“I asked,” Lolly said simply. “Let me tell you something, my dear. My grandma sat at that sewing machine every single day, mending clothes, making wedding dresses for happy brides, tailoring suits for the town’s businessmen, making all of my clothes. I loved the sound of that Singer. The whir of the machine sounded like a million hummingbirds, and it would lull me to sleep out here on the screened porch. She could take a feed sack and make me the most beautiful dress from a pattern. She could take the scraps of rich people’s clothes and make us a quilt to keep us warm during long Michigan winters. My mom always tried to give her more charms, but my grandma always refused. ‘I have the only two I ever need,’ she’d say. My grandma had terrible arthritis in her later years, and it was hard for her to sew. Her knuckles looked like gumballs, her fingers like bent limbs on a sassafras tree. But she wouldn’t stop sewing. One day, I brought her a cup of hot tea while she worked. She patted her lap, and I jumped in it. ‘Let me show you how to do a running stitch,’ she said, teaching me the magic of her Singer. When we finished, I looked up at her as she sipped the tea from her favorite desert rose teacup. ‘Tell me about your charms, Grandma,’ I said. And she did. Before she died, she gave me that sewing machine charm, and she was buried with her four-leaf clover, right next to her beloved husband. The quilt on our laps was made by your great-grandmother,” Lolly finished, running her hand lovingly over the quilt.
Arden picked at her coffeecake. She stared out onto the lake, embarrassed by the fact she had never known this.
“Well, I need to go get ready for work,” Lolly said, standing up.
“Work?” Arden asked, looking back at her mother. “Mom, you need to rest.”
“No, I need to go to work. I need routine. Isn’t that what you and the doctor said?”
“What about us? We’re here and want to spend time with you.”
Lolly gave Arden a look that a parent would give a child who just doesn’t understand. She walked over and lifted her daughter’s chin with her hand. “And I couldn’t be happier that you’re here. I need you so much right now.”
Lolly hesitated, but continued, “I just wish it hadn’t taken you so long to come.”
When everyone had left, Arden took a seat on the glider. She felt chilled, from the inside out, and covered herself with the quilt. She fidgeted nervously with an errant thread on the edge, and pulled and tugged until a large seam split, and stuffing began to spill forth.
After a while, Arden fell asleep under the quilt, dreaming that she was drowning in Lost Land. But the lake wasn’t filled with water, it was filled with charms. Arden tried to claw her way to the surface, but she slowly sunk to the bottom, until the only things visible at the surface were the charm of a sewing machine and letters on a wave that spelled out: GUILT.
part four
The Kite Charm
To a Life Filled with High-Flying Fun
Ten
Arden jolted awake after a fitful night of sleep, to the sounds of loud music and giggling, rather than the moan of loons and the gentle lapping of the lake.
She tilted her head, like the RCA dog, to listen.
She felt for her glasses on the bedside table made of old birch bark and twigs, kicked the quilt off her body, and groggily shuffled to the window of her childhood bedroom. It was cracked slightly, and Arden gave it a sleepy tug to open it fully.
The ancient window—still the original, wavy glass in a peeling wooden frame balanced on fraying rope pulleys—refused to budge.
Arden crouched, leveraging her palms under the bottom of the frame, and gave it a mighty push. The window went flying all the way up, like a strongman’s bell at a carnival attraction.
A cool, morning breeze rushed into the upstairs room, and Arden was transported back to the days of her childhood. This room had been her refuge. Books had been her life raft. And they still lined her room—stacked haphazardly on shelves and on the floor—a sort of literary insulation from her bigger-than-life mother and the too small town where she felt trapped.
Arden scanned the room, and her neck suddenly popped from the stress of opening the stubborn window. She yelped, and reached for the ceiling, hoping a quick yoga stretch would relieve her suddenly screaming vertebrae.
Sun salutation.
The sun was rising over the lake, and Arden smiled at the beauty. She reached high yet again, her body mimicking the tall pines just out her window, whose sky-high tops were towering toward the light and gently swaying in the wind. The sun glinted through the pines and off Arden’s glasses.
And that’s when she heard—at an excruciatingly loud decibel—the screech of bubblegum pop music.
Katy Perry? “California Gurls”? she wondered.
Arden leaned out the window, studying the lake, and turned her head left and right to study the lawns and beaches of the surrounding cabins for the source of the music.
Okay, who’s making all the noise? It’s a tad early in the morning and the week for college kids to kick off Memorial Day with loud music, she thought.
That’s when the floors beneath Arden began to shake violently, and for a second she believed she might actually be in California in the midst of an earthquake. The world outside her window, however, was serene. An off-key voice began to sing again.
Mother! she realized.
Arden tossed on a Northwestern University “Parents” sweatshirt, the static electricity causing her dark hair to stand on end, and carefully navigated the suffocatingly narrow stairwell that led from her tiny bedroom to the downstairs. She tiptoed down the stairs and stopped at the end of the landing.
Lolly and Lauren were dancing in the living room and singing into ladles. “California Gurls” blasted from Lauren’s iPad.