The Wedding Cake Grandma and I Baked
Stacking
Marcy measured each tier with a dowel, marked it with her thumbnail, and cut the dowels to height with the garden shears. Five dowels in the twelve-inch tier. Four in the ten. Three in the eight. Each tier sat on its own cardboard circle so the weight rested on the dowels and not on the cake underneath.
We drove the tiers to the church separately in her van, in their boxes, with me sitting in the back holding the twelve-inch on my lap like a baby. Marcy took every curve on County Road D at twenty miles an hour.
At the church hall, in the basement of Our Savior’s, she stacked it on the cake table under the window. Twelve, ten, eight, six. She ran one long dowel down through the center of all four tiers to keep them from sliding. Then she touched up the frosting where her fingers had been, and she turned the leaning side toward the wall.
Then I took Grandma’s cake topper out of my purse.
It was hers from her own wedding in 1961. A little plastic bride and groom under a white arch, the bride’s veil yellowed now. Marcy had given it back to me in an envelope Thursday afternoon.
I set it on top.
It wasn’t the cake I ordered. It was taller on one side and the frosting was a little thick in places and the six-inch tier was not quite centered. And it was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.
I tried to pay Marcy. I had six hundred and forty dollars in an envelope in my purse, cash from the bank the day before.
She pushed it back across the table at me.
“I took a deposit from the wrong woman,” she said. “I’m not taking money from the right one. Besides, I owed your grandmother this one since 1989.”
She left before I could argue. She had a cake to deliver in Durand.
The church
I’ll tell you that it rained in the morning and cleared by noon. That my dad walked me down the aisle in his only suit and his hand was shaking worse than mine. That Grandma sat in the second pew in her lavender dress with her cane hooked over the back of the pew in front of her.
And I’ll tell you that Pam came.
She came in at five minutes to two and sat on the groom’s side in the front pew next to her sister Barb. She wore a navy blue dress, and she didn’t look at me when I came down the aisle. She looked at her hands.