The Burnt Sugar Cake in Room Six

The taste

I set the cake on the tray table that swings over the bed. Denise cranked the head of the bed up a few inches so the light fell right. Kathleen smoothed the blanket. Nobody said anything for a moment, the four of us standing around a man asleep.

Don’s face had gone small in the last week. That is the only way I know to say it. The big, broad, weathered face of a man who had spent his life in a cab with the window down had drawn in around the bones, and his skin was the color of candle wax, and his breath came in long slow pulls with a little catch at the top. His hand lay on the blanket with the knuckles standing up.

I leaned close to his ear.

“Don. It’s your birthday.”

His eyelids moved. Only a little.

“Seventy-one,” I said. “You were born in the middle of corn picking, your mother always said. She had to leave the kitchen in the middle of the afternoon.”

The corner of his mouth moved.

“Do you smell that?”

I took the lid fully off and held the cake closer. The scent came up, burnt sugar and butter and the dark almost-bitter edge of the caramel, and filled the room, which until then had smelled like lavender lotion and plastic tubing.

His nose twitched. Then, slowly, his eyes opened.

They were not fully clear, and I want to be honest about that. They were the eyes of a man standing at the far end of a long porch, who can see you coming and cannot quite say who you are. But they found my face. He knew it. There is a way a person looks at you when he is present, and a way when he is somewhere else, and this was somewhere in between, and I took it.

“Ellen,” he said. That was all he had.

“Happy birthday, honey.”

He looked at the cake. His eyes went over it slowly, the dented frosting, the swirled top, the little battery light Kathleen had pressed into the middle where a candle would go. Troy made a sound that was half a laugh and half something else. Denise kept her eyes down and stood very still.

I took the plastic knife and cut a sliver from the dented side. I did not put it on a plate. I took a bit of the frosting on the tip of my finger, the way you do for a baby, and I held it to his lips.

He tasted it.

He closed his eyes. And he went away for a second, I could tell, all the way back to a farmhouse kitchen with a wood stove and a woman in a flour-sack apron standing over a skillet, and he was nine years old and it was October and someone had made him a cake.

His lips moved. I put my ear down to them.

“Mama’s,” he whispered.

My eyes stung then, and I let them, and I wiped my face on my sleeve and kept my hand on his arm.