The Pound Cake on Donna’s Porch

“She was right about that,” she said. “She was always right about that girl.”

It is twenty miles from town to Donna’s house. Angie made it in twenty-five minutes, which tells you how fast she drove on the gravel.

We heard her before we saw her, the crunch of tires and a long tail of dust coming up the road. She pulled in behind my car, got out, and shut the door. Then she just stood there by the bumper with her arms around her own middle.

She looked terrible. She had lost weight. Her hair was pulled back in a rubber band, and she had on one of Mark’s old work jackets with the plant’s name stitched on the chest.

She did not come up to the porch. She stood in the yard on the fresh-cut grass and started to cry, standing straight up with her arms crossed, the way you cry when you have been holding it for a long, long time.

I looked at Donna. Donna looked at me.

“Go on,” she said quietly. “I’ll stay here.”

I set my saucer down and walked out to her. I did not hug her right away. I stood in front of her and waited, because I had waited three months and I figured I could wait three more minutes.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Stacy, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“I know,” I said. “Tell me why.”

She told me there in the yard, with her mother watching from the porch step and the cut grass sticking to our shoes.

Mark was laid off on the second of June. The plant cut a whole shift. He looked for work every single day. He drove to Kearney and Grand Island and Lexington, filling out applications at every place that had a sign out. He picked up a few days here and there, hauling hay, fixing fence. It was not enough.

By July, they were two months behind on the house payment. The bank sent a letter. Angie said she read the word foreclosure in that letter and could not breathe.

“I couldn’t tell anybody,” she said. “Mark was so ashamed already. He said if people in town found out, he’d never get hired anywhere. He made me promise not to tell. And I couldn’t tell Mom because she’d have sold something to help, and she doesn’t have anything to sell.”

“So you told me she was sick,” I said.

She shut her eyes.

“I told you she was sick because nobody asks questions when your mother’s sick,” she said. “I knew if I told you the truth you’d give it to me. I knew you’d give it to me either way. That’s what made it so awful.”

She wiped her nose on her sleeve.

“I stood at your counter and I picked the lie that would hurt you least to hear, and it was the worst thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

“And then you stopped answering.”

“Every time your name came up on my phone I’d sit on the bathroom floor and cry,” she said. “I’d tell myself I’d call you when I had some of it to pay back. Then I’d tell myself I’d call when I had half. Then it was so long that I couldn’t figure out how to start.”

“I saw you at the gas station,” I said.

“I know. I went home and threw up.”