“Mom told me about Clem today,” she said, taking a sip of her beer. “And I told her I wanted to change my major. I want to paint, Grandma.”
“I know you do, my dear,” Lolly said. “I take it your mother didn’t like that idea.”
Lauren nodded. “I told her life is too short to be unhappy. We have to follow our passion, right?”
Lolly nodded. “You’re setting me up for a story, you know. Can I tell you about the loon charm? I think it will help you.”
Lauren nodded again, before taking a big gulp of beer.
Lolly smiled, her old face beaming. She felt again for the charm and to Lauren, her grandmother looked like a young girl again, decades washing away, a light surrounding her body and emanating from her soul as if a spotlight had been focused on her in this dark bar.
“Your grandfather gave me this charm, my beautiful girl,” Lolly said, shutting her eyes as the band took the stage and began to play. “Oh, my goodness! They’re playing ‘Summer Wind’ by Frank Sinatra. Do you know this song?”
Lauren shook her head no.
“Listen to the song’s story, and then I’ll tell you mine. It’s a story about summer love, a story about a love that forever calls you home,” Lolly said, shutting her eyes and swaying her body as the honey-voiced crooner began to sing. “Your grandfather is with us tonight!”
Twenty-one
1962
Whooo-dooo-ooooh-ooooh!
The loons woke Lolly just seconds before the predawn rustling of her father. The nineteen-year-old rubbed her eyes, navigated the cool, narrow wood steps in the log cabin and padded into the kitchen, where her father stood illuminated in the darkness by the weak light from the refrigerator.
“Lemme help you, Dad,” Lolly said.
“I can get it,” he groused.
“You can? It’s okay to turn on a light,” she said, hitting the switch over the sink. “It’s not gonna wake me up.”
“I like to watch the sun rise over the lake,” her father said. “That’s my morning light. Along with you, of course.”
Lolly smiled and hugged her father, her blond head coming to rest on his flannel overshirt.
As the two pulled apart, they looked at each other closely in the burgeoning light from outside and smiled, hiding their deeper emotions: Vi’s too early death had aged both of them. There was a constant weight, like an invisible brick, pressing down on them. Vern’s hair was now more grey than black, and Lolly often woke with circles under her eyes.
Lolly started the coffee, grabbed a skillet, and pulled out three eggs and two slabs of bacon.
“Toast?” she asked.
“Yep,” Vern said.
She yanked the jam and butter from the refrigerator and bread from the bin on the counter, and plugged in the toaster. She plopped the bacon into the now-hot skillet, and when it began to bubble and grease began to fill the bottom of the pan, Lolly cracked three eggs into it.
The sun was just beginning to reflect off Lost Land when Lolly handed her father his breakfast. For a moment, the eggs’ yolks matched the early summer sunshine. Her father lifted his fork and cut into them, the yellow spilling forth and flowing haphazardly around the plate.
“You can’t take care of me forever,” he said, sopping up the yolks with his toast.
Lolly looked out at the lake, a long sigh her answer.
It was summer, and the resorters were returning. Although it had been nearly a decade since her mother had died, the first weeks of summer always stung like an angry ground hornet. Lolly knew her mother would never be coming back.
Even Jo was gone. She was staying in the city, living in her sorority house and working.
“Who are you taking out today?” Lolly asked, breaking the silence.
“A group of guys from Chicago,” Vern said, snapping off a bite of crispy bacon. “They want to fish Lost Land for musky, and then the big lake for salmon. Full day. Good money.”
Vern stood. “Mind filling me a thermos of coffee?”
“Sandwiches?”
Vern nodded. “I’ll go gather up my stuff.”
An unspoken routine between the two had developed over the years. Lolly met her father on the screened porch, thermos and cooler filled, picked up a tackle box in her free hand, and accompanied her father to his johnboat at the end of their dock.
The morning was crisp but would warm quickly, as they did in Michigan, the chill giving way to humidity-free warmth and skies as blue as the indigo buntings that dove over the lake in search of mosquitoes.
Whooo-dooo-ooooh-ooooh!
“New couple, I do think,” Vern said, nodding back at the cabin, where two loons nestled in the inlet by the screened porch. “I think Lucy and Ricky might have passed on this winter. I think we may have some new lovers.”
“Loud ones,” Lolly said, handing her dad the thermos and cooler. “Woke me up again this morning.”
“You got names for them?”
Lolly jumped at the sound of a strange voice.
She turned to find a mop-headed kid, with eyes as green as the lake reeds swaying in the breeze behind him.
“Oh, Les! Right on time!”
“Thanks for letting me help you out this summer, sir.”