The Burnt Sugar Cake in Room Six

The recipe

Burnt sugar cake is not a fancy thing. If you grew up in the country in the Midwest, you may have eaten it at a church homecoming. You scorch white sugar in an iron skillet until it goes dark and smoky and nearly bitter, and then you stop it with boiling water, and that syrup goes into the batter and again into the frosting. It tastes like caramel, but a grown-up caramel, with something almost like coffee underneath. It is a poor family’s birthday cake. Sugar, flour, eggs, butter, a skillet.

Don’s mother made it. Her name was Lorene, and she raised four boys on a hundred and sixty acres outside Cedar Bend, and she made a burnt sugar cake for every birthday in that house for fifty years. She wrote the recipe on the back of a seed company calendar page and gave it to me the week Don and I were married, in 1980, with a look that said she had her doubts.

The first one I made, I burned the sugar until the whole kitchen filled with black smoke, and the cake came out tasting like a campfire. Don took one bite at the table, chewed, and swallowed with his eyes watering.

“Mama says it’s got to be burnt,” he said. “But I don’t think she meant that burnt.”

I laughed so hard I had to sit down on the linoleum. And that was the beginning of it, forty-six years of birthday cakes. Mine got better. His mother’s recipe never changed. Every October for forty-six years, the same skillet, the same stirring spoon with the worn-off corner, the same green-lidded carrier on the same shelf.

Don ran a county road grader for twenty-six years, up before light in every kind of weather to scrape the gravel roads and pull the school buses out of the ditches. He was not a man for talk. He was a man for showing up.

He did not eat much of anything by the end. The cancer was in his pancreas. They found it in August of last year, too late, the way they do, and he had fourteen months, which the doctors told us was more than most. Then came the last nine days in Room Six.

But on Tuesday afternoon, with the sun coming across the blanket and the oxygen machine making its steady sound, Don opened his eyes and said, in a voice like paper, “Ellen.”

“I’m here.”

“My birthday’s Saturday.”

“I know it is.”

“Mama’s cake,” he said. And then, because he was Don, and even at the end he could not ask for something without apologizing a little, “If it’s not too much.”

So I went home Friday night, to the house on Pickering Road where the dog was waiting and the porch light was on, and I put on the old iron skillet.

Room Six

Kathleen was at the nurses’ station when I came around the corner.

“Is that what I think it is?” she said.

“Burnt sugar,” I said. “It was in the kitchen. It’s all right. Can he have a little of the frosting, Kathleen? Just a taste. I can ask the doctor.”

She took off her glasses and let them hang on the chain.

“Honey,” she said, “that is the whole point of this place.”

“Is he awake today?”

“He was at six. He knew me.”

“Then let’s go.” She reached into her desk drawer and pulled out something small and round. “Oxygen’s running in there, so no real flame. You know that. But I keep these for exactly this.” She pressed a little button and a tiny flicker of battery light came on, yellow and trembling in her palm. “A birthday’s a birthday.”

She called down the hall, not loud. “Denise? Can you bring some plates and a knife to Six?”

Denise is the aide who works days. She is twenty-four, with a tattoo of a sunflower on her wrist, and she had been the one who learned Don’s way of lying on his left side with the pillow folded. She came with paper plates and a plastic knife and did not ask what was going on. She looked at the carrier and her whole face went soft.

The three of us went down the hall together.

Troy, in the chair by the bed, is seventy-four. He had driven seven hours from the Nebraska panhandle in his pickup, starting at midnight, because Homer had called him Thursday night and said the doctor didn’t think Saturday was a sure thing. He sat with his seed cap on his knee, holding his big hand over Don’s hand, saying nothing at all, which is the most a farmer can say.

He looked up when we came in. He saw the carrier. He took in a breath through his nose, and I knew he knew the smell before I even had the lid off.

“Lorene’s,” he said.

“Lorene’s,” I said.