The Pound Cake on Donna’s Porch

I told him at the supper table. I told him everything Angie told me, the attacks, the deductible, the twenty-ninth.

Jeff set his fork down and thought about it the way he thinks about everything, slow and all the way through.

“It’s Angie,” he said finally. “And it’s Donna. Donna drove you to the hospital the night your mom went in, when I was out on that storm call.”

“So you think we should.”

“I think we can’t not,” he said. “The furnace will make it one more winter. Write her a check. Tell her to pay it back when she can, and don’t put a date on it.”

That is the kind of man I married. I want you to know that, because of what came later.

I wrote the check the next morning from our savings, four thousand dollars even, and I drove it to Angie’s house on my lunch break. She hugged me in her driveway so long that the neighbor’s dog started barking at us.

“I’ll pay you back,” she said into my shoulder. “Every cent. I swear on Grandma June.”

“I know you will,” I said. “Just take care of your mom.”

On the twenty-ninth she texted me a single heart. That evening she texted me that the surgery went fine and her mom was home resting and grumpy about it. I texted back that I would bring something by when Donna felt up to company.

She wrote back: “Better give her a few weeks. She hates people seeing her laid up.”

That was the last real text I got from Angie Walsh for three months.

At first I did not think much of it. August is a busy month in a farm town. School starts, the county fair runs, and everybody with a pickup is hauling something somewhere. I figured she was busy taking care of her mother.

I called her the second week of August. It rang through to voicemail. I left a message asking about Donna. I called again a few days later. Voicemail again.

I texted. I texted a picture of an old photo I found of the two of us at Grandma June’s table, both of us with milk mustaches. That one she read. I could see that she read it. She did not write back.

By September I was calling every few days, and every call went straight to that cheerful recording she made years ago, the one where you can hear her boy laughing in the background.

I saw her once, at the gas station on the highway. I was pulling in as she was pulling out. I lifted my hand off the wheel to wave, and I saw her see me. She looked right at me through the windshield, and then she looked away and pulled onto the highway toward town.

I sat at that pump for a long time.

Jeff never once brought up the money. I want to be fair to him about that. He noticed I was quiet, and one night in late September he asked me straight out whether Angie had said anything.

“Nothing,” I said. “Not a word since July.”

“You want me to go over there?” he asked. “I could talk to Mark.”

“No,” I said. “Please don’t. Mark’s got enough on him, and I don’t want it to be a men’s business thing between the two of you. It’s between me and her.”