Chapter 4 - The Saugatuck Fair
I had bought the pewter brooch on a Saturday in July of 2023.
The heat had been ninety-four degrees along the Kalamazoo River, the humidity coming off the marsh grass so thick it felt like breathing wet flannel. Ellis had spent four hours helping an elderly painter from Holland set up display canopies on the village green, and we had forty dollars left from our gas budget for the week.
The booth was run by a woman with silver hair who lived in a cabin near Fennville. She made brooches by pouring molten pewter into carved soapstone molds that had belonged to her grandfather, a pattern-maker at the iron foundry in Muskegon.
The leaf was a white oak leaf—the kind that grows along the dunes behind Oval Beach, short and broad-lobed, with the tiny veins cut deep into the metal so that when the light hit the surface, it looked like gray frost on a winter window.
“That’s for an old lady who still has her teeth,” the woman told me, wrapping the pin in a piece of blue tissue paper. “The cheap stuff bends when you stick it through heavy wool. This will go through three layers of melton cloth and never lose its point.”
I had driven straight from Saugatuck to the post office on Michigan Street.
I bought a padded yellow mailer for two dollars and forty cents. On the green customs label—even though it wasn't going across a border, the clerk had given me the wrong slip and I had used the back of it—I wrote Grandma’s address:
Marin Stark
c/o Bellweather Grove Senior Community
Room 114, West Wing
840 East Green Street, Hastings, MI 49058
Inside the envelope, along with the brooch, I had tucked four folded sheets of lined notebook paper.
I had written to her about the dental practice: about Dr. Ashby’s new associate who couldn't find the root canals on an upper molar without three bitewing X-rays; about the old dental chair in operatory three that made a wheezing sound like an accordion every time we lowered a patient; about Ellis, who had spent his summer vacation building six oak bookshelves for the junior high library because the school board had cut the supply budget by forty percent.
I had written to her about the ring Ellis had given me—an antique sapphire that had belonged to his great-aunt in Cadillac, small and square-cut, with two tiny seed pearls set into the silver bezel.
“Grandma,” I had written on the last page, “Dad says you don't like visitors because the drive makes your hips ache after we hit the county line. Mom says you get confused when more than one person sits in the room. But I’m sending this leaf because you told me once that oak leaves don't fall off the branch until the new bud pushes them off from underneath. I love you, Essie.”
I mailed that envelope on July twenty-fourth, twenty twenty-three.
Three weeks later, on an overcast Tuesday morning, my mother called me at the dental office while I was autoclaving the morning hygiene instruments.
Her voice had been low, hurried, with the television running in the background—some morning talk show with an audience clapping rhythmically.
“Esther?”
“Yes, Mom. I’m between patients. What’s wrong?”
“Your father had to go down to Hastings yesterday. The administration called him.”
My stomach had dropped into that small, cold knot that every granddaughter knows. “Is she sick? Did she fall again?”
“No,” Mom had said, her tongue clicking against her cheek. “She’s… she’s having another spell, Esther. She opened that package you sent. The one with the metal pin.”
“Did she like it?”
“She threw it across the room, Esther,” Mom had said, and her voice had carried that smooth, practiced sadness that sounded like grease on a wheel. “She didn't know who sent it. She thought it was a piece of scrap iron from the factory. She told the head nurse that Sanford had left it in the yard to trip her. The nurse told your father that packages from outside just agitate her too much. She’s living in nineteen seventy-eight, honey. She doesn't know what year it is, and she doesn't know who Ellis is. Don't send anything else. It just makes your father have to drive all the way down there to calm her down.”
I had stood in the sterilizing alcove with the smell of hot steam and distilled water in my nose, holding the black landline receiver against my ear, and I had cried until my scrub top was wet at the collar.
I had believed her.
I had believed her because she was my mother, because Vaughn Stark was my father, and because in twenty-eight years of living on the west side of Grand Rapids, nobody had ever told me that a mother could look at a daughter who loved her and lie to her face simply to keep her from driving forty minutes down M-37 with a legal notebook in her purse.
Now, standing at Harrow Lake Lodge with the oak fire roaring six feet away, I looked at Grandma Marin’s sweater.
The leaf was there.
The pewter was slightly tarnished at the stem, where Grandma’s thumb had rubbed against it while she sat in her room in Hastings, but the point of the pin was buried deep into the green wool, through the gray cotton lining underneath, exactly where the woman in Saugatuck had said it would go.
“Grandma,” I said.
The old woman looked at me. Her right eye was clear, dark, and bright as a wet river pebble.
“I never got your letters, Essie,” Grandma Marin said. Her voice didn't rise, but every word fell into the ballroom like an iron weight through thin ice. “Your father told the front desk at Bellweather Grove that all incoming mail had to be forwarded to his office on forty-fourth street. He told the social worker that I had persecutory delusions about my bank statements, and that letters from family members made me refuse my evening porridge.”
She turned her walker toward my mother.
“Cheryl,” Grandma said.
My mother did not look up. Her head was down, her forehead almost touching the front of Bridget’s green satin dress, her hands trembling so violently that the synthetic plum fabric was jerking in small, spastic twitches.
“Cheryl,” Grandma repeated. “You remember that brooch? You were in my room on August tenth, twenty twenty-three. You brought me two boxes of tissue paper and a sack of stale lemons that were already brown at the stem. You told me Esther had gone to Chicago for the weekend with an architect who had a boat in Burnham Harbor.”
May you like
“Marin,” my mother sobbed, her voice breaking into a ragged, bubbling shriek that made three people at table one stand up from their chairs. “Don't do this here. Not in front of the church people. Not in front of the Petersons.”
“I don't give a damn about the Petersons, Cheryl,” Grandma Marin said. “The Petersons haven't paid my room and board for forty-two months. Esther has.”
