The Wedding Cake Grandma and I Baked

Dawn

We finished the last layer at three-forty in the morning.

Eight layers wrapped in plastic wrap, two for every tier, stacked in Grandma’s chest freezer on the back porch on top of a deer roast and a bag of rhubarb. Grandma said a cold layer is easier to frost and doesn’t crumble. I did not argue. By then I would have believed anything she told me.

At ten after six my phone buzzed on the floor next to my head. Then again. Then again, nine times in a row, the way a phone does when it has been somewhere with no signal and suddenly finds one.

Then it rang.

“Hannah.” Nate’s voice was rough. I could hear the road under his tires. “I’m at the Cenex at the county road. I just got your messages. I’m coming home.”

“You don’t have to. Everything is handled.”

“I’m coming home,” he said again. “Is my mother there?”

“No.”

“Did she really call Marcy?”

“Yes.”

He didn’t say anything for a while. I could hear his turn signal clicking.

“I’ll be there by nine,” he said. “Don’t do anything else without me.”

He was there at eight-forty. He had driven the whole way with his fishing license still clipped to his cap.

He came in Grandma’s back door smelling like lake water and campfire smoke, and he looked at the kitchen, at the flour on the floor and the mountain of dishes in the sink, and at the two of us at the table, Grandma in her housecoat and me in my ruined T-shirt.

Then he went out to the back porch and lifted the freezer lid and looked in at eight layers of white cake.

He came back in, took off his cap, set it on the table, and asked my grandmother where she kept her aprons.

What Nate did that day

I love my husband for a hundred reasons. But I think the morning he spent washing every mixing bowl in my grandmother’s kitchen, still in yesterday’s flannel shirt, might be in the top five.

He didn’t call his mother that morning. I asked him why while he was drying the twelve-inch pan.

“Because I’d say something I can’t take back,” he said. “Same as you.”

“So what are you going to do?”

He set the pan down. “I’m going to see her tonight at the rehearsal. In person. Then I’ll know what to say.”

Pam had told Marcy the wedding was off. But she hadn’t called the church, or the caterer, or the DJ, or the hall. I think she couldn’t. Those weren’t in her name. The cake was the only thing she could reach.

She did not come to the rehearsal Friday night. Her sister Barb came alone and sat in the third pew with her purse in her lap and didn’t look at anyone. When Nate asked her where his mother was, Barb said Pam had a headache.

Nate nodded. He didn’t argue with his aunt. He just said, “Tell her I’ll see her tomorrow.”

Frosting

Friday after the rehearsal supper, we frosted the cake.

My sister Kim came. My mother came straight from sleeping off her shift. Nate came, and he was in charge of the mixer, because Grandma’s old stand mixer had to be held down with one hand when it was full or it walked itself right off the counter.

Grandma’s buttercream is nothing fancy. Butter, powdered sugar, a little cream, vanilla and almond. You beat it until your arm aches, and then you beat it longer.

We did a crumb coat on each tier first, a thin layer to catch the crumbs, then back in the freezer for twenty minutes, then the real coat. I smoothed it with a bench scraper Nate bought at Fleet Farm on his way to the rehearsal because Grandma’s had gone missing sometime during the Carter administration.

It was not perfect. The ten-inch tier leaned. That old oven floor isn’t level, and one of the layers had baked up higher on one side, and no amount of frosting could completely hide it. If you looked at it from the side, the whole thing tipped, just a little, like it was listening to something.

“It’s crooked,” I said.

“It’s handmade,” Grandma said. “There’s a difference.”

Then it came time for the border.