The Pound Cake on Donna’s Porch

He nodded. He did not push. But a week later, when he found me standing at the kitchen window at ten at night holding my phone, he came up behind me and put his chin on top of my head.

“Then go see for yourself,” he said. “You’re making yourself sick. Whatever it is, it’s better to know.”

People have asked me since why I did not just call Donna and ask her. The plain answer is that I believed her mother was recovering from surgery, and I was not about to phone a sixty-six-year-old woman on the mend to ask her about her daughter’s debts.

There was more to it than that. I did not want my money back nearly as much as I wanted my friend back. I wanted the truth, and I wanted to hear it from Angie, and I did not want to go around her to get it.

But Jeff was right that it was eating me alive. So on a Saturday in the middle of October, I got out Grandma June’s recipe card and her old tube pan and decided I would take Donna a cake.

It felt like the decent thing. If Donna was still recovering, she would get a cake from a girl she had known since the girl was eight. And if Angie happened to be out there, then maybe we could just talk, the three of us, over a slice of something sweet.

The recipe card is soft as cloth now. It is written in my grandmother’s slanting cursive, with a grease spot on the corner shaped like the state of Ohio. A pound of butter, a pound of sugar, a pound of eggs, a pound of flour, and a little vanilla and mace.

I creamed the butter and sugar by hand with a wooden spoon, the way she taught us. I did not use the mixer. I could hear her voice the whole time. You can’t hurry it. A pound cake knows when you rushed it.

My arm ached exactly the way it did when I was eight, and I cried a little into the batter, and then I laughed at myself for crying into the batter, and then I put the pan in the oven and went to write the card.

I bought it at the drugstore on Main. It had a watercolor bluebird on the front and said Get Well Soon in gold letters. Inside I wrote:

“Donna, Angie told me back in July about your surgery. I am so sorry I waited this long to come out. I hope you are mending fast and back on that mower soon. This is Grandma June’s pound cake, the same one she fed your girl and me every day after school. All my love, Stacy.”

I sealed it, set it on top of the cooled cake, wrapped the cake in foil, and drove twenty miles out to Donna’s place on the gravel road past the old Lutheran cemetery.

Donna has lived in that white farmhouse since she remarried, and she kept it after her second husband passed. It sits on three acres with a windbreak of cedars to the north and a big lawn she insists on mowing herself, on a red riding mower she bought used at a farm sale.