The Second Cake on Mom’s Dock

The slice

Kate cut Mom’s slice. She cut it crooked, because she was crying so hard she could not see the cake, and it came out of the top tier in two pieces.

She put both pieces on a plate. Then she knelt down on the dock in front of Mom’s lawn chair, the way I had knelt on the pontoon, and she held the plate out with both hands.

“I’m sorry, Mama,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I ruined your day.”

Mom took the plate and set it on the card table. Then she took Kate’s face in both her hands, the way she used to when we were small and had a fever.

“You gave me the day,” Mom said. “Then you gave me two of them. I’m the only woman on this lake who got two birthday parties this year.”

Kate laughed, and it came out wet, and she put her head down in Mom’s lap like a little girl, and Mom stroked her hair, and nobody on that dock or on those boats said one word.

Tess came and stood beside me. She took my hand. She was ten, and she did not entirely understand it, but she understood enough to stand still.

After a minute Mom said, “Well, somebody had better cut the rest of this before it melts,” and Uncle Dave hollered that he would do it if nobody else would, and the whole cove laughed, and Kate stood up and picked up the knife.

She cut every slice. All seventy-some of them. She did not let me help. She cut them crooked and straight and every way in between, and she handed every plate to every person herself.

The plates

Mom had insisted on real plates. She said paper plates were for picnics and this was a party. She had borrowed eighty plates from the church, the heavy white ones from the basement kitchen.

When the boats started pulling out around nine, and the yard light came on, and the loons started up again out past the buoy, Kate went up to the shed and came back with the big galvanized washtub.

She ran the hose into it at the end of the dock and squirted in half a bottle of dish soap. Then she sat down on an overturned bucket, rolled up the sleeves of her sweatshirt, and started washing.

“You don’t have to do all of them,” I said.

“Yes, I do,” Kate said.

So I got a stack of dish towels from Mom’s clothesline and sat down on the dock beside her and dried.

We did not talk at first. We just washed and dried and stacked. Rex and Glenn carried the clean stacks up to the porch in laundry baskets. Mom sat in her lawn chair and watched us and did not say anything.