Arden looked at her mother and shook her head. “You are remarkable,” she said. “Why didn’t I ever realize that before now?”
“You were never the brightest bulb in the box,” Lolly quipped with a wink, her joke breaking the tension. “I’m just teasing you, my dear. It’s just that you’ve always been so intelligent, but sometimes you have to believe in the things you don’t understand.”
“Like you?” Arden said, returning the wink.
“Exactly!” Lolly laughed. “I have faith. You need to have faith, too. So does Lauren. I didn’t, for the longest time, however.”
Lolly set her water down on the floor and began to flip through her charms, until she found one of a tiny yellow seed encased in a little bubble of glass and surrounded by a frame of woven silver.
“If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, then you can move mountains. Nothing will be impossible.”
Arden shot her mother a suspicious look.
“There’s a difference between faith and religion,” Lolly said, wagging the charm and a finger at her daughter. “We are all given a tiny seed of faith. What we do with it is up to us. How did I survive such heartache? How did you end up with such a special daughter? Faith. You believed. Even if you didn’t know it at the time.”
Lolly removed the peony from behind her ear, held it to her nose, and inhaled deeply. “Heaven,” she sighed. “This is what heaven will smell like!”
She tossed the flower to her daughter, who caught it just before it hit the floor of the porch.
“My peonies started from seeds,” she said. “They were planted by my grandmother Mary. They can bloom for hundreds of years. Those flowers will outlive all of us.”
Lolly sat up on the couch and stretched her arms high toward heaven.
“There was a time when I had very little faith,” she continued. “I felt lost, like I didn’t have a compass. And then one day, I met a poor man whose soul made him richer than Donald Trump.”
Forty-one
1988
Lolly cast her line into the lake, close to the reeds, and gave the lure a quick tug.
Nothing.
She reeled in the bright, wooden lure and gave it another cast—whiiiirrr!—into the water, where it hit with a soft splash.
There was something about the act of fishing—the repetitiveness of motion—that relaxed her. It had the same soothing effect as sewing.
It, too, connected her to her father, her husband, her past.
Lolly set the rod down on the dock, her legs dangling over the edge, and zipped up her hooded jacket. Though it was only early October, a fall chill had settled over Scoops. Lolly inhaled and—whoosh!—blew out a gasp of air to test the temperature.
I can already see my breath! Winter is around the corner, she thought.
The giant sugar maples that rimmed Lost Land Lake were already losing their leaves. The lake, in fact, glowed, looked as if it were on fire, between the reflection of the maples’ delicate orange, gold, and crimson leaves off the water and the ones already floating on its surface.
Lolly was happy she had found a job that occupied her on fall color weekends and kept her busy over the summers and holidays. She was happy that Arden was doing well at school. Lolly missed Arden and Les, but there was something deeper that seemed to be missing, too. Something that made Lolly ache, even more than the damp chill that surrounded her.
“You gotta have a lot of faith to fish.”
Lolly let out a yelp, nearly dropping her pole, before turning to see an elderly man with a white wisp of hair jutting forth from the middle of his forehead.
“Didn’t mean to startle you,” he said. “My name is Joseph.”
“I usually don’t scare so easily,” Lolly said, leaning back on the dock—pole in hand, line in water—to extend her hand. “My name is Lolly. It’s just so quiet these days. Everyone has left for the season.”
“Quiet don’t mean lonely to me,” the man said, shaking her hand.
If Michigan were dressed in its Sunday finest—drenched in brilliant Technicolor—the old man was dressed in his work clothes: worn Dickies work pants, tattered coat and torn overshirt, muddy boots, hands and fingers that were red and curled, knotted as the sassafras that dotted the woods.
“What brings you to Lost Land?” Lolly asked. “Come to fish?”
Lolly was a trusting soul, but there was something about this man—almost an aura, if you believed in such a thing—that made her feel a bit off-kilter.
“Came to build,” he said.
“Build?”
Lolly reeled in her line and pushed off on the dock to stand. After the buying boom of the 1980s, Lolly hated the word “build.” Scoops—and Lost Land—didn’t take kindly to renovation, gentrification, and escalation. Things were just fine as they were. She took a step toward the man, and nervously zipped and unzipped her jacket.
“Just a little house,” he said. “A peaceful place, somewhere near the lake.”
“Do you have property?” Lolly asked.
The man laughed, revealing perfect white teeth that didn’t fit his aged, whisker-stubbled face, Lolly thought.
“Yes,” he replied.