The Second Cake on Mom’s Dock

The knife

I got up and walked to the card table and picked up the cake knife. It was Mom and Dad’s, from their wedding, a silver knife with a long thin blade and a little worn spot on the handle.

I had found it in Mom’s drawer that afternoon. Every birthday cake she had ever cut for us, she had cut with that knife.

I walked back and held it out to Kate, handle first.

She looked at it and did not take it. “What’s that for?”

“You’re cutting it,” I said. “Tonight. In front of everybody.”

“Allison,” she said. “No. The whole cove heard about it. Glenn went around to every dock. They all know what I did.”

“I know they know,” I said. “That’s why you’re cutting it.”

I want to be honest about what was in my heart when I said that. Part of it was grace. Part of it was not. Part of it was that I wanted her to stand in front of all of those people with what she had done, and not get to hide in Rex’s truck.

I do not think that part was wrong. I think you can forgive somebody and still ask them to stand up.

Kate looked at the knife for a long time. Then she reached up and took it.

Six o’clock

The boats started coming around five-thirty. Pontoons, fishing boats, one old wooden runabout the retired couple on the point had restored. They tied off to Mom’s dock and the Lindgrens’ and the empty dock next door.

People walked along the shore too, carrying lawn chairs and casserole dishes and bags of chips. Ted Lindgren had his grill going by the shed, and the smell of brats came drifting down over the water.

By six there were close to seventy people in Mom’s yard and on her dock and on the boats tied alongside. Uncle Dave came back, and most of the cousins, and the whole cove.

Mom sat in a lawn chair at the end of the dock, beside the card table. Somebody had given her a jelly jar of daisies from the ditch, and she held it in her lap.

She had not asked me a single question about Kate all afternoon. When Kate came down the dock with the knife, Mom only looked up at her and waited.

Kate stood beside the cake. Her hands were shaking. Everybody got quiet, the way they had on the pontoon the day before, but it was a different kind of quiet.

“Most of you heard I threw the first one in the lake,” Kate said. Her voice carried out across the water. “I did. Allison made this one last night. I’m cutting it because she told me to.”

There was a little laughter, kind laughter, mostly from the men by the grill. Somebody said, “Good for her.” I do not know if they meant me or Kate. I have decided it was both.

Kate put the knife to the top tier to cut Mom’s slice first.

The card

Before Kate could press down, Mom reached into the pocket of her blouse and took out the index card. The same one from the pontoon. It was wrinkled and the ink had run in one corner.

“Hold on, Katie,” Mom said. “I never finished.”

Kate froze with the knife resting on the cake.

Mom put on her reading glasses. She did not stand up this time. She read from her lawn chair, loud enough for the dock and the boats and the yard.

“And last,” she read, “I want to thank my Katie. Katie planned this whole day. She called me in February and told me I was going on the water. She has been making things happen my whole life while the rest of us were still talking about them.”

Kate made a sound. Not a word.

“When her dad was dying,” Mom read, “Katie drove from Fargo every Friday for eleven months. Three hours each way. She never once told me she was tired. I saved her for last, because the last thing you say is the one people remember.”

Mom lowered the card. She took her glasses off and looked up at Kate, standing there with the knife in the cake.

“That’s what was on the card,” Mom said. “I should have said it sooner than seventy, honey. That one’s on me.”