The Burnt Sugar Cake in Room Six

Tuesday

He went at 5:40 on Tuesday morning. The radio at the nurses’ station was playing very low, a country station out of Ottumwa, and the sky out of the east window had gone the gray-pink of the inside of a shell.

I was holding one hand. Homer was holding the other. Troy stood at the foot of the bed with his cap in his fist. Amber stood behind Homer with her hand on his back. Kathleen came in and stood in the doorway and did not say anything.

It was very quiet. That is what I want to tell anyone who is afraid of it. It was a long, slow breath out, and then no breath in, and then a stillness that came into the room and sat down with us like a guest.

“Thank you,” Troy said to nobody. “Thank you, Don. Thank you.”

I kissed my husband on the forehead. He smelled like lavender lotion, and under it, faintly, like burnt sugar.

Thursday

On Thursday evening, the night before the funeral, Amber came out to the house on Pickering Road. She stood on the porch with her purse in front of her in both hands and did not ask to come in.

“I’ll say it here,” she said.

“No,” I said. “Come in the kitchen. The dog will want to look at you.”

We sat at the table where Don had sat for forty-six years. I did not make coffee. I did not want to make it feel like a visit.

“I’m going to say one thing,” I said, “and then I’m done, and I won’t bring it up again.”

She nodded.

“You put his cake in the trash while he was breathing forty feet away. You did it so strangers would not see the thing his mother taught me to make. And you decided for him what he wanted. He asked for it, Amber. It was the last thing he asked for. And you decided he didn’t know his own mind.”

“I know.”

“He did know it,” I said. “He knew it well enough to count to two.”

She winced at that, and I let her.

“I’m not going to say I’m past it,” I said. “I’ll get there. I’ve decided to. But it’s going to take me a while to be easy with you, and I would rather tell you that plainly than have you guess at it from my face.”

“Okay,” she said. It was a very small word. “That’s fair.”

“One more. I’m sorry your mother stood in a church basement and was looked at. That was cruel, and it was done by women who ought to have known better. I’m sorry for it. It is just not the same as what you did.”

“No,” she said. “It’s not.”

She stood up. At the door she turned around, and I thought she was going to say something more, and she only nodded at the dog, and then she left.