The Second Cake on Mom’s Dock

The dock

Uncle Dave brought us back to Mom’s place a little before six. The sun was getting low and gold over the west side of the lake, and the water had gone calm.

Mom’s cabin sits at the back of the cove, a small brown place Dad built with his brother in 1984, with a dock that runs forty feet out over the shallows and a bench at the end of it.

Glenn and Dave tied the boat off. Tess ran up the yard to the outdoor shower. Mom and I walked out to the end of the dock and sat on the bench, the way she and Dad used to sit every night after supper.

We did not say anything for a while. A pair of loons were working the drop-off out past the Lindgrens’ buoy, diving and coming up, diving and coming up.

“I keep thinking about how it just sat there,” Mom said finally. “Floating, all three tiers, like it was waiting for somebody to come get it. It looked so pretty, even then.”

“I’m sorry, Mom.”

“What on earth are you sorry for?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “For the day.”

She turned the index card over in her hands. It had gotten damp from the spray, and the ink had run a little in one corner. She did not show it to me, and I did not ask.

“I’ll tell you something,” she said. “That was the nicest thing anybody ever made me. I got to look at it for twenty minutes. Some people never get twenty minutes.”

That was when I decided. I did not plan it out. It came up in me all at once, sitting on that bench with the loons calling.

“Mom,” I said. “What are you doing tomorrow at six o’clock?”

She gave me a look. “Same as today, I suppose. Sitting on this dock.”

“Good,” I said. “Then you’re having a party on it.”

The night

People have asked me since why I did not just go to the store in Nisswa and buy a sheet cake and let it go. A sheet cake would have fed everybody fine.

But nobody had ever made Mom a cake in seventy years, and I was not going to let a store sheet cake be the first one she actually got to eat.

Glenn understood without my explaining any of it. He looked at the clock in the truck when we got back to Baxter, said, “They close at eleven,” and drove straight to the grocery store.

He came back with ten pounds of butter, four dozen eggs, fifteen pounds of powdered sugar, three bags of flour and every lemon they had left. The receipt said $112.48. He put it on the counter and did not say a word about it.

I baked from nine at night until a little after four in the morning. Tess creamed butter with me until almost midnight and then fell asleep on the couch with a rubber spatula still in her hand.

I piped every pearl again, white on white, tier by tier. Tess had done the whole bottom row before she fell asleep, the same as the first time.

At one point around two in the morning, I stood at the back door with a cup of coffee and looked out at the yard light and the moths, and I cried for about five minutes. Then I went back in and crumb-coated the bottom tier.