The Pound Cake on Donna’s Porch

Donna Kline shut off the red riding mower in the middle of her front yard, pulled one work glove halfway off, and squinted at me like I was a salesman she half remembered.

She was sixty-six years old and as brown as a walnut from a summer outside. Her short gray hair curled damp at the temples. She had on a sleeveless plaid blouse and the kind of tan leather work gloves you buy at the farm store and wear until they go soft.

She looked healthier than I did. She looked healthier than anybody I had seen all week, and I work the front desk at a vet clinic, so I see a lot of people at their worst.

“Stacy Penner?” she called. “Is that you, honey? Lord, I haven’t seen you since the Fourth.”

I was standing on her front lawn in my denim jacket with a foil-covered pound cake on my grandmother’s good plate and a get-well card in my other hand. I had knocked twice before the mower came around the side of the house.

“It’s me,” I said. “I brought you a cake. I wanted to see how you were feeling.”

Donna climbed down off the seat and stood beside the mower. Most of the big lawn behind her was freshly mowed in long straight stripes, and the air smelled like cut grass and gasoline and the last of the fall sun.

“Feeling?” she said. “I’m feeling fine. Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Your surgery,” I said. “Your gallbladder. Back in July.”

She took the other glove off slowly and looked at me for a long moment. It was a sunny October afternoon, the sky was that hard clean blue we get out here before the first frost, and I felt the whole day tilt under my feet.

“Stacy,” she said, “I have never had a thing wrong with my gallbladder in my life.”

I stood there holding the cake.

I want to tell you what went through my head, but the truth is nothing did. It was quiet in there, the way a room goes quiet after somebody drops a plate. I just kept thinking that the foil was warm against my thumb because I had only taken the cake out of the oven at noon.

To understand why I was standing in that yard, you have to know about the four thousand dollars, and to understand the four thousand dollars, you have to know about Angie.

Angie Walsh has been my best friend since the third grade. We met the first week of school when she traded me her pudding cup for my apple and then felt so bad about the deal that she gave me the apple back too.

We grew up in the same little farm town in the middle of Nebraska, the kind of place with one stoplight, two churches on the same block, a co-op elevator you can see from six miles out, and a café where the same five men have been solving the world’s problems since 1985.

Angie’s mother worked nights back then, cleaning at the hospital over in Broken Bow. My mother worked days at the bank. That meant that from three thirty until supper, both of us belonged to my grandmother, June, who lived in a little yellow house two blocks from the school.

Grandma June did not believe in snacks. She believed in pound cake. Every Monday she baked one in the same scratched tube pan, and it lasted us until about Thursday, a slice after school with a glass of cold milk at her kitchen table.