The Burnt Sugar Cake in Room Six

The door

Denise had gone to refill the water pitcher, and she left the door open behind her. That was how Leon heard us.

Leon is a retired Lutheran minister, a tall, gaunt man with white hair combed straight back, who plays the piano in the family lounge on Saturdays for whoever wants to listen. He had come down the hall because he smelled something burning, he told me later, and then realized it was sugar. He stopped in the doorway with his hands folded and did not come in.

Footsteps came behind him, a man’s, and then a child’s, and then a second child’s.

I had not known the children were in the building. Emma is eleven, Wyatt is eight. Our neighbor Marge Kuhn had driven them over from the farm that morning and waited with them on the lobby couch while Homer finished with the paperwork, so they could see their father the minute he was free. Homer had come up from the lobby with the children beside him, still carrying the manila folder with the funeral home’s name on the tab. His eyes were red and his tie was crooked. He is forty-three, a big man like his father, but he moves like a man carrying water in his hands.

“Mom?” he said, and stopped when he saw Leon. “What’s going on?”

“Your father is having his cake,” I said.

Emma was looking past me at the bed, with her braid over one shoulder and a folded piece of paper in both hands. I opened my mouth to tell the children to wait in the lounge, and then I shut it, because that was not mine to say.

I bent down to Don. “Don. Homer’s here. He brought Emma and Wyatt. Do you want them in?”

His eyes went to the doorway. It took him a while.

“Emma,” he said.

She went to him on her own, and Wyatt after her. Emma stood at the side of the bed. “Grandpa. It smells like your kitchen.”

His mouth moved, and I think it was her name, the whole of it, Emma Jane.

“I made you a card,” she said. “It was supposed to be for later. But I brought it now.”

She had drawn a horse in a field on the front, which is not anything Don ever kept, but Emma’s horses are the center of her world. Inside, in her careful school printing, it said: Happy birthday Grandpa. I love you.

Troy had to leave the room for a minute. He put his hand on the doorframe on the way out.