“We all have skills, but most of us don’t have faith in ourselves,” the man said. He pointed a swollen finger that hooked at the knuckle. “Meet me on the opposite side of the lake tomorrow—over there by the weeping willow, see?—around three.”
Lolly knew the willow well, but turned just to make sure. When she spun back around, the man was gone, not even a puff of breath hanging in the fall air to indicate he had even been there.
The next day, Lolly walked the edge of the lake, arriving at the willow promptly at three. A stack of two-by-fours and knotty pine wood sat under a tarp, alongside bags of concrete, saws, hammers, wheelbarrows, buckets, a spade, and a rusty toolbox. The man was already up to his waist in the wet ground, digging up shovelfuls of Michigan sand mixed with dark mud.
“You own this land?” Lolly asked, looking around the spot. “Millers own that cabin up the hill from here.”
“This is the right spot,” the man replied.
Lolly considered his response odd but conclusive. She glanced back up at the Millers’ cabin.
I could call them. Do I have their number? she considered.
“Why don’t you start hauling up some water from the lake?” the man asked, distracting Lolly from her thoughts. “I’ll need it for the concrete. Need to finish fast, before the ground freezes.”
“What are you building, exactly?” Lolly asked once more. “Seems small.”
“Tiny of space, huge of inspiration,” the man said.
Lolly began hauling water, and asking the man questions: Was he married? Where did he live? Why did he come here? Did he have a family? What did he do for a living?
The old man worked feverishly, with the inexhaustible drive of youth, dispensing little personal information but much wisdom.
“I have no family,” he would say, “save for the world.”
And, “I come from everywhere. My home is wherever one will accept me.”
The man never tired, only stopping on occasion to drink water from the lake, like one of the deer. Once, when he lifted his shirt to wipe his brow, Lolly gasped: The old man had the body of a young one. His stomach was taut, muscles rippled.
Over the next few weekdays, at three, Lolly did what she could to help the man: Hauling water, raking dirt, stacking lumber. She didn’t know why she returned, but she felt compelled to do so. She found the hard labor as comforting as fishing or sewing.
“Told you I don’t have any skills,” she would tell the man over and over.
“You have many gifts,” he would repeat. “You just need to believe in them.”
The following Monday remained drizzly and cool, and Lolly walked around Lost Land Lake, her galoshes leaving sloppy, wet footprints in the muddy grass. When she neared the willow, she looked up, stopping dead in her tracks: The structure was complete.
In front of her stood a tiny white chapel, no bigger than a back-yard playhouse for two children, a cross made of birch jutting from the roof. There were small windows on each side, empty pine window boxes underneath both. The back—facing the lake—was all glass. The front double doors were painted red, and a steppingstone path led to the lake.
“What?” Lolly stammered, as the man emerged from inside. “How did you? When did you?”
“Labor of love,” he said. “Come inside.”
Lolly ducked to enter the front doors and again gasped once inside: The cathedral ceiling soared toward heaven, and was outlined with wood beams. It was tall enough for Lolly to stand fully and stretch her body. The walls were knotty pine, the floors painted white. Four tiny pews, two on each side, big enough to hold two people each, were burnished and lacquered to a high shine. One step up led to a tiny altar that was lit with candles. A single Bible sat in a wood stand in front of the glass window, the lake shimmering beyond.
“I don’t understand,” Lolly said. “It’s beautiful, but I thought you said this was going to be your home.”
“It is my home.” The man smiled, showing those perfect teeth. “It is yours, too. It is everyone’s.”
“I still don’t understand,” Lolly stammered.
“Now it’s your turn,” he said. “What skills can you offer to make this place your own?”
Lolly looked at the man. She knew she should have felt scared, but instead she felt incredibly calm. This felt like a place she wanted to be.
“I can sew curtains for the windows,” Lolly said. “I have an old Singer at home. Oh! And I can make a garden, too.”
“See,” the man said. “You have many talents. It’s a deal. I have some things to finish here. Come back when you are done with your work.”
Lolly scurried home, working round the clock to make sweet curtains from sheets her mother had loved, a pattern dotted with deer, pine trees, steeples, and little lakes. When she was done, Lolly went into her garden, which had died back but whose flowers still held their pods for spring, and gathered seeds from her peonies, daisies, foxglove, coral bells, and hollyhocks. She returned the next Monday at three. The man opened the doors when she arrived. He looked younger to Lolly, although he was cloaked in the same dirty work clothes.
“These are gifts from your mother,” he said. “Gifts from your family.”
“How did you know?” Lolly asked.
“Because they tell a story, just like your bracelet.”
He helped Lolly hang the curtains, and then the two went outside, turned over the earth, and planted the seeds.
“If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, then you can move mountains,” the man said when they were done. “Nothing will be impossible.”
“Excuse me?” Lolly said.
“We have all been given a seed of faith, but it is up to us to spread that around. We must believe in ourselves, have faith in what we don’t understand. When we do, the world will open. You will no longer fear.”
Lolly stared at that man.
Was he getting younger? I must be tired, Lolly wondered.
“It’s time I went home,” the man suddenly said.
“I thought this was your home.”
“My home is everywhere. See you tomorrow at three?”
Lolly nodded. She bent down to retrieve an extra curtain rod she had brought, and when she stood, the man was again gone, not even a footprint to track his departure.
At three the next overcast day, Lolly returned. The man was not outside waiting. When she opened the doors of the chapel, it was aglow in candlelight.
“Hello?” she called.
Nothing.
Lolly looked around, again admiring the incredible craftsmanship of the building: the angles, the beams, the woodwork. She walked to the front and took a seat in a pew. The candles flickered, like the lake, and that’s when Lolly shut her eyes and prayed.
She stayed that way forever, it seemed, and when she opened her eyes she felt at peace. Her internal ache was gone. Lolly stood to blow out the candles, and that’s when she noticed a little box on the altar next to the Bible.
She sat on the step and untied the bow. Inside was a little charm of a tiny yellow seed encased in a little bubble of glass surrounded by a frame of woven silver.
Lolly ran the charm between her fingers, confused as to what it was and what it signified. As she rolled the little seed to and fro, the man’s voice popped into her head:
“If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, then you can move mountains. Nothing will be impossible.”
Lolly added the little charm to her bracelet, and when she walked out of the chapel, she felt—for the first time in her life—a great sense of peace.
Over the course of the winter, Lolly returned to the chapel at three—trudging through several feet of snow—to see if the man had returned. She asked around Scoops if people had seen the man, and stopped at farms around Lost Land Lake asking if anyone had let an elderly man stay with them.
No one had seen such a man.
When spring came, and Michigan thawed, the resorters returned. All that is, save for the Miller fa
mily, who Lolly would learn had been killed in a tragic car accident that fall.
Over time, the chapel became a playhouse and hideaway for the children who lived around Lost Land Lake.
On fall and winter days, when everyone had left Lost Land for the year, Lolly would return, around three, and bow her head in prayer.
Forty-two
“No matter what happens—in your lives, in my life, with my health—you need not fear anything,” Lolly said, giving her charm a little kiss. “Faith will see you through it all. My only fear is forgetting. That’s why I’m telling you these stories.”
“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 t
o 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!”
The Charm Bracelet Page 22
