The Second Cake on Mom’s Dock

What I did not do

I would like to tell you I was calm. I was not calm inside. My hands were shaking so hard I put them in the pockets of my denim jacket so nobody would see.

But I did not yell. I have never yelled at my sister, not since we were girls fighting over the bathroom mirror, and I was not going to start on my mother’s seventieth birthday.

Before I could decide anything at all, Tess was swimming toward the cake. She had her arms out like she meant to rescue it.

“Tess, stay back,” I said, louder than I meant to. “It’s got a board under it. Stay by the ladder.”

She stopped and treaded water and looked at me with her mouth open. She had helped me pipe those pearls for an hour. She had done the whole bottom row herself.

Glenn was already moving. He took the long-handled landing net off the side of Dave’s boat, stepped over the rail onto ours, and leaned out as far as a man his size can lean.

He got most of the bottom tier on the first scoop and swung it over onto the deck in a heap. He went back for the board and the top tier. He did it without a word.

“No sense leaving it for the loons,” he said to Uncle Dave, finally, when he was done. That was the only thing anyone said for a full minute.

I went to Mom. I knelt down on the pontoon deck in front of her, and I took both her hands, the card still between them.

“Mom,” I said. “Are you all right?”

She looked at me. Her eyes were wet but steady. “Don’t you fight with her today,” she said, very quietly, so only I could hear. “Promise me. Not today.”

“I promise,” I said.

“Well,” she said, a little louder, looking at the mess on the deck. “It floated longer than I would have.”

And Uncle Dave laughed, one bark, and then a couple of the aunts laughed, and the kids started climbing back up the ladders, and the afternoon, somehow, began to move again.

Rex

Rex came over to me while the others were wiping down the deck. He stood beside me at the rail with his hands in his back pockets.

“I’ll take her in,” he said. “We’ll run one of the rentals back to the marina. You and Glenn bring your mom home on Dave’s boat.”

“Rex,” I said. “What was that?”

He looked across the cove for a long time. “She’s been carrying something,” he said. “A long time. I don’t think it’s mine to tell. But it isn’t about the cake, Allison.”

“It was a $450 cake,” I said, and I hated how small it sounded the second it came out of my mouth.

Rex nodded like he had expected that. “I know it was,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’ll make it right however you want.”

He untied the second rental pontoon from our rail, and Kate stepped onto it without looking at anybody. Rex eased it out of the raft and turned it toward Nisswa, and we watched them go.