The Cake That Said 312

I want to be fair to my sister here, because she deserves it. She did not argue.

She did not say, “Well, nobody told me.” She did not make one excuse, though she had a few she could have made.

She just stood up very slowly, and pushed her chair in, and walked to the back door, and went out into the cold without her coat. The steel door banged behind her.

The hall went quiet again. Everybody looked at me. Mom looked at me too.

I could have let her go. I could have sat there and eaten a piece of that cake and let the hall think whatever it wanted about Pam. Some people would say she had earned that. Maybe she had.

But Mom had her hand on my arm, and she gave me a little push, the same push she used to give me toward the front of the church for the Christmas program. “Go on,” she said. “She’s your sister.”

So I got Pam’s coat off the back of her chair, the nice wool one from the Cities, and I went out after her.

She was sitting in her car in the Legion lot with the engine off, her hands on the steering wheel and her forehead on her hands.

The streetlight had just come on. I knocked on the passenger window and she unlocked it without looking up.

I got in and put her coat over her lap. We sat there for a while.

Across the street the elevator lights were on, and I could hear the dryer running, that low roar that means harvest is still going.

“Three hundred and twelve,” Pam finally said, into the steering wheel. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

“You never asked,” I said. Then I heard how that sounded, and I shook my head.

“No. That’s not fair. I never told you because I didn’t want you to know. I wanted to be the one who did it. That’s the truth, Pam.”

She lifted her head. Her mascara had run, and she looked about twelve years old.

“I said it because Kathy was right,” she said. “That’s why. Kathy was right, and everybody heard her, and I couldn’t stand it.”

“Pam.”

“No, let me say it.” She wiped her face with the heel of her hand.

“I moved away. I moved away and I stayed away, and every Sunday when I call I feel like a stranger, and every Christmas I come home and you know where everything is in Mom’s kitchen and I don’t.”

She took a breath that shook. “It was easier to think you weren’t doing anything either. If you weren’t doing anything, then I wasn’t any worse than you. That’s what I told myself in the car for two years.”

“That’s an awful thing to say into a microphone,” I said. I said it quietly, but I said it, because it was true, and because I wasn’t going to pretend it hadn’t hurt.

“I know it is,” she said. “I knew it the second it came out. I just didn’t know how to take it back. And then they walked in with that cake.”

“What’s it like?” she asked me finally. “In the mornings. What is it actually like?”

So I told her. I told her about 4:10 and the green thermos and the shovel and the deer by the Lutheran cemetery.

I told her about the fistula Mom called her motor, and the pink blanket with the cardinals, and Mom keeping watch for the deer.