The Cake That Said 312

“Mom, you don’t owe me for that.”

“I know I don’t owe you,” she said. “That isn’t what counting is for. Counting is so I don’t forget. When you’re old, people do things for you and you start to forget they’re doing them. I didn’t want to forget a single one.”

She sat down across from me then and took my hands in her cold ones, and she looked at me the way she used to look at me when I came home from school with a ribbon, and she said, “Three hundred and twelve, Jodi. I didn’t forget any of them.”

Pam was crying at the counter with the calendar in her hands. I was crying too. Mom wasn’t.

Mom drank her tea and said, “Well, you two are a mess,” which is the most Lutheran thing a woman can say.

Before we left, Mom took the pencil off the nail and handed it to Pam. “January,” she said. “You’ll make your own marks. Use a P so I can tell.”

Pam came out the first Monday in January, after work, in the dark, three hours on the interstate and the two-lane with snow blowing across it in ribbons.

She slept in our old bedroom, the one with the twin beds and the horse wallpaper.

I didn’t go over that first Tuesday. I wanted to. I lay awake at 4:10 with my eyes open, listening to the furnace, and Mark said, “Don’t you dare,” and I didn’t.

She called me at 6:15 from the center’s parking lot. “We made it,” she said.

“Your driveway shovel is a joke, by the way. I used Dad’s old one from the garage. It weighs a ton.”

“Did you see the deer?”

“Mom saw them. Four of them, by the cemetery, right where you said. She pointed and said ‘deer, Pam’ so calm I almost drove into the ditch anyway.”

She laughed, but her voice was shaking. “Jodi, how do you do this every time?”

“You just do it,” I said. “And then you do it again.”

That first week she got lost in the parking lot looking for the side door.

The second week she forgot Mom’s blanket and drove back eleven miles for it, and they were late, the first time Mom had ever been late. Becky forgave her.

The third week was the worst cold of the winter, twenty-six below, and Pam’s car wouldn’t start.

She called me at 4:40 in a panic, and Mark went over in his truck with the jumper cables, and he had her running in ten minutes.

He told me later she just stood there in the driveway, in Mom’s old barn coat, watching him hook up the cables.

“She asked me how long I’d been picking Arlene up,” Mark said. “I said two years. She said, ‘You too?’ and she hugged me, right there in the snow.”

He was quiet a minute. “Nobody ever asked me that before,” he said. That is the most Mark has ever said about any of it, and I think it was a great deal for him.

At the end of every Tuesday, when Pam brought Mom home, she made her mark on the back of the January page.

Each one had a little P beside it, and one week there was a note in her careful pencil: “P. learning.”

The month went by faster than I thought it would. On Thursdays and Saturdays I still drove Mom myself, and she would tell me everything Pam did wrong on Tuesday, and everything Pam did right, which was more.