The Top Tier I Sent My Niece

The Card

I sat down at the empty front table, the one set for my family, in one of the chairs that nobody came to fill, and I put the boxed top tier in front of me and the blank card beside it, and I picked up a pen off the gift table.

I thought about what I wanted to say to April. There were things. There were three weeks of things.

But the card was not going to April.

The card was going to a fourteen-year-old girl who had gotten into the honor society, who had been promoted out of the eighth grade, who had done every single thing right, and who was, at that very hour, watching a party at her own house run out of dessert because the grown people around her had made an ugly little choice and then tried to patch it with my cake.

Kaylee had not chosen any of it.

Kaylee had only been born into the favored place the way I had been born into the managing one, and neither of us had picked our seats at this table.

So I wrote to her.

I wrote that I was proud of her, honor society and all, and that getting into the eighth grade and out of it again is harder than the grown-ups let on.

I wrote that the little cake in the box was the top of my wedding cake, which is the sweetest part, the part you are supposed to save for something that matters.

I wrote that I could not think of anything that mattered more that day than her, and that I wanted her to have it.

I did not write a single word about who came to my wedding and who did not. I read the card over twice to be sure of that.

Not because the thought was not screaming in me.

Because Kaylee was going to read it, and a child should not have to carry a grown woman’s hurt in her own graduation scrapbook.

I signed it, your aunt who loves you, and I meant the whole of it.

I gave the box and the card to Becca’s husband, who had his truck, and I asked him to run it to April’s house and set it on the porch if nobody answered and to say, if somebody did answer, only that it was from the wedding and that there was a card for Kaylee.