The Graduation Party in the Fire Hall

“And I was a C student. All the way through. My father told me I’d never amount to much, so there was no sense making a fuss over me. Nobody threw me a party. I didn’t even walk. I was working.”

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t think of a thing to say that would have been the right size.

“When that money came,” she said, “I looked at it and I heard my father. Six hundred dollars for a party. For a 2.4. And I thought, she’ll need that money someday, and nobody is going to be there to hand it to her. So I put it where it would be safe.” She swallowed.

“And then I said what I said, because it’s what was said to me. I heard it come out of my mouth in his voice.”

I don’t remember deciding to do it. I only remember that there was a long cake knife on the table next to Dad’s sheet cake, still in its plastic sleeve from the bakery, and a stack of paper plates beside it, and nobody cutting.

“Brooke’s going to want to open the cards soon,” I said. “And there’s still forty people who haven’t had cake. I’ve got to get back to the roasters.”

Rhonda looked at the knife. She looked at me.

“Somebody’s got to cut it,” I said. “I’ve got my hands full.”

That was all I said. I didn’t hand it to her. I didn’t make a speech.

I went back to the food table, and I took the lid off the pulled pork, and I did not turn around for a full minute.

When I did turn around, Rhonda was at the cake table. She had set her purse under it.

She had taken the knife out of the sleeve, and she was cutting the sheet cake into squares as neat and even as a checkerboard, the way a woman cuts who has served lunch at a hundred funerals.

My father was standing beside her holding the paper plates. Neither of them was talking.

She cut, and he held out a plate, and she set a square on it, and he handed it to whoever was next in line.

She cut cake for two hours.

She cut the sheet cake down to the cardboard, and then she cut the Dairy Queen ice cream cake when Tom brought it over, though it was melting, and she had to work fast, and the Dairy Queen kids stood around her and watched like it was a trick.

People talked to her. That is the thing about a small town in Wisconsin. Nobody knew what had happened, and the few who suspected something had the good manners not to say it.

They said, “You must be Ken’s wife,” and “That frosting is beautiful,” and “Are those roses from Festival? I always get mine there.”

Dale Kowalski came through the line twice and told her both times that she cut a cleaner square than his wife, and Sue swatted him with a napkin.

Mrs. Haugen, the teacher, stood at the end of the table for a while and talked to Rhonda about the cheese plant, because her own mother had worked the line there too.