The Cake That Said 312

When Mom started dialysis, Pam called me and said, “Let me know what I can do.” I said, “We’re fine.”

She said, “Are you sure?” and I said, “We’ve got it handled, Pam,” and that was the whole conversation.

I want to be honest about that part, because it is the part that makes me look less right, and I have thought about it a great deal since.

I never told my sister how hard it was. I never once asked her for anything.

Some of that was pride. Some of it was that she was three hours away and I didn’t see how she could help.

And some of it, if I’m honest, was that I wanted to be the one. The daughter who stayed. The one Mom could count on.

When Pam called on Sundays, Mom would tell her, “Oh, I’m doing fine, Jodi takes me.” Pam would say, “That’s good.”

I don’t think either of them ever said the words three times a week, or five in the morning, or forty miles.

At Christmas Pam would see Mom on a good day, on an off day from the machine, in her good sweater at the head of the table.

She never saw the Tuesday mornings. She never saw Mom after four hours in the chair, gray and shaking.

So I suppose, if you only knew what Pam knew, you might think I mostly brought casseroles.

I did bring casseroles. I brought a great many of them, and I am not ashamed of a single one.

Kidney patients can’t have much potassium or salt, so you can’t just make the usual hot dish.

I learned to soak potatoes overnight to leach them, and to use rice instead of noodles, and to skip the canned soup entirely.

Mom said they tasted like cardboard. She ate them anyway, every one, and she’d scrape the pan with a spoon and say, “Well, it’s better cardboard than last week’s,” and we’d both laugh until she had to sit down.

Mom’s 75th fell on a Saturday in October, which was a dialysis day.

So that morning, like every other Saturday, I had her in the chair by 5:30, and then I came home and ran my route, and then I went straight to the Legion.

Mark and Kayla had been there since noon. They’d hung the crepe paper and set up the long head table and blown up a bunch of red, white and blue balloons. Mark tied them in clusters by the windows, because Kayla kept letting go of the strings.

Pam got there at quarter to two. She’d driven out from the Cities that morning, three hours, with a bakery cake on the floor of her car and the blouse in a gift bag with tissue paper sticking out the top.

Mom loved the blouse. It was lavender with little pearl buttons. She put it on right over the top of her other blouse, and she wore it like that all afternoon, her cream cardigan buttoned over both, and she would not let anyone tell her it looked funny.

Pam hugged me hard when she came in. “You look tired,” she said. I said I’d been up since four.

She said, “Mail must start early out here,” and I said, “Something like that,” and let it go.

I don’t know why I didn’t say it then. I could have said, “I was up taking Mom to dialysis, same as every Saturday.”

It was right there in my mouth. I just didn’t want to start anything on Mom’s day.