Eat Cake: A Novel (27 page)

“It’s your wife,” the college boy said, and gave Sam the kind of smile one guy gives to another in those circumstances.

So Sam came back upstairs and looked again. He had to say my name three times and shake my shoulder before I woke up.

“Ruth,” he said. “What happened?” He was panicked, because why would I fly all that way unless something terrible had happened, something I couldn’t tell him about on the phone?

“I missed you,” I said, and as soon as I said it I knew that missing Sam was exactly what I had been doing. I had been missing him for a long time.

“You saw me this morning.”

I yawned and shook my head. I couldn’t believe how deeply I had slept. “No,” I said. “It’s bigger than that. I mean I’ve really been missing you. I love you.”

“You flew to Newport to tell me that?” He looked somewhere between pleased and confused.

“There are so many things I’ve been wanting to tell you,” I said. “Things about working and not working and family. A million crazy little things that I haven’t been saying. I feel like we’ve been right next to each other this whole time but we haven’t really been together. I want us to be together. I want to hear everything you’ve been thinking about or worrying about. I want to hear all about the boats. I want to get up in the morning and see the boats that you’re interested in.”

“I can show you the boats, but I don’t want you to worry about them. I’ve been a little crazy myself lately. I walked around the docks all day and wondered what I was thinking.”

“You were thinking you loved boats. You probably do love boats. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“Do you really want to see them?”

“I just want to be together.”

“Don’t you have a lot of cakes to bake?”

I reached up and kissed his left eyebrow. “I have so many cakes to bake I think that I’m in serious trouble, but we can talk about cakes another time.”

“While we’re looking at boats maybe?”

“Maybe we could take turns. You could show me a boat, I could tell you about some cakes. I need your help, Sam. If the whole thought of the cake business leaves you cold, I understand it, but I’m asking you, at least for a little while, please help me.”

“What are you talking about? You know I’d do anything in the world for you. I want to be helpful. I just didn’t want you to feel like you had to give me a job.”

“I’m dying to give you a job!” It would seem to me that administrating cakes would be pretty simple after administrating a hospital.

Sam kissed me. We kissed. “That would mean I was in bed with my boss.”

“You’re in bed with your partner,” I said, and even though there was still so much more we had to say, we decided at that point to stop talking for a while. I fell back onto the bed with my partner of twenty-six years.

AFTER SIX MONTHS IN THE RESTAURANT BUSINESS
it became clear to everyone at Eat Cake that the real money was in cakes as gifts. The corporate offices of the Marquette Hotel had shown us the tip of the iceberg when they ordered seventy-five cakes in boxes and mailed them to people who all wanted to send cakes in boxes to other people. My father said it was a regular pyramid scheme. Camille doubled the price for mailed cakes. We said she was insane, but she explained that by cutting out the middleman, we could essentially charge restaurant prices. Then she said this was her part of the business and so we should leave her alone. She hired a boy in her class who she said was not her boyfriend and together they designed a website that gave buyers everything they needed to place an order except for an actual bite of cake. My mother wound up having to make her own cardboard boxes after all. Every time we thought she had perfected the art of the covered box, she came up with something new. The boxes were round now, satin, padded, and beaded until they looked like throw pillows in the Taj Mahal. Eat the cake, keep the box—that was the principle we operated on.

But Mom wound up passing the box division onto Florence, who was as good with a bolt of fabric and some scissors as she was
at the ovens. After spending her life working on other people’s hands, she discovered there was nothing she couldn’t do with her own. Dad’s hands were getting better all the time. He worked on his piano every day, but he was still tentative, slow. He said the best part of being out of the braces was being able to wear cuff shirts again. Still, he thought it would probably be another year before he was playing in public, which is where my mother stepped in.

“It’s not that I’m bailing out on you,” she told me. “Florence makes better boxes than I do and we both know it. Your father really needs me now. I can’t play the piano all night and then get up and go to work in the morning. Plus there’s all the rehearsing. I’m too old for that. I’ve got to pick one or the other.”

I told her I understood.

And so my mother played the piano and my father sang. That way, she reasoned, when he was ready to go back to playing again, people wouldn’t have forgotten about him. “It’s a very fickle business,” she said. But if the business was fickle, they were the flavor of the month. They appeared almost every weekend at a club or hotel and turned down more offers to sing than I turned down cakes to bake. They were putting together quite a following. My father wanted them to start traveling. He said they could make more money if they took their act out on the road. But my mother said that’s how they got into trouble in the first place.

“Except maybe we’ll do a couple of cruise ships. Your father wants to book us on cruise ships.”

My parents got their own apartment in the summer when Wyatt came home from college. My father said, and it was true, there were just too many of us in the house. Of course, they still had terrible fights, and one or the other of them would wind up in
what was once again the guest room sometimes, but never for more than a night.

“Why don’t the two of you just give up and get married?” Sam said to them last week when my father came by to pick up my mother. “You have an act now. You have to stay together.”

“We are married,” my mother said.

I was with Sam on this one. “Well then, remarried. Why not get married again?”

“We never got divorced,” my father said.

I squinted at them, my parents standing side by side, looking like an advertisement for happy senior living. “What do you mean, you never got divorced?”

“That’s not such a hard sentence to figure out, is it?” my father said.

“We certainly meant to divorce,” my mother said. “It was on the top of my to-do list for years. But there was never any money for the lawyer and we didn’t have anything to split up anyway. Divorce was so much more complicated back then. You had to come up with a reason. None of this irreconcilable differences nonsense.”

“I always thought we’d get divorced when one of us decided to remarry,” my father said. “And then, I don’t know …”

“I just sort of forgot about it,” my mother said.

My parents were married?

“But you always said you were divorced,” Sam said.

“Well, what are you going to say? It’s easier than explaining the whole thing to everyone.”

“You could have explained it to me,” I said.

“You were two,” my mother said. “What can you explain to a two-year-old?”

Contrary to what I may have believed, I was not a child of divorce after all. I was merely a child of a long estrangement that was now almost completely patched over.

“Maybe you’d want to have a little ceremony anyway,” I said. “It’s been a long time.”

“What?” my father said. “Like a commitment ceremony? People only do that on soap operas. You just want an excuse to bake a wedding cake.”

“The last thing we need around here is another cake,” my mother said, and patted her stomach.

We employed Wyatt for the summer doing packing and shipping. He was good to have around. He could carry anything and he liked to eat any cakes that didn’t turn out to our standards. He had been gone for the birth of the company. He was the only one of us who could still get excited over a slice of cake.

Camille took a job as a counselor at a vegetarian camp in Maine for the summer. She said she had to get away from the smell of baking, but it turns out the camp did a lot of baking, mostly with turbinado sugar, carob, and whole wheat flour. She came back for her senior year in high school with a much kinder attitude toward my cakes, even though she still begs us to rent a proper kitchen and move out of the house.

We still haven’t moved out of the house. We took out the breakfast table and put in three extra ovens and some more counter space. We had to have the kitchen rewired to bring it up to code and we eat all our meals in the dining room now, but there’s nothing wrong with that. Sam says he left the house every day for his entire working life and now he wants to spend some time at home.

Sam hasn’t bought a boat yet, but he’s still looking. He says with business going the way it is, there wouldn’t be time to sail it. I tell him he should have a boat. You only go around once, after all, you’ve got to live out your dreams.

“I used to pretend I was standing inside a giant cake,” I told him. “Whenever I got upset about something I would close my eyes and imagine that I was surrounded by cake. It always made me feel better.”

“I bet you don’t do that anymore,” he said. “Now you’re surrounded by cake all the time.”

“Exactly. Now when I feel stressed I see myself on a boat. You and I are sailing in a beautiful wooden boat, and there’s wind but not too much wind, and the water is clear and blue. I can see the fish underneath us and the birds over us. I just put myself on that boat and I feel better.”

“So you’ve gone from being in the middle of a dark cake to being out in the open water on a boat,” Sam said. “That sounds like progress.”

“I’ve gone from being alone inside a cake to being with you on a boat,” I said. I kissed him, but just as I did, a timer went off. In this house timers are always going off. After a while you come to realize the cakes can wait.

Serves 16 to 20