Eat Cake: A Novel (12 page)

Sam smiled. “I can still write you a note.”

“You got out of there just in time, I mean it. You’re going to be glad you’re gone.”

“Maybe I would have come to that conclusion if I had someplace to go.” He looked around the den, at my father, the television, the plate of half-eaten sandwiches left from lunch. “Not that I’m not perfectly happy to be home.”

“You’ll have a place to go,” Florence said. Her voice was kind and yet it didn’t have the slightest trace of pity in it. “As soon as you’re ready, the perfect job is going to find you.”

“I hope you’re right,” Sam said.

I felt like my heart was going to break for Sam. I hadn’t thought of how it might be hard for him to see an old friend from work.

“I’m always right about these things,” Florence said.

“Sam’s going to come out of this one back on top!” my father said. “No more working for the man.” My father looked over at the television screen. “Look at that. I think there’s blood on the ice. Sam, turn up the volume.”

“Good-bye, Florence,” Sam said, reaching down sadly for the remote. “Thank you.”

She waved to him and my father and we left them on the frozen blue rink.

I knew the polite thing to do would be to walk Florence Allen to the door and let her go, but I turned us toward the kitchen instead, hoping that she might relent for the coffee if it was just the two of us. I realized that I had been so consumed with meeting the needs of my family that the only nonrelatives I had talked to in the past week were the check-out girls at the grocery store. Here was an adult, an intelligent adult I did not know, right in my own kitchen.

And Florence Allen seemed to want to go to the kitchen. She wanted to talk to me in private as much as I wanted to talk to her.

“How’s he doing?” she said in a quiet voice once we were alone.

“He doesn’t complain, really. He’s not the easiest man in the world to have around, but given all he’s been through, I think he’s holding up pretty well.”

She shook her head. “When they fired Sam they took away the spirit of that hospital. There’s nobody to stick up for the people anymore.”

“Sam? I thought you were talking about my father. Sam is a very easy person to live with, all things considered.”

“You have a crisis overlap here,” she said.

“I’m not even sure I know how Sam is doing.” I pulled out a chair and sat down at the table. Florence followed my lead. “I know this is terrible for him, but to tell you the truth, we don’t really talk about it. I don’t want him to feel like I’m pushing.”

Florence sighed and stretched her long hands out on my kitchen table. She studied them for a while, trying to figure out how much she wanted to say. “Sam saved my job once. It was about five years ago. They were cutting back the whole physical therapy department. They said it was going to be cheaper to contract out the work, and Sam went to bat for me. He said I’d be his mission, and he did it. I’m still there.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said. I wondered what I was doing at home five years ago when Sam was at work saving Florence Allen’s job. Probably driving Wyatt to hockey practice.

“He’s a very good man, your husband. Everybody thought so.”

“I always thought so.”

“He went through all that to make sure I’d have a job and now he doesn’t have one. How does something like that happen? And now on top of that I wonder if I’m going to have to leave anyway. It seems like all the hospitals are the same these days. It’s all about the bottom line.”

“It sounds like a tough job.”

“You’re the one with the tough job,” she said. She took off her heavy bag and rested it on the kitchen table. “Did your father live with you before his accident?”

I shook my head. “Only my mother.”

She raised one eyebrow, a talent I have always admired and do not possess. “And your father did not live with your mother.”

“Correct.”

“A very tough job.” She nodded her head like a detective who was just beginning to put together the gravity of the crime.

I agreed. “Would you have a piece of cake?”

“Cake?” she said.

“Do you eat cake?” Maybe as a medical professional she was opposed to cake.

“I should probably be going, but thank you.”

I didn’t want to seem desperate, but I was. I wanted to sit down with someone who was not a member of my family and have a regular conversation. “I made it myself.”

“A scratch cake?” she said. I thought there was a flicker of interest in her tone.

“Always.”

She looked at her watch as if it might give her approval. “I don’t see that one slice would hurt.”

I took down two plates from the cupboard. In the next room I heard the volume on the television rise again and I was grateful for the privacy it gave us. “We really appreciate you coming over.”

“That’s my job,” she said.

I sliced the cake. It served well, no breakage, few crumbs. “Well, a lot of people wouldn’t want that job. I would think you’d have to be a pretty generous sort of person to want to take care of other people. I don’t think I could do it.” I set two pieces of cake down on the table. “Would you like something to drink with that?”

“Wait a minute,” she said. “I just take care of people in a hospital. You do it in your home. You don’t get to leave work at the end of the day like I do.”

I sat down and handed her a fork. “But it’s my father. See, that’s the difference. I didn’t sign on for this. I was born into it.”

Then Florence Allen did the most remarkable thing. She put her hand on my wrist, just set it there like it was the most natural thing in the world to put your hand on the wrist of someone you barely knew. She looked at me squarely when she spoke. “Everybody has parents. Very few people take care of them.”

Gently and smoothly, her words pricked the edge of the enormous well of emotion that had been pressing on my chest since the day my father arrived. I tried to hold myself together but I didn’t seem to have the energy to manage it anymore. Great tears welled up in my eyes and I had to pull my hand away from hers to get a paper napkin from the holder. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I have no idea why I’m doing this.”

“Honey, if I was you I would have been crying a long time ago.” She clearly was someone who was very used to being around the fully displayed emotions of strangers and it didn’t faze her in the least. She went ahead and ate her cake.

When Florence Allen took a bite of her dessert the expression on her face changed completely. She looked puzzled at first, as if she wasn’t at all sure it was cake that she was eating. She cut herself another bite and then held up her fork and looked at it for a minute before slipping it into her mouth. She chewed slowly, as if she were a scientist engaged in an important experiment. She lifted up her plate and held it up to the light, studied it from different angles. Then she dipped down her nose and inhaled the cake. “This is sweet potato.”

I dabbed at my eyes again and told her that it was.

“Sweet potatoes and raisins and … rum? That’s a spiked glaze?”

I nodded.

She took another bite and this time she ate it like a person who knew what she was getting into. She closed her eyes. She savored. “This is,” she said. “This is …”

“Easy,” I said. “I can give you the recipe.”

She opened up her eyes. She had lovely dark eyes. “This is brilliant. This is a brilliant piece of cake.”

In my family people tended to work against the cake. They wished it wasn’t there even as they were enjoying it. But Florence Allen’s reaction was one I rarely saw in an adult: She gave in to the cake. She allowed herself to love the cake. It wasn’t that she surrendered her regrets (
Oh well, I’ll just have to go to the gym tomorrow
, or,
I won’t have any dinner this week
). She
had
no regrets. She lived in the moment. She took complete pleasure in the act of eating cake. “I’m glad you like it,” I said, but that didn’t come close to what I meant.

“Oh, I don’t just like it. I think this is—” But she didn’t say it. Instead she stopped and had another bite.

I could have watched her eat the whole thing, slice by slice, but no one likes to be stared at. Instead I ate my own cake. It was good, really. Every raisin bitten gave a sweet exhalation of rum. It was one of those cakes that most people say should be made for Thanksgiving, that it was by its nature a holiday cake, but why be confined? I was always one to bake whatever struck me on any given day.

Florence Allen pressed her fork down several times until she had taken up every last crumb. Her plate was clean enough to be returned to the cupboard directly. “I’ve made sweet potato pies,” she said. “I’ve baked them and put them in casseroles, but in a cake? That never crossed my mind.”

“It isn’t logical. They’re so dense. I think of it as the banana bread principle. Would you like another piece?”

She folded her long fingers over her stomach and shook her head. “I don’t want to ruin it by making myself sick.”

“Take it home, then.” I stood up and took out a package of the extra-heavy, extra-large Chinette paper plates I had become so
fond of over the years. It is a universal truth: No matter how trustworthy they are, people don’t return cake plates.

Florence Allen looked at me as if I had pulled off my engagement ring and offered it to her. “You can’t give me your cake. Your family will want that. What would they think of me if I took their cake?”

“They’ll think you’re doing them an enormous favor,” I said. “They want it out of here. The truth is I have plenty of time to bake something else to have with dinner.”

“Is it somebody’s birthday?”

“Somewhere I figure it’s somebody’s birthday. It’s always somebody’s birthday.” I pulled a sheet of Glad wrap over the cake and pressed it into her hands. I was glad to see it go. “I appreciate your help with my father. I appreciate you liking the cake.”

“I shouldn’t take your cake,” she said. “But I want it. My daughters, my husband, they won’t believe it.” She held it up on the flat of her palms and looked at it.

I smiled. I thought about telling her how happy I would be to bake her a cake every day for the rest of her life if she was willing to come back and help me with my father or even just express an interest in what I was doing, but then I thought there was no need to tell her. It could scare her off. A guaranteed future of cakes was more than most people could really understand.

We said our good-byes and Florence Allen left with the cake. My mother came into the kitchen just in time to watch her walk down the driveway toward her car. She craned her neck forward to get a better look.

“Is that a nurse?” she said.

“Kind of.”

“A nurse for your father?”

“She’s an old friend of Sam’s from the hospital. She just came by to give Dad some advice about working his fingers.” I picked up the plates from the table.

“So she’s not going to come and take care of him?”

“No, I think that’s still up to us.”

“Up to you,” my mother said. “I’m touching the old man more than I think is appropriate.” My mother kept watching Florence Allen until finally she had to move to the other side of the window so she could see the picture from another angle. “Ruth, look, I think she’s taking the sweet potato cake.”

“I gave it to her.”

“You gave her the cake and she took it?”

“She seemed glad to have it.”

My mother nodded her head in approval. “Well, I like her already.”

That night I lay in bed and thought about cake. I was thinking about what I would bake for Florence Allen when she came back again, something she might eat with equal enthusiasm. I wanted a cake that would in no way be a logical followup to the sweet potato cake. I wanted a cake that would come completely out of left field, something that would astonish her. But I wouldn’t just be making it for her. I wanted something for myself, a cake that was complicated and beautiful, a cake that would take up time I didn’t have with enough tricky steps to keep my mind completely off of the matters at hand. I thought about a chocolate layer cake with burnt orange icing and the orange in the icing made me consider a Grand
Marnier cake instead. Finally, in a complete non sequitur, I settled on a charlotte. I would make a scarlet empress. I closed my eyes and imagined myself making a jelly roll, the soft sheet of sponge cake laid across my counter. I spread the cake with a seedless raspberry preserve and then I rolled it up with even ends. I was nearly asleep. My parents were floating away from me. I took a knife and started slicing off the roll, but I didn’t let it end. No matter how many rounds I cut, there was more there for me, an endless supply of delicate spirals of cake. It was the baker’s equivalent to counting sheep, lulling myself to sleep through spongy discs of jam. There were enough slices of jelly roll for me to shingle the roof, to cover the house, to lay a walkway out to the street. In my dreams I made the house a cake, and inside that cake our lives were warm and sweet and infinitely protected.

WHEN WYATT WAS FIFTEEN I FOUND TWO
PLAYBOY
magazines circa 1989 in his sock drawer. I had not been snooping. I always returned his clean socks to the drawer. I had been doing it with his full knowledge since he was old enough to wear socks. But on this particular day I was depositing an unusually large collection of small bundles to the dresser and could clearly see Miss June staring back at me with an expression that could only be described as brazen. She was barely covered by a couple of mateless tube socks that always stayed behind.