The Burnt Sugar Cake in Room Six

What I did not say

Then I thought of Don.

Here is something you learn in a hospice house that nobody tells you beforehand. A dying person does not have days anymore. He has hours. And the hours are not equal. Some of them are good, with his eyes clear and his hand warm and his mind present enough to know your face. Some of them are not. The good ones come with no warning and leave the same way, and a day might hold two of them if you are lucky, and you spend the other twenty-two sitting very still, waiting for them.

Don had perhaps two good hours left in that day. Kathleen, the nurse, had told me so quietly that morning, in her own way, by saying, “If there’s anything he’s been asking for, I’d do it today.”

I was not going to spend one of those hours on Amber.

That was all it was. It was not forgiveness, and it was not that I am a better woman than I am. It was arithmetic. If I had it out with my daughter-in-law, Don would hear some of it through the wall, or I would walk into his room with my face still arranged for a fight, and his last birthday would be the one where his wife looked like that.

No. He had asked me for one thing.

I had no son in the room to fix it for me. Homer was down in the lobby at that moment with the social worker, a kind woman named Gail, signing the forms that had to be signed. The forms with the funeral home’s name on them. I had tried on Wednesday and could not make my hand do it, and Homer had said, “Mom, I’ll do it,” and I had loved him so much I thought it would break my chest. So he was downstairs, doing the thing I couldn’t. Nobody was there to see what happened in the kitchen but me and a coffee maker.

I reached into the trash can.

The lid

The carrier was upright. It had landed on its base. The green lid had popped partway loose and there were coffee grounds stuck to the top of it in a gritty brown spray.

I lifted it out with both hands.

Underneath the lid, the cake was fine. It was a single round layer of burnt sugar cake, eight inches across, with the caramel frosting I had stirred for forty minutes at four that morning. One dent on the east side where the lid had shifted. That was all. A person could have smoothed it with the back of a spoon.

I pulled a clean dish towel off the oven door and I wiped the lid.

I wiped it once, and then I wiped it again, slowly, the way you wipe a child’s face. Every coffee ground. The ring where the rim had touched the filters. I was not doing it because the lid mattered. I was doing it because my hands needed a job, and a job like that settles a person down.

Then I carried it out of the kitchen and down the hall.

Past the family lounge with the old upright piano that somebody’s grandmother had donated, past the framed quilt that hangs outside the chapel. I held that cake level in front of me like it was something that could spill, and I did not hurry.