The Pound Cake on Donna’s Porch

I stood there looking at her. She was my best friend. She was the girl who gave me back my apple. She was also the woman who had lied to my face about her own mother’s body to get my family’s furnace money and then let me worry for three months.

Both of those things were true at the same time. I had to hold them both.

“Angie,” I said. “Do you know what I’d have done if you’d told me the truth in July?”

“Given me the money.”

“Given you the money,” I said. “And then I’d have brought you supper. And I’d have had Jeff ask around the co-op for Mark. And you wouldn’t have had to sit on a bathroom floor alone for three months.”

That was when she broke all the way. She put both hands over her face and bent over like somebody had hit her in the stomach, and I put my arms around her, finally, and held on.

I do not know how long we stood there. Long enough for the sun to move off the cedars. Long enough for Donna to go in and come back out with a third mug of coffee and set it on the step without a word.

When Angie could walk, I took her by the hand and led her up to the porch, and she sat on the bottom step, and her mother looked at her.

I was afraid of what Donna would say. I did not need to be.

“You used my name,” Donna said. “You used my body. You told my daughter’s best friend I was sick so she’d hand over her money. Do you understand that?”

“Yes, Mama.”

“Do you understand that she baked June’s cake for me?”

Angie looked at the cake on the saucer. Her face crumpled again. “Grandma June’s?”

“Same pan,” I said.

Angie put her face down on her knees.

Donna let her cry for a minute. Then she reached over and put one hand on the back of her daughter’s neck, the way you would with a little girl, and left it there.

“Now,” Donna said. “Here’s what’s going to happen.”

We talked for two hours on that porch. I know it was two hours because the shadow of the windbreak came all the way across the lawn and touched the red mower, and Donna had to go in and turn on the porch light.

Angie told us everything, the whole summer. The four thousand dollars had gone straight to the bank to catch up the two missed payments and the late fees. The house was safe. That part had worked. Everything else had fallen apart.

Then she told us something that made me sit up.

Mark had found steady work. In September he had hired on at the co-op elevator for harvest, driving grain truck, and the manager liked him well enough that he had already offered him a full-time spot through the winter, running the dryer and keeping the scales.

“Since when?” Donna asked.

“Two weeks ago,” Angie said. “He starts full-time November first. With benefits.”

“So you could have called her two weeks ago,” Donna said.

Angie did not argue. “I know.”

“Does Mark know where that four thousand dollars came from?” I asked.

She shook her head. “He thinks I got a loan from the credit union.”

Donna and I looked at each other.