The Burnt Sugar Cake in Room Six

The hall

I followed Homer out. I did not mean to listen. I meant to stand with my back against the wall and breathe, and they were at the far end by the window, and that building is quiet.

“Why is there coffee on Mom’s lid?” Homer said. He said it low, so the children would not hear.

Amber looked at the floor. She said, “I put it in the trash.”

He did not say anything for a long moment. He is not a man who raises his voice. He is his father’s son that way.

“Go sit in your car,” Homer said. “Then go home. I’ll meet Pastor Dirk and the rest of them in the lobby at two, and I’ll tell them Dad is resting and the family is having a private afternoon, because that’s what’s true. And then tonight you and I will sit at the kitchen table and you will tell me, and I will listen. I’m not going to do it here.”

“Homer”

“Not here,” he said.

She went down the hall with her heels in her hand.

I let her go. I went back into Room Six.

The first slice

Don had two more bites of frosting. Then a crumb of the cake, the corner, which Kathleen checked first, with the careful hands of a person who has done it many times. She said his swallow was strong. She said, “Go ahead, he’s earned it.”

He chewed it slowly with his eyes closed. We watched him do it. I think it was the most important meal I have ever watched anyone eat.

He drifted after that. His breath got longer. Kathleen checked his color and said, “That’s his rest now. Let him sleep.” We stood in the room a while, all of us, and then Denise slipped out, and Leon went back to his piano, and I heard him start to play something quiet down the hall.

Homer met them in the lobby at two o’clock, as he had said. Gail told me later what happened. He thanked Pastor Dirk and the boss and the two couples for coming. He said his father was resting and the family was having a private afternoon, and he would call about the service when there was a service. One of the wives asked if there was anything they could bring.

“My mother bakes,” Homer said. That was all.

The night shift came in at seven. By then the word had gone around, as words do, and they came to the break room one at a time, in their scrubs and their sneakers, and stood around the counter and ate eighty-four dollars’ worth of vanilla cake with fondant ribbon and raspberry filling, off paper plates, and said it was the best they’d ever had. Because it was a lovely cake. That was never the problem.

Denise told me the next morning that his name on top was in a beautiful curly script and nobody wanted to cut through it. So she took a knife and cut a clean square around the letters and put it on a plate, and set it on the windowsill of Room Six, where Don would have seen it if he had woken. He did not wake. But it was there beside Lorene’s cake, both of them in the afternoon light. I always liked knowing that.