The Wedding Cake Grandma and I Baked

Why I didn’t call Pam

The obvious next thing was to call his mother. I know that. My sister Kim said so twice that evening, and she was not wrong.

But I knew exactly what would come out of my mouth if I heard Pam’s voice that afternoon. I would say something true and something cruel, and I would say them both in the same breath. And then on Saturday I would have to stand in the front of Our Savior’s Lutheran and take her name.

You can’t unsay something like that to your husband’s mother. You carry it into every Thanksgiving for forty years.

So I didn’t call her. I didn’t text her. I took my mask off, finished my last two cleanings, clocked out at five, and drove twenty minutes south to my grandmother’s farmhouse on County Road D.

Grandma Vera

My grandmother Vera Lutz is eighty-two years old. She has lived on the same quarter section of land since 1961, when she married my grandpa and moved in with his folks. The dairy herd was sold off in the nineties, and the land is rented now to a neighbor who grows corn on it, but she stayed in the house.

And it has her stove. A white gas range she and Grandpa bought new in 1958, the year before they were engaged, when she was saving for her hope chest and working at the creamery. It has a clock in the back panel that stopped in 1990 and a storage drawer underneath full of every cake pan she has ever owned.

For thirty years, Grandma Vera made the cakes for every wedding, anniversary and confirmation in our church that couldn’t afford the bakery. She did it out of that oven for the cost of the eggs.

I sat down at her kitchen table and told her the whole thing. She listened the way she always listens, with her hands folded on the oilcloth and her head tipped a little to one side.

When I was done, she didn’t say anything about Pam at all.

“What kind of cake did you order?” she asked.

“White almond,” I said. “Four tiers. Six, eight, ten and twelve inch. Buttercream. Your topper on top.”

She nodded slowly, like I’d given her a grocery list.

“How many people?”

“A hundred and twenty.”

“Well,” she said, and pushed herself up from the table with both hands. “Then we’d better get the pans down.”