The Charm Bracelet(41)

Whap! Splash!

Arden’s left foot caught on a tree root, and she yelped, her glasses flying from her face, her body falling hard and coming to land directly in the water. Arden’s heart raced, and she scrambled up to assess the damage.

Face?

Palms?

Back?

Knees?

Arden exhaled and looked up toward the sky.

No damage, she thought, relieved.

Arden reached for her glasses and found them sitting on the edge of the bank she’d never reached. She rubbed the dirt off her lenses with her shirt and, as she placed the glasses on her face, the world came back into focus. Arden gasped.

In front of her stood a tiny forest of gnarled sassafras, their trunks dark, knotted and bent, like witches’ fingers. The weight of the scene forced Arden to take a seat on the damp embankment, her feet resting on a stone in the stream.

This is it! Our “secret spot,” she realized, amazed.

Arden tried to catch her breath, but memories came rushing back.

“Meet me by the sassafras grove,” read the notes that Clem used to shove into her locker, Arden recalled.

Clem Watkins, a quiet farm boy who raised cattle and showed goats, had appeared as suddenly into Arden’s life as her father had left it.

Clem and Arden had never talked much in school, outside of the occasional hello in the hall, but he came to the cabin after her father’s sudden death from a heart attack, with a casserole from his mother and a rose for Arden. No other classmates had come to visit, so when Clem asked Arden to go for a walk, she agreed. She had no one else, it seemed. They ended up sitting for hours in this sassafras grove, Arden crying until she could cry no longer, Clem patiently holding her until her tears subsided.

“How will I move on?” Arden had gasped. “What will my mother do? I can’t imagine living alone with her. She’s already crazy enough.”

“Your mother is not crazy. She’s unique. That’s a wonderful trait. Can you imagine what she is going through, too? Arden, you need to take all the time you need to mourn the death of your father,” Clem had said in the quiet of the woods.

His words had stunned Arden. They were not only more mature than anything she expected a boy his age to utter and more heartfelt than any she had ever read in any of her beloved books, but they also echoed her mother’s.

She began to tell Clem about her father’s and grandfather’s work as fishing guides, their love of the lake, the land, Lolly and Arden, Fred and Ethel.

“They mate forever,” Arden said to him of the loons. “And they always return home. Forever. Do you think my dad will ever come back to visit?”

“He never left you,” Clem had whispered. “He’s right here … in every leaf and in every wave of the lake.”

For the first time since her father had died, Arden felt a sense of peace.

From that moment on, they met whenever they could.

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.”