The Pound Cake on Donna’s Porch

I could hear the mower before I saw her. That should have told me something. I remember thinking, as I knocked on the door, that she must have a neighbor boy doing the mowing while she healed.

Then the mower came around the corner of the house with Donna on it, and she cut the engine and climbed off, and you already know the rest of that part.

So there we were. Me on the lawn with the cake. Donna beside her mower with one glove in her hand.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “Angie told you I had surgery?”

I did not answer. I could not figure out how to answer without doing the very thing I had driven out there to avoid, which was going around Angie.

Donna walked over to me across the cut grass. She looked down at the cake and then at the card in my other hand, and then up at my face.

“Is that for me?” she asked.

“It’s for you,” I said. “It’s a get-well card. I guess you don’t need it.”

“I’d like to read it anyway,” she said, and she held out her hand.

I thought about it. I want to be honest that I thought about it, about putting the card back in my jacket and driving home and figuring the rest out later. But she was holding out her hand, and she is Angie’s mother, and I have never in my life been able to lie to Donna Kline. So I gave it to her.

She sat down on the second porch step and opened the envelope with her thumbnail. She read the card once. Then she read it again. I watched her lips move on the words Angie told me back in July.

When she looked up, her face had changed. It was not angry. It was something worse than angry, the look of a mother doing arithmetic.

“Stacy,” she said quietly. “What did Angie tell you in July?”

“Donna, I don’t want to get in the middle of anything.”

“Honey, you’re already in the middle. You’re standing on my lawn with a cake. What did she tell you?”

So I told her. I told her about the clinic, and the attacks, and the doctor in Kearney, and the high deductible, and the twenty-ninth. I said the number last, because I could not find a way to say it gently.

“Four thousand dollars,” Donna said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Of your money.”

“Mine and Jeff’s,” I said. “It was our furnace money. But Donna, I didn’t come out here about the money. I promise you that. I came out because she won’t answer my calls and I thought something was wrong. I thought maybe you were worse off than she said.”

Donna set the card down on the step beside her and smoothed it flat with her hand, the way you would smooth a child’s hair.

“Sit down,” she said. “Right here. I’ve got coffee on.”

She went inside. I sat down on the porch step with the cake on my knees and looked out at the lawn. Half of the last strip was still standing, longer and darker than the rest, where she had stopped the mower to come see who was at her door.

She came back out with two mugs, the old brown kind with the drip glaze that every farmhouse kitchen in Nebraska seems to have at least four of. She handed me one and sat down beside me.

Then she took her cell phone out of the back pocket of her jeans.