The Second Cake on Mom’s Dock

The cove

At seven the next morning, Glenn put his old fishing boat in at Mom’s and went around the whole cove, dock by dock.

He told me later he did not knock on a single door. He just idled up to each dock and waited, and somebody always came down the yard with a coffee cup to see what he wanted.

“Leigh’s having a birthday,” he told every one of them. “Tonight at six, at her dock. There’s cake. Bring a lawn chair if you’ve got one.”

Ted Lindgren said he would bring his grill and a cooler of brats. His wife said she had forty folding chairs from the church in Nisswa sitting in her garage from the fish fry.

The retired couple on the point, who had only bought their place two summers before, said they had never been invited to anything on the cove in two years, and they would not miss it.

By the time Glenn came back to the landing, he had been to nineteen docks. Every one of them had heard about the cake in the lake already. Sound carries on water, and so does news.

The text

Before I went to bed for two hours, I sent Kate one text. I wrote it four different ways and deleted three.

What I sent said: Six tonight. Mom’s dock. Bring Rex.

That was all. I did not say anything about the cake or the pontoon or the thirty people. I did not say, How could you. I had promised Mom.

She did not answer. I watched the phone until my eyes closed, and then I slept on top of the covers in my clothes until Glenn woke me at six-thirty to say he was heading out on the lake.

Five o’clock

We brought the new cake to Mom’s in the van at four, Glenn driving thirty again with the air on high. I stacked the tiers on a card table at the end of the dock, under the shade of a beach umbrella.

At five, Rex’s truck came down the gravel drive. He parked by the shed and walked down the yard alone, and he came out onto the dock where I was setting out plates.

“She’s in the truck,” he said. “She hasn’t slept either. She wanted to come early and talk to you, if that’s all right. If it isn’t, I’ll take her home.”

“It’s all right,” I said.

He nodded and went back up the yard, and a minute later Kate came down to the dock by herself. She had on sunglasses and an old Bison sweatshirt, and she walked like she was walking on ice.

She stopped about ten feet away from me. She looked at the cake on the card table for a long time.

“You made another one,” she said.

“I made another one.”

“Overnight.”

“Mostly.”

She took her sunglasses off. Her eyes were swollen. She looked older than fifty, and for a second she looked exactly like Mom.