone—the long views of the Mississippi blocked now by grand structures of brick or limestone, the sparsely settled streets filled in with two- and three-story homes beneath canopies of elm and linden and maple. Back here in the place where they met, Gretta felt certain that Ulysses was close by, that she was going to find him. But she also dreaded more than ever the humiliation of discovering what he’d been unwilling to tell her when he left—that he had no intention of returning to her.
    Her plan was to visit her sister-in-law, who lived on a little side street off Summit Avenue with her husband. Or at least she hoped they still lived there. It seemed unlikely Ulysses would return to St. Paul without enlisting their help, though it was also possible that shame might keep him away. He’d always been given to brooding over mistakes others would shrug off as nothing. Once during their first year together, when he was in the habit of making breakfast and bringing it to her in bed, he gave her a hard-boiled egg which, when cracked open, revealed a shriveled, bug-eyed chick. Gretta shrieked, but she wasn’t nearly as horrified as Ulysses had been. For months he berated himself, and he never made her breakfast again.
    At the Union Depot she splashed water on her face and brushed out her hair and moistened a handkerchief to freshen herself beneath the arms. She sprinkled herself with the rose water she kept in her handbag, but still she felt dingy and rough, too coarse for the city. And so she kept her face lifted and her back straight, her eyes busily engaged, trying at least to present an air of knowing her business. On the brick street outside the depot she caught a horsecar and rode out toward Summit Hill beneath a sky marred