The Cake That Said 312

Around three our aunt Kathy, Mom’s younger sister, cornered Pam by the coffee.

Kathy is eighty and deaf in one ear, so she talks like she’s calling hogs, and the whole end of the hall heard her.

“So when are you moving home to help your mother?” Kathy said. “Your sister can’t do it all alone forever, you know. She’s going to wear herself to a nub.”

Pam laughed it off. “Oh, Aunt Kathy, Mom’s doing great. Look at her.” And she waved at Mom at the head table in her two blouses, laughing with the pastor’s wife.

But I saw Pam’s face when she turned back to the bars.

It was red right up to her hairline, and she ate a lemon bar in about two bites, the way she used to eat when she was upset in high school.

Then it was time for the toast, and our cousin Jeff handed Pam the microphone, because she’s the oldest, and that is how it has always been done in our family.

I think now that Pam was still hearing Kathy when she stood up.

I think she had been hearing some version of Kathy for two years, maybe longer, and she had to put it down somewhere, and I was the nearest place.

That is not an excuse. It is just what I believe. I have had a long time to think about it, and I have decided that I would rather understand my sister than be right about her.

After she sat down, I got up and went into the Legion kitchen and started washing coffee cups, because I had to do something with my hands. The kitchen smelled like bleach and ham and old coffee.

And I thought, she doesn’t know. She doesn’t know any of it, and that is partly my fault, and I don’t know how to tell her now without it sounding like I’m keeping score.

Mark came in and leaned on the counter beside me. He didn’t say anything for a while.

Then he said, “You want me to go say something to her? I will. I’ll be nice about it.”

“No,” I said. “Not today. It’s Mom’s day.”

“She’s wrong, Jodi.”

“I know she’s wrong,” I said. “But she’s my sister, and she’s hurting about something, and I’m not going to fight her at the Legion with a hundred people eating bars.”

He kissed the side of my head, right above my ear, and went back out.

I dried my hands and followed him a minute later, and I sat back down next to Mom like nothing had happened.

Mom didn’t ask me where I’d been. She just slid her plate over so I could have the pickle off it, which is what she has done since I was four years old, because I always wanted the pickle.

Twenty minutes after that toast, give or take, the back door of the Legion hall opened, the heavy steel one by the coat rack that sticks in wet weather and bangs when it closes.

Two women came through the door in scrubs with their winter jackets thrown on over the top, carrying a big white sheet cake between them on a board.

It was the full-size kind, the kind you get for a graduation.

It was Becky and Sue. Mom’s nurses. They had come straight from the Saturday shift, forty miles, and they hadn’t even stopped to change. Sue still had her badge clipped on upside down.