Eat Cake: A Novel (26 page)

My father walked into the kitchen just at the sound of the beep. “Guy,” a man’s voice said. “It’s Lenny. I’ve called to talk to your daughter about this cake.”

“It’s Lenny from the Four Seasons!” my father said. “Pick up the phone.”

I held my finger up to my lips, as if maybe Lenny could hear us on his end.

“I don’t know why I told you to go to restaurants. We want her cooking here. At the very least we want to buy these cakes. Guy, I want a lot of these cakes.”

“Why aren’t we picking up the phone?” my father whispered.

“Too much cake,” I whispered back. I looked over my kitchen. It was covered in cooling racks and half-empty cartons of eggs. I was already out of baking powder and I hadn’t even started on what needed to be done. I didn’t even understand what needed to be done.

Lenny finished his message, leaving his phone number and an emphatic request for a return call. When he hung up the phone it rang again. I went to turn off the volume on the answering machine.

“What’s wrong? Are you suddenly afraid of success?”

“I don’t think I’m afraid of success but I have no idea how to bake that many cakes. Don’t worry, I’m going to call everyone back. I just need a second to think.”

“What’s there to think about?” my father said. “All you’ve got to do is cook.”

“Sam,” I said. “I’m thinking about Sam.”

“Is he having a problem with the cakes?”

I shook my head. My father sat down at the table and rested his arms on top of the newspaper. “I don’t think so. I don’t know. We haven’t exactly talked about it. We haven’t talked about anything. Something’s happened. He’s in his world dealing with his problems and I’m in my world dealing with mine and I feel like we just keep getting farther and farther apart.”

My father leaned over to look behind me. “So talk to him. Where is he?”

“He went to Newport this morning to look at a boat. He wants to sail. I want to bake cakes.”

“And you want to be married to Sam?” my father said.

“Of course I do. Don’t you think I can have a business and be married?”

“Sure you can. You have to remember, I’m the one who suggested this business in the first place, and you’re always getting your nose bent out of shape because I like Sam so much, so I must think that they’re both good ideas, the business and the marriage.”

“I don’t get my nose out of shape.”

“You do too. Listen, Ruthie, your mother and I both played piano. We had everything in the world in common, but when I stopped teaching school and started playing in clubs, it was a big change for us. Somehow, I don’t know why, we never really talked about it. We had this nice new baby and I thought I could make more money if I traveled and she thought I was gone too much and the next thing you know we’d had some terrible fights and then we weren’t together anymore. I look back on that now and I think, What, were we crazy? All we had to do was try and work it out. If we had each said what we wanted to do, what we wanted the other one to do, I think we could have sailed right through it. When you get older you see what real trouble is. You look back on what you thought was trouble before and it all seems so small. You’ve just got to give it a little bit of effort.”

“I’m just so afraid of hurting Sam’s feelings. I don’t want him to think he can’t get a job and everything’s going great for me.”

“You’d hurt Sam’s feelings a lot more if you wound up divorcing him down the line. He’s a good guy. You know he’s happy for you. But don’t forget all that’s happened: He lost his job, you have these crazy old people living with you, his wife turns out to be some kind of superstar cake baker. It’s a lot for a fellow to digest.”

“You’re right,” I said. “I just need to talk to him when he gets home.”

“That’s not what I’m saying at all. I think you should get on a plane and go to Newport. Talk things over with him now.”

“He’s coming back in a day or two.”

“Yeah, well, I was going to come back from Chicago in a day or two and then I was going to come back from New York in a week and then the next thing I knew I was back out in California.”

“I can’t leave now. You forget that I have a couple hundred cakes to bake.”

The phone rang again.

“You’re starting a new job. If you start today or if you start three days from now, it isn’t going to make any difference, the good people of Minneapolis will still have food. You took a big chance sending those cakes out there. Take another chance. You were the one who told me that this was the time that everything could change.”

“What about all those phone calls?”

“Your mother and I will call everyone back. We’ll take the orders and set up a schedule. You can be home by tomorrow. What’s going to happen before tomorrow?”

“I have no idea.”

My father came over and kissed the top of my head. “Do as I say, daughter, not as I did. Now I’m going to go talk to your mother. We’re going to come up with a plan. You go and get yourself on an airplane.”

In my life I had never gone on a trip that hadn’t been planned at least three months in advance. Buying tickets the day of travel to express your love for someone who already knows you love them was something that people did in movies. Then again, the people in movies had bigger lives than I did, and suddenly my life had become a whole lot bigger.

Sam had left me the name of the hotel where he’d be staying. I went back to our bedroom and looked through the trash can. I found the empty FedEx envelopes. Now I had the name of a
hotel and the name of the yacht broker in Newport. I had as much information as anyone needed to get something done.

I called the airport and booked myself on the four o’clock flight to Providence, then I put a couple of things in a bag. When I came back out I found both of my parents in the kitchen listening to messages on the answering machine.

“All three of the hotels called!” my father said. “It’s a jackpot!”

“He tells me you’re going to see Sam,” my mother said.

“Dad thought it was a good idea.”

My mother put her hands on my shoulders and squeezed. “Always listen to your father,” she said to me. “Isn’t that what I told you when you were growing up?”

I kissed my parents good-bye. I told them to take good care of Camille.

I still had an hour before I had to be at the airport and so I decided to stop by the hospital and see Florence. I gave one of my cards to the receptionist in the rehab unit and told her I was there for Mrs. Allen.

“Let me guess. Everybody loved their cakes,” Florence said when she came down the hall dressed in white. “You wanted to tell me so in person.”

“Something like that.”

She took me into an office that was full of big-handled spoons and various cups and balls. The sign on the door said
OCCUPATIONAL THERAPY
.

“If it’s occupational therapy it seems like you should be finding people occupations.”

“I found you an occupation,” she said. “After a fashion.”

“So maybe I can return the favor. Listen to me, I have no idea if this is something you could do or something you’d want to do,
but how would you feel about taking a leave of absence and coming to work for me?”

“The cake business?”

“It’s booming. It’s more than I’m going to be able to handle. I think I’m going to have to rent a kitchen, if such a thing is even possible, either that or put stoves in all the bedrooms.”

“How many cakes are we talking about?”

“Right now, probably two hundred a week, but I have a feeling that if we could figure out a way to really move them, we could do even more business than that.”

“But I wouldn’t know what I was doing.” Florence picked up a red rubber ball and squeezed it.

“You’d know as much as I know. I’m not saying this is what I think you should do with your life, but if you just wanted a little switch, who knows? At the end of a couple of weeks you might feel really great about occupational therapy again. Plus, there’s no one else I’d rather spend a day in the kitchen with.”

Florence looked around the room; posters of hands in different positions lined the walls. “It would be nice to take a break.”

“Think it over. I’m on my way to Newport now. I’ll probably be back tomorrow. We can talk then.”

“Newport?”

“I’m going to go and see Sam.”

“Sam went to Newport?”

I nodded my head.

“He’s fallen for some boat, hasn’t he?”

“It’s not just about the boats. I just realized that I really wanted to be married to my husband. I thought I should go and tell him that.”

There was a tap on the door and then a nurse stuck her head inside. “Florence, you’re backing up out here.”

“I need to go anyway,” I said.

Florence stood up and gave me a hug. “Cake sounds pretty good right about now. We’ll talk tomorrow,” she said. “You tell Sam I said hi.”

Everything changes. Sometimes when your life has been going along the same way for a long time you can forget that. You think that every day is going to be the same, that everyone will come home for dinner, that we will be safe, that life will roll along. Sometimes the changes are the kind you can’t do anything about: Someone gets sick, someone dies, and you look back on the past and think, Those were the days of my happy life. But other times things change and all you have to do is find a way to change with them. It’s when you stay in exactly the same spot when everything around you is moving that you really get into trouble. You still have a chance if you’re willing to run fast enough, if you’re willing to forget everything that you were absolutely positive was true and learn to see the world in a different way. So I was not the kind of person who would start a business or fly halfway across the country to declare my love for the man I had been in love with since I was twenty-five. I did not rent cars and find my way alone to seaside towns, but now I did, because I was someone else, because the circumstances changed and I decided to follow my father’s advice and try to change with them.

I had never before set foot in the state of Rhode Island, but Newport is not such a big town. I only had to ask at one gas station to find out where I was going. It was after dark when I got in and the hotel was lit up bright, as if every guest had gone to turn on the lights in their room just to help me find them. It was nowhere near as
grand as the hotels I had been to with my parents the day before, but in a way it was better, more romantic. I went to the young man at the front desk and told him I was Mrs. Hopson looking for Mr. Hopson. I held up my bag as if it were proof that I was who I said I was.

“Room three fifty-seven,” he said, and smiled at me. He looked like a college student. He probably decided to go to school here so he could sail in his spare time. “Do you need a key?”

“That would be nice,” I said, though what I wanted to say was, Is that all it takes to get a key to someone else’s room? People seemed to me to be very trusting in Rhode Island.

I went up to 357 feeling oddly nervous. I stood in the hall and tapped a few times on the door. When no one answered I slipped the key in the lock. There was a double bed with a striped bedspread and a couple of old prints of sailboats on the walls. Sam’s bag was sitting on the dresser and his extra pair of pants was hanging in the closet, the same pants that had been hanging in our closet this morning. I ran my hand along the leg and felt the broken-in smoothness of the fabric.

I called the yacht broker’s office, but it was after six o’clock. A friendly voice on the answering machine encouraged me to leave a message and my number but I didn’t do it. Sam was probably coming back soon, unless he was going out to dinner. If he was going out to dinner he could be a couple of hours. I sat down on the edge of the bed and it occurred to me how little I had slept in the past few days. I kicked off my shoes and turned off the light on the bedside table. It had been my intention to just close my eyes for a minute but instead I fell into a deep sleep. For the first time in a while I slept without dreaming of cakes.

When Sam told me the story later he said he thought he had opened the door to the wrong room. He glanced inside, saw a woman asleep on the bed, and shut the door. After he checked the room number and the number on the key, he went downstairs to tell the desk clerk that they had put another guest in his room and that that guest was now asleep in his bed.