The Cradle That Stood Beside the Cake

“He did,” I said.

“Oh my gosh,” said Kim.

So that is how a cradle built in a garage south of Holland came to stand beside a three-tier cake at the country club. There was no place else to put it, and a girl in a black vest had better sense than the rest of us.

Earl set it down square on its rockers. I took the quilt out of my tote bag and laid it inside, and I bent over to smooth the fold.

When I straightened up, there were women all around me.

I had not heard them come. They had left the gift table. They had left their place cards and their mimosas. One had a hand on the rail. One was running her thumb down a spindle, slowly, the way you would touch a horse’s nose.

“There’s not a nail in this,” a woman in a green jacket said.

“No ma’am,” Earl said. “Pegs and glue.”

“Is this one piece? This rocker?”

“One board each. You don’t want a joint in a rocker.”

“And you did the carving?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“I saw one in a shop window in Saugatuck last summer,” said another, “not half this nice, and they wanted fourteen hundred dollars for it.”

Earl went a little red about the ears. He looked at the door. I knew he was thinking about his thermos.

“I’d better get out of you ladies’ way,” he said.

That was when the old woman came in.

I heard her before I saw her. A cane on the hardwood by the door, and a voice that was used to carrying across a field.

“Don’t steer me, Katie, I can see the room. I’m old. I’m not luggage.”

This was Cynthia’s mother, old Mrs. Vandermeer, eighty-six years old. Cynthia was born a Vandermeer and went back to the name after her divorce, so the two of them matched. I had met the old lady once, at the wedding, for the length of a handshake. She was small and bent, in a lavender suit and big sturdy shoes, on the arm of Ashley’s younger sister.

She did not go to her table. She did not go to the cake.

She came straight across that room to the cradle, as if somebody had called her name from it.

The women moved aside for her. She stood and looked at it a long moment with both hands on her cane.

“Who made this?” she said.

Earl raised his hand partway, like a boy in school. “I did, ma’am.”

“With what?”

“Cherry. Air dried. Man over by Allegan sawed it.”

“I know it’s cherry. I mean with what. A kit? A pattern out of a magazine?”

“No ma’am. I just drew it up.”

She grunted. She handed her cane to Katie without looking at her, and she put both of her hands flat on the headboard. They were old hands, spotted, with the knuckles swollen up like walnuts. She moved them over the wood, and over the letters, and down the smooth empty place below.

“My father built one,” she said.

Nobody said anything.