The Second Cake on Mom’s Dock

The cake hit the lake flat, board and all, and for a second it floated beside the pontoon like a little white boat that had lost its way.

I remember the sound more than anything. It was not really a splash. It was more of a slap, the way a beaver tail sounds across a bay at dusk.

Thirty people had been laughing a moment before. Three pontoons were rafted together in the cove on Gull Lake, tied rail to rail, kids cannonballing off the back ladders.

Then nobody said a word. Even the little ones in their life jackets went quiet, bobbing in the green water like fishing corks, looking up at the grownups to see what to do.

I was standing at the rail in my white sundress and the old denim jacket I had pulled on because the wind off the lake still had a bite to it, even in July.

My braid had come halfway loose. I could feel it against my back. I stood there with my hands empty and watched three tiers of buttercream drift away from the boat.

Behind me, Mom sat on the pontoon bench in her coral blouse, the one she saved for occasions. The breeze kept lifting her short gray hair straight up off her forehead.

She did not gasp. She did not cry. She folded her hands over the index card in her lap, the one she had been reading her toast from, and she looked at the water.

My sister Kate was still standing by the folding table where the cake had been a moment before. There were crumbs of frosting on her fingers.

“Mom thanked her first,” she said.

She was not saying it to me. She was saying it to her husband, Rex, quietly, the way you explain something to a man who should have understood it years ago.

Then she sat down on the big cooler, put her elbows on her knees, and stared at the floor of the pontoon like there was something written there.

The cake

My name is Allison. I was 47 that summer. I have decorated cakes at the grocery store bakery in Baxter for eleven years, and on weekends I do weddings and graduation cakes out of my own kitchen.

My husband, Glenn, put a second oven in for me the year I turned thirty. He works for the power cooperative, climbing poles in weather most people will not drive in, and he installed that oven himself on a Saturday.

A three-tier cake like the one in the lake serves about seventy-five people. When a bride orders one, I charge her $450, and I am cheaper than the bakeries down in the Cities by a good stretch.

I did not charge Mom anything, of course. I had spent two evenings on it. Lemon cake, raspberry filling, white buttercream as smooth as I could get it, and a piped pearl border around each tier, plain and white, the way she always did her own.

Daisies were her flower. Dad used to pick them along the ditch on County 77, roots and all, and she put them in a jelly jar like they were roses. So I kept the cake plain and set a jar of ditch daisies beside it.