The Second Cake on Mom’s Dock

What Kate said

“I booked those boats in February,” Kate said. “I paid $850 for two pontoons. I made a chart. I drove three hours with a cooler of ice in the back seat because I didn’t trust the marina to have enough.”

“I know you did.”

“Forty-one people on that text,” she said. “I answered every one of them. Where do we park. Can my dog come. Is there a bathroom on the boat. Forty-one people, Allison.”

“I know,” I said again, and I did not know what else to say.

“And she thanked your cake first,” Kate said. Her voice cracked. “Then Dave. Then the grandkids. Then the Lindgrens’ buoy. The Lindgrens’ buoy got thanked, and then she was done.”

“She wasn’t done,” I said. “She stopped to wipe her eyes. Rex clapped.”

Kate stared at me. “Rex clapped,” she said.

“Rex clapped,” I said. “Everybody followed Rex. I don’t think she ever got to the end of the card.”

Kate put her hand over her mouth. She sat down hard on the edge of the dock with her legs over the water, and I sat down next to her, a few feet apart.

Second best

For a long time we sat there with our feet over the water and did not talk. A boat went by out on the main lake, and its wake came in and rocked the dock under us.

“You were always the easy one,” Kate said finally. “Do you know that? That’s what she called you. My easy one. Her helper. In the kitchen with her every Saturday from the time you were six.”

“I know she called me that.”

“I was the one with the mouth,” Kate said. “I was the one who moved to Fargo at nineteen with a boy she didn’t like, and came back at twenty-two with nothing. You were the one who stayed.”

“You came back, though,” I said. “You came back and you finished school.”

“I came back, and I spent almost thirty years being the one who came back,” Kate said. “You don’t get thanked for coming back, Allison. You get forgiven. It isn’t the same.”

I did not answer, because she was right, and because I had known it for a long time. I had liked being the easy one. I had liked being the helper. I had let her be the other one, because it made me look better.

That is the second part of this story that makes me look less good. I am leaving that in too.

“When she said your name first,” Kate said, “something in me just went. Like a fuse. I don’t even remember picking it up. I remember the water and Tess’s face.”

“Tess’s all right.”

“I scared her,” Kate said. “I scared my own niece in the lake. And I did that to Mom on her birthday. In front of everybody she knows.” She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes. “I’m fifty years old.”