“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 family, 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.”