The farm boy who Arden would have never previously talked to had suddenly touched her broken heart and made her consider a life that wasn’t part of the elite set or the city.
To a girl who had lived with her head in books, Clem was real. Too real. Six foot four inches of tall Dutch ancestry, a body chiseled by farm labor, tousled hair made blonder by the summer sun, pine green eyes with chips of gold, and a deep voice that sounded like the engine of the family Woodie. When they talked about their futures, Clem’s always included Arden. When they kissed, Arden could actually picture their futures.
One October afternoon, as they lay in the grove of sassafras, angling their faces just so between the red-leafed branches to catch the last of the Michigan sunlight before winter returned, Clem said, “Marry me?”
Arden’s first thought—as she lay on her back, still too stunned to move—was that Clem’s words sounded more like a plea than a question.
When she sat up, Clem was on his knees in front of her, holding a little box.
“No,” Arden said. “No, Clem.”
“It’s not a ring,” he said. “Just a promise that I’ll be with you forever.”
Arden opened the box: A charm of a loon sat nestled on top.
“Have you been talking with my mother?” Arden said.
“Maybe,” Clem said. “Can I add it to your bracelet?”
Arden held out her wrist, and Clem added the charm to her bracelet and then kissed her hand, as if she were a princess.
Arden stared at the charm. It was just like the one her mother had on her bracelet.
Arden looked into Clem’s green eyes, the breathtaking fall background of the woods, filled with sugar maples exploding in gold, red, yellow, and orange behind him.
And that’s when Clem leaned in and kissed Arden. She hadn’t expected the proposal. She hadn’t expected her heart to leap from her chest. She hadn’t expected her head to began to twirl, like the Tilt-A-Whirl that came to town with the traveling carnival every year. She hadn’t expected, at the young age of eighteen, to want to say yes.
But when her lips left Clem’s and she began to speak, a pack of Chicago women visiting for the fall color tour suddenly ran by, talking about “that crazy charm bracelet widow” in the old log cabin who had lost her husband. “Probably faked his own death to get away from her,” one cackled.
“That daughter has just as many charms,” another one laughed. “She’s going to be just like her.”
“Ignore them,” Clem replied.
But Arden couldn’t. These women were everywhere: They descended on auctions of foreclosed homes and farms like vultures, picking and plucking possessions, while tired families watched from behind curtains.
“Could you ever see yourself in a city?” Arden asked Clem one day. “What does our future look like?”
“God, no,” Clem scoffed. “A city? I can’t live like that. I’m a farm boy. I love this town. I want a simple life with a big family. Don’t you?”
Farm boy. Simple life. Big family.
For weeks, Arden was panicked, haunted by Clem’s dreams. She avoided him at school, hid out on weekends, made up excuses.
But when Arden was without him, she was haunted even more.
At a school assembly, Clem was honored by his chapter of the Future Farmers of America for service, and in his acceptance speech, Arden could hear his joy when he talked about farming. When he showed her his medal after the assembly, his face beamed.
Arden shut her eyes, but no longer saw Clem: She saw the tired faces of broken families. She saw her mother.
“Meet me after school,” she told him. “In our spot.”
“I can’t marry you,” Arden said when they met, bursting into tears. “I love you, but I just can’t live here. I will die here, just like you’d die in the city.”
And so, like the city women, Arden ran—from Clem, from Scoops, from her mother, from her past—toward the city.
The next summer, Arden left for college. She thought of Clem every day for years as she finished school, started as a journalist, worked on her book, and became a part of Chicago.
Arden was working at the Chicago Reader when her mother sent a letter that included a clip from the local paper, The Scoop, that read, “Local Boy Killed in Farming Accident.”
Even after so many years, Arden’s heart shattered.
She sat in her cube and wept, thinking of the boy she had left, of the most vulnerable time in her life, when Clem had made her feel so safe.
Clem had married a local girl and had three children, two boys and a girl. The paper ran a picture of the family: The kids looked like Clem. The family looked happy.
In the bottom of the envelope was the charm of the loon, dangling on the bracelet Arden had left at home, her past hidden in an old shoebox in the closet.
“My heart breaks for you, my angel,” Lolly had written in her looping script. “He loved you so much, didn’t he?”