The Wedding Cake Grandma and I Baked

By the coffee urn

Later, while the dance floor was full and the kids were running in circles in their church shoes, I went to get Grandma a cup of decaf from the big silver urn at the back of the hall.

Pam was there. She was holding a styrofoam cup she hadn’t filled.

“Can I tell you something,” she said. “Just you.”

I filled Grandma’s cup and waited.

“Nate’s father married me in June of 1997. In this hall.” She looked around at the low ceiling and the folding chairs. “Right there by the stage. We had a sheet cake from the grocery store and a keg out back.”

I didn’t say anything. I hadn’t known they’d been married here.

“He left in September. Three months. He went to work one morning and called me that night from Rockford, Illinois. He said he’d made a mistake. I was six weeks along with Nate.”

I set the coffee down.

“I never told Nate that part,” she said. “The three months. He knows his father left. He doesn’t know how fast.”

“Pam.”

“I’m not saying it to excuse anything.” She held up her hand. “You and Nate got engaged after a year. You set the date in eight months. I watched him and I kept thinking it was all going too fast, the way it went too fast for me.

“And I thought, if I could just slow it down. If the cake fell through, if everything got hard, maybe you’d wait a year. Maybe one of you would get scared. And if one of you was going to get scared, I wanted it to be now and not three months after.”

“So you tried to scare me.”

“Yes.” She didn’t look away. I’ll give her that. “It was wrong. It was cruel. I knew it was cruel when I hung up the phone. I sat in my car outside the bakery for half an hour afterward. I almost went back in.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Because I’m stubborn and I’m scared,” she said. “Those are the two worst things to be at the same time.”

I thought about my grandmother saying that there’s usually a reason underneath, that it isn’t a good reason, it’s just a reason.

“You didn’t save him from anything,” I said. “You’d have only hurt him.”

“I know that now.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist. “I watched you carry that plate across this room tonight. And I thought, he’s not marrying a girl who’s going to leave in three months. He’s marrying a girl who stays up all night with her grandmother and then hands the woman who did it the first piece.”

“I didn’t do it to shame you,” I said.

“I know you didn’t. That’s what made it so hard to eat.”

“Tell Nate,” I said. “About the three months. Not tonight. But tell him. He should know why.”

“I will,” she said.

She did. Two weeks later, at her kitchen table. Nate came home from it and sat in our truck in the driveway for a long time before he came inside. Then he came in and held on to me for a while without saying anything, and I let him.