The Pound Cake on Donna’s Porch

“Donna,” I said. “You don’t have to do this right now.”

“Yes, I do,” she said. “If I wait, I’ll think about it, and if I think about it, I’ll talk myself into being soft. Drink your coffee.”

She dialed. I could hear it ring. Once, twice, three times. I was sure it would go to voicemail the way all of mine had.

It did not. Angie picked up on the fourth ring. I could hear her voice small and tinny through the phone. “Hi, Mom.”

“Angela Marie,” Donna said. Her voice was perfectly calm. “I am sitting on my front porch with Stacy Penner. She brought me a pound cake and a get-well card for my gallbladder surgery.”

There was a silence on the line that went on so long I thought the call had dropped.

“Mom,” Angie said. That was all. Just the one word, and it cracked down the middle.

“I want you out here,” Donna said. “Not tomorrow. Now. I don’t care what you’re doing. Stacy and I will be on the porch.”

She hung up without waiting for an answer and set the phone face down on the step.

“She’ll come,” she said. “She always comes when I use her whole name.”

We sat there in the sun. A pickup went by on the gravel road and the driver lifted two fingers off the wheel the way people do out here, and Donna lifted her coffee mug back at him.

“You want to know what I think?” Donna said after a while.

“Only if you want to tell me.”

“I think something’s wrong at that house. Mark got laid off at the ethanol plant in June. Angie told me that much. She said they were fine, he’d find something, they had savings. I believed her because I wanted to.”

I had not known that. Angie had not said a word to me about Mark losing his job. I thought about that, about her standing at my counter in July with her husband out of work, and not saying it.

“Does that make it right?” Donna asked. She was not really asking me.

“No,” I said. “But it makes it make sense.”

She nodded slowly. Then she looked down at the cake on my knees.

“Well,” she said, “are we going to eat that or are you going to hold it until she gets here?”

I laughed for the first time in what felt like weeks. I peeled back the foil. Donna went in and came back with a knife and two saucers and cut us each a slice, and she took one bite and closed her eyes.

“That’s June’s,” she said. “I’d know that anywhere.”

“Same card,” I said. “Same tube pan.”

“Do you know,” Donna said, “I never once thanked your grandmother properly. All those years, I was cleaning floors at night and sleeping half the day, and I knew my girl was going to that yellow house after school. I knew she was being fed and looked after. I meant to thank June a hundred times.”

She set her fork down.

“Then she passed, and I never did. I just sent a card to the funeral home like everybody else.”

“She knew,” I said. “She used to cut Angie the bigger slice. She said that girl needed it more than I did.”

Donna looked out at the yard for a long time. Her eyes were wet, and she did not wipe them.