The Charm Bracelet (30 page)

“That's so beautiful, Grandma,” Lauren said, walking over to give her grandmother a little kiss. “Let me get you some more water.”

“Mom, are you sure you weren't depressed?” Arden asked once Lauren had left for the kitchen. “Or taking something?”

“Oh, ye of little faith!” Lolly said, wagging a hand at her daughter. “You have all the talent and brains in the world, my dear, but you've always lacked faith.”

Lolly glanced at Jake, who was still staring at her, riveted by the story. She cupped her hands around her mouth, and said in a Shakespearean whisper, “Especially in love.”

Arden's face flushed.

“You're as red as a cardinal.” Jake winked, nodding toward the bird feeder.

“I think I need some air,” Arden said, rushing off the screened porch, embarrassed.

Jake hesitated, but Lolly said, “Go after her!”

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“Are you?”

With that, Jake raced out the door. Lolly watched Jake scan the dock and grassy hillsides that rolled to the lake. They were teeming with holiday revelers.

Then, in the distance, Arden rounded the bend of the lake, like a fleeing bat. Jake zipped after her.

“What's going on?” he huffed, gently grabbing Arden by the arm.

“My mother has always had this way of embarrassing me,” she said, turning, her cheeks flushed, her eyes wide. That's when Jake could tell she had been crying.

“I'm sorry,” he said in his low voice. “I don't think she means to embarrass you. I think she just wants to shake you up a bit because she cares.”

“Do I need shaking?” Arden asked, taking off in a hurry once again.

“Maybe,” Jake said. “Do you?”

Arden stopped. “Maybe I do,” she conceded.

“Well, your mother certainly has a flair for the dramatic,” Jake said, gesturing ahead of Arden. When she turned, Arden could see the chapel-turned-playhouse—now warped, the doors aged to a faded red, a birch cross still emerging from the roof—standing in front of the lake.

Jake took Arden's hand and led her into the chapel, the two stooping to enter. Once inside, he led her to a front pew, where they took a seat and stared out the front windows.

“Do you think she's telling the truth about this place?” Arden asked.

“Do you?”

“Please don't answer a question with a question,” Arden replied. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean that. I just feel a little overwhelmed.”

“I do think she's telling the truth,” he said, putting his arm around her back to calm her. “But now I get to ask you a question: Do you pray?”

“No,” Arden said.

“Why?”

“What's the point in praying to something that isn't there?”

Jake looked closely at Arden, and then out the side window, to the lake shimmering beyond. “Religion is like a blind man looking in a black room for a black cat that isn't there, and finding it.”

Arden cocked her head.

“Oscar Wilde,” Jake said. “Even a literate cynic believed.”

A breeze tossed around the delicate flowers planted in the window boxes. “Do you think my mother still plants these boxes?” Arden asked.

“Of course,” Jake said. “She found the black cat.”

Arden stood and raced out the chapel.

“Always on the run!” Jake called.

Before he could exit, he saw Arden's hand pluck a peony from the window box. By the time he was out of the chapel, Arden had raced halfway around the lake and had already entered the screened porch of the cabin before Jake finally caught up with her. As he entered, Arden was handing the peony to her mother.

“Would you like to decorate graves for Memorial Day, like we did when I was a kid?”

Lolly was touched by Arden's suggestion, and her tears told her daughter she did.

Later, after Lolly had rested and Jake had left, the three women all put on respectful clothes and sensible heels, packed some Kleenex, American flags, and a slew of fresh flowers they had dug up earlier from Lolly's garden and they loaded into the Woodie, and began to make their “rounds.”

At Scoops Memorial Cemetery, the three parked under a series of narrow pines that lined the gravel drive. Arden opened the trunk and handed her mother some flowers and her daughter some flags. Arden took a box of Kleenex, and the three began to walk, arms interlocked, until Lolly said, “I think it's this way.”

“Are you sure?” Arden asked.

The two argued for a few seconds, before they set out over the soft grass, wending their way through headstones—some of which were new, marbled, impressive, while others were worn, cracked concrete.

Cemeteries along the lakeshore of Michigan were not lush, lavish, or large. Graveyards, as they were simply called, were compact and rested on a rolling foothill, a quiet piece of country land next to a pasture, or on the edge of a sandy dune overlooking Lake Michigan. They were not filled with marble headstones. The graveyards and headstones were simple, like the people.

“Here she is!” Lolly said.

MARY FALLORAN

Wife, Mother, Grandmother

Sewer & Adventurer

1884–1971

Lolly bowed her head, reaching her hands out to Arden and Lauren. The three clasped hands and prayed. Lolly nodded to Lauren, who kneeled and planted a tiny American flag by Mary's grave. Then Lolly bent to the ground on her knees, dug her hands through the wet earth, and planted some peonies. When they were done, Arden handed Kleenexes to Lauren and Lolly.

“Next!” Lolly said, pointing north.

Lauren and Arden helped Lolly stand, and she smiled. As the three walked, arms interlocked like sentinels in a graveyard, Lauren asked, “How long have you been doing this, Grandma?”

“Forever.”

“Why?”

“Smell!” Lolly said, holding out a peony for her granddaughter.

“I know! It smells like heaven!” she said.

“Exactly!”

Lolly stopped on a slight embankment, under the shade of a pine. Gravestones were artfully arranged in perfect symmetry on the hillside below. The flags and flowers adorning the grass were beautiful. Lolly held the peony up to her own nose, and the memories came flooding back.

“These peonies started in Ireland, where Mary was born,” Lolly said. “Since Mary couldn't return home, her parents sent her starts of their peonies, so that a piece of home would forever link the family. Those long rows of peonies on the backside of the cabin? Mary started those, rotating bushes of white and pink, babying them until they grew big and strong, until the flowers grew so heavy that they simply exhausted the stems that valiantly tried to support them. And, oh! The smell!”

Lolly held a peony in front of her face.

“Before my mom died, we would decorate graves on Memorial Day, and she told me Mary's stories. This place,” Lolly said, nodding at the cemetery, “is where I learned so much about my family and friends, those who passed before me, or those I barely knew.

“My mom told me that Mary planted two types of peonies, early and late blooming. Mary planted the early bloomers for just one reason: So that she could decorate the graves of her family and friends on Memorial Day with not just real flowers, but with flowers that came from her family's garden, flowers she considered to be the most beautiful in the world.”

Lolly halted, but couldn't stop a tear from trailing down her cheek. “You know, the earth is what grounds us in life for a very short time. The starts from Mary's family remain forever in my garden. They represent a way to keep the memory of those we love alive, no matter where we live, or how much time has passed.”

“Like your charms,” Lauren said.

“Exactly, my dear.”

Lolly turned with a purpose, pulling Arden and Lauren alongside, and meandered until she found her husband's gravestone, images of the lake and two loons etched into the stone.

“My Les,” she whispered, planting a peony.

The trio of visitors continued their rounds, stopping at Lolly's mother's grave next, and then continuing on as if they were greeting guests at a party, Lolly telling stories about people her granddaughter and daughter never knew.

Finally, Lolly said, “I think we're done with our visits.”

Arden hesitated. “I think there's one more, Mom.”

The three meandered around the small cemetery until, perched under a sassafras, they found the stone:
Clem Watkins
.

Arden took a flag from her daughter and a peony from her mother, knelt on her first love's grave, planted a flag, and then said a prayer.

You were the first man to love me. I'm so glad you found your happiness. I pray you help me find mine. And I pray that someone takes the time, like my mother has done today, to share my story, to visit me on occasion, to plant a seed of hope, to pass along my legacy.

And then Arden dug through the new grass, mud, sand, and clay, and she planted some peonies.

 

part eleven

The Tiara Charm

To a Life in Which You Get to Feel Like a Queen, Even for a Day

 

Forty-three

The Scoop
hit the stoop with a bang.

The noise startled Arden, who was in the midst of checking in with her office. She jumped, coffee sloshing over the edge of her mug and onto her stomach.

“Owww!”

She looked up in time to see the local paper take a big hop and fly end over end across the lawn, as if it were a piece of shale that the paperboy had skimmed across the lake.

Arden set down her coffee and hit
SEND
on a message to her editor that read, “Van, c'mon … it's a holiday! I'll be back WHEN MY VACATION IS OVER.”

Before she had even set down her phone, Van replied: “Simóne's still doing a GREAT job filling in for you.”

Arden's heart raced as she retrieved the paper. She thought about responding but instead took a deep breath and rolled the rubber band off the paper. Arden opened the paper and laughed sarcastically at the front page:

Happy Memorial Day, Scoops!

75th Annual Tulip Queen Celebration Today!

“The universe must be telling me something today.” Arden chuckled, reading the lead story. “Wow. This hasn't changed at all.
The Scoop
ain't the
Trib
. Or even
Paparazzi
.”

“This isn't Chicago, my dear,” Lolly replied, walking onto the porch with her own cup of coffee. “And we're not celebrities, thank goodness.”

“That Tulip Queen thing sounds fun!” Lauren said, following her grandmother. She took a seat on the glider, crossing her legs and balancing a bowl of cereal in her lap. “How come we've never gone?”

Silence engulfed the porch.

“I mean, every little town has a dairy queen, or cheese queen, or something, right?” Lauren said between mouthfuls of the Lucky Charms her grandmother always bought for her. “I always wanted to be queen of something.”

“All girls should be a queen or princess, even for a day,” Lolly said, sipping from her mug, and giving Arden a wink. “But, my dear, there's a reason why you've never gone and why your mother is being so quiet. Isn't that right, Arden?”

“Mother!”

“What am I missing?” Lauren squealed, bouncing on the glider, her cereal sloshing to and fro in the bowl. “Yet something else my mother forgot to share with me?”

“I can't wait to hear this!” a disembodied voice that sounded like a bear's rumble boomed from outside the porch.

For the second time, Arden jumped, again jostling her coffee. Jake's handsome face appeared at the screen.

“I was just trying to have a quiet cup of coffee and read the paper,” Arden said, exasperated, taking a seat at the table with a sigh, as Jake entered the cabin. She took an errant piece of the jigsaw puzzle and gestured with it as emphasis. “
Alone!
”

“I'm shocked there aren't
Paparazzi
paparazzi swarming this cabin!” Jake said, jostling Arden's shoulders playfully. “You're famous in Scoops! You should be featured in your own magazine!”

“Enough mystery!” Lauren yelped. “Somebody talk.”

Arden bounced a hard look off her mother, who returned her visual volley with a withering glance. “Go on,” Lolly said with a smirk, taking a seat and folding her arms satisfactorily.

“Well…,” Arden started. “My mom felt it was important that I meet some friends my own age. She felt before I went to college that I needed to come out of my shell, so I wouldn't be so shy.”

“
And
that we do something together as mother–daughter,” Lolly added. “To bond, after Les died.”

“So,” Arden continued, “in typical Lolly fashion, she came up with this harebrained idea…”

“Hey!” Lolly interrupted. “You're a journalist. Stick to the facts!”