The Top Tier I Sent My Niece

What I Did With the Cake

I did not answer April’s text for a long time.

I danced with my husband first, because the fiddle was going and I had paid for the floor and I was not going to spend my one wedding hunched over a phone being hurt.

Seth danced with everybody. That is a thing about him I did not fully know until that day.

He danced with Becca and with his grandmother and with the two old sisters from church who never get asked, and he danced with the little girls standing on the tops of their fathers’ shoes, and he made forty-one people feel like the party had been thrown for each one of them in particular.

When people ask me now what I married, I tell them that. I married a man who dances with the ones nobody asks.

While he danced I went and found Darlene by the cake.

“I need a favor,” I said, “and I need you not to ask me why.”

Darlene is sixty-six years old and she has catered enough family weddings to know that a bride with a set jaw does not want questions. “Name it,” she said.

I told her to cut the cake, all of it, for the forty-one people in that hall, big pieces, seconds for anybody who wanted them, send it home in napkins with the ones who were leaving.

Every layer but the top.

The top tier I wanted boxed.

Darlene had a bakery box in her van, the white kind with the little cardboard round.

She boxed the top tier, the small one, the one couples are supposed to freeze and eat on their first anniversary, and she set it on the side table by the punch bowl where the light was warm, and she looked at me.

“You freezing this for your year,” she said. It was not quite a question.

“No,” I said. “I’m sending it to my niece.”

Darlene did not say anything for a second.

Then she went out to her van again and came back with a blank card, cream with a sprig of wheat in the corner, left over from a box of thank-you notes, and she put it in my hand.

“Then you’ll want to write her something,” she said.