She looked at her phone again, as Jake drove toward downtown Scoops in his pickup.
Arden reread aloud the text that had finally come through from Lauren as soon as she and Jake had just gotten back to the cabin.
“Meet me at Scoops Park at 5! DON’T BE LATE!”
“What do you think that means? What do you think is going on?”
Jake laughed, a rocky rumble that matched the engine of his truck. “I don’t know, Agatha,” he joked. “Maybe she wants to do a surprise dinner downtown. It is Memorial Day. Why are you making it into such a mystery?”
Arden’s voice rose in surprise. “Because it’s my daughter. You know girls her age. They’re always up to something.”
The truck bumped along the top of the dune road. To one side was the majestic view of Lake Michigan, stretching out to infinity like an ocean, its blue water meeting the blue sky, making it appear as if one huge, heavenly canvas had been stretched across the entire horizon. On the other side sat the river and the town—jammed with vacationers—and beyond Scoops were squares of green and ovals of blue, Mother Nature’s patchwork quilt of farms, lakes, pastures, and vineyards.
Jake reached out and touched Arden’s forearm. She dropped her phone in her lap and grabbed his hand. They drove that way until traffic into town became snarled, the tiny, two-lane road—no wider than a country bridge—unable to handle the giant SUVs sporting license plates from Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit, and Indianapolis.
“Over there!” Arden suddenly shouted, pointing at an empty space.
“I think your contacts work better than your glasses,” he said, parking his truck. “And you certainly look even prettier without them.”
The two took to the Scoops streets, falling into flow with the slowly meandering summer resorters, on their way for drinks and dinner. Arden grabbed Jake’s hand and cut down a small alley between two restaurants, which spit the pair out just down the street from Dolly’s.
“I became quite the expert at avoiding crowds my whole life in Scoops,” Arden explained in a matter-of-fact way when Jake stared at her for taking the impromptu shortcut.
Arden peered through the window of Dolly’s, but didn’t see her mother. She looked at the clock on the window, but there was no time designated for the next show.
Alarmed, she zipped into the sweets shop and asked a young girl with two shades of hair—white on top, black underneath—“Where’s my mother? Lolly? I thought she worked until six?”
“She said she had an emergency,” the girl said, looking up as she rang a customer up.
“Was she okay?” Arden asked, alarmed.
“Totally,” she responded. “Very happy. She took off with some young girl.”
“Let’s just go to the park,” Jake said, pulling Arden out of the shop and toward the boardwalk. “That’s where she said to meet.”
“Something’s just not right,” Arden said, checking her cell as they walked.
4:59.
And that’s when she saw it: The giant banner above the park announcing the Tulip Queen pageant.
Strains of terrible music suddenly began to blare over a pair of squeaky speakers. Pimply, ragtag members of the Scoops choir—dressed in hideously bright colored T-shirts—stood in front of a row of mics and began to sway like flowers in the wind, singing off-key The Andrews Sisters’ song that had kicked off the Tulip Queen pageant for decades:
Tu-li-tu-li-tu-li-tulip time!
“Oh, no,” Arden said, stopping in her tracks so quickly that a family of four nearly tripped over her body. “This is like reliving a nightmare.”
Jake put his arm around Arden and led her to the bleachers. Arden squinted in the late afternoon sun, the reflection bouncing off the river, and yanked sunglasses from her purse.
From behind the bleachers, a row of girls dressed in colorful, sequined gowns began to walk in a line toward the platform in front of the pavilion. From a distance, they looked like one, long, undulating glittering snake seeking sun.
“Why am I here?” Arden asked out loud.
And then she saw why: At the very end of the snaking line stood her daughter.
“Lauren?”
Without thinking, Arden was on her feet.
“Lauren?!” she yelled at the top of her lungs. “Lauren! What are you doing?”
The crowd around her stared, alarmed by her shouts, cautiously sliding their rears away on the aluminum benches from the crazy woman.
In the distance, Lauren heard her mother yell, and she waved back enthusiastically, just like she had done when she was little and had to perform in a band concert.
“Don’t alarm her,” said Lolly, who was hiding under the last rows of the bleachers. “Just keep her calm.”
Arden saw her daughter laugh. She put her hands around her eyes, scanning the narrow slats between the bleachers to get a better look.
Was that…?
“Mother!” Arden yelled, standing on her bleacher. “I knew you were behind this!”
As Arden’s screams traveled toward Lolly, she tried to hide behind a stranger’s body, shadowing the surprised observer like Wile E. Coyote might in a cartoon.