The Burnt Sugar Cake in Room Six

Sunday

I stayed the night in the recliner, and Amber came back in the morning.

She was in the lounge when I came out at seven, sitting by the piano in jeans and a sweatshirt, with a thermos from home and the face of a woman who had not slept. She was not wearing makeup. She had a small scar through one eyebrow that I had never noticed.

She did not get up. She did not come into the room. She said, “I’m not here to be let off.”

“All right,” I said.

“I’m going to sit here. If Homer needs something, I’ll get it. If you need the children fed, I’ll feed them.”

“All right,” I said again.

I got a cup of the church-donated coffee and sat down across from her, and neither of us talked for a long time. The sun came across the piano keys.

After a while she said, not to me, “My mom brought a box cake to the church potluck every year. They’d lift the foil and put it back.”

That was all she said about it on Sunday. Two sentences. It was not a reason, and she knew it was not, and she did not try to make it one.

“I’m sorry for that,” I said. “For her.”

“It isn’t a reason,” Amber said.

“No,” I said. “It isn’t.”

She told Pastor Dirk herself that afternoon, and the small group on Monday. I had that from Homer, not from her. She did not tell them the soft version, either. She told them that she had thrown away a dying man’s birthday cake because she was ashamed of it, and that she had been wrong. Homer said the pastor called him afterward and said he had never in thirty years of ministry heard a woman do that without being made to.

Don had one more good hour that Sunday afternoon, when Phyllis got in from Des Moines. She is our daughter, Homer’s little sister, thirty-eight, and she came through the door with her husband and the eight-month-old twins on her hip and her face already wet. He knew all of them. He held a baby’s foot in his palm and said it was as small as a pocket watch.

The rest of the time he slept.

Monday night

Monday night, Amber came to the door of Room Six and asked, very quietly, if she could sit with Don for an hour while I slept in the lounge.

I thought about it for about as long as it takes to breathe in.

“Yes,” I said.

I went and lay on the lounge couch under Leon’s afghan and slept for the first time in ten days. When I came back into Room Six at three in the morning, she was sitting in the recliner with her shoes off and her feet tucked under her. Don’s hand was in hers. She was humming something, so low I could barely hear it, a hymn I couldn’t place.

She looked up. She wasn’t embarrassed.

“I don’t know any of the words,” she said. “My grandmother used to hum it.”

“It’s ‘Abide With Me,'” I said.

“Is it?” She looked at Don. “He likes it. His fingers move.”

I sat down on the other side of the bed and we kept him between us until morning.