The Wedding Cake Grandma and I Baked

“She said the wedding is off, Hannah. She said it like she was reading me the weather.”

That was Marcy, who has run the bakery on Main Street in Pine Creek, Wisconsin, for twenty-six years. She was on the phone with me at ten after three on a Thursday afternoon in June.

I was standing in the back hallway of the dental clinic in Menomonie with a paper mask hanging off one ear. I had a patient in my chair with a mouth full of fluoride foam and a timer running.

My wedding was Saturday at two o’clock. Forty-seven hours away.

“Who said it was off?” I asked, although I already knew. There was only one person in the world who could have called that bakery and been believed.

“Pam,” Marcy said. “Pam Gerber. The order is in her name, honey. She put the deposit on her card back in January. When the person who placed the order calls and cancels, I cancel. I refunded her two hundred dollars at eleven this morning.”

I leaned against the wall. The wall was cold and painted the same pale green as every clinic in America.

“Marcy, the wedding is not off.”

“I was afraid you’d say that,” she said. “That’s why I’m calling. You dropped off your grandmother’s cake topper last week. I was going to ask where you wanted it returned. Something in my stomach told me to ask you first.”

The slot that was already gone

I want to say this plainly, because people always ask it. Why didn’t I just tell Marcy to put the order back?

I did. Of course I did.

“Can you still make it?” I said. “I’ll pay all of it. The whole six hundred and forty. Right now, today.”

“Hannah.” Her voice went soft, and I knew. “Honey, at noon a girl from Durand called me crying. Her cake lady fell off a ladder Tuesday and broke her wrist in two places. Her wedding is Saturday too. Two hundred guests. I already had the Hendricks girl at the Legion hall, a hundred and fifty. I gave that girl your slot.”

“Oh,” I said.

“I have one oven and one high school girl helping me. I’ve got eleven tiers between those two weddings now. I’m going to be here until three in the morning both nights as it is. If I take yours back, I ruin somebody’s cake. I’d be choosing which bride cries.”

“I’m sick about it,” Marcy said. “I can’t tell you how sick.”

“It’s not your fault,” I said, and I meant it. “You did what anyone would do.”

Where Nate was

You are going to ask where my fiance was. Everybody does.

Nate Gerber sells seed corn and soybeans to farmers in three counties. He is twenty-eight, he is steady, and he knows the difference between a planter and a drill, which matters a great deal in the town where we live. Planting was done by the end of May that year, and the week of the wedding was the first slow week he’d had since March.

His cousins had taken him up north Wednesday night for the bachelor trip. Two nights at his cousin Kyle’s cabin on a little lake past Hayward, fishing for crappies and eating bratwurst out of a cast iron pan. They were due back Friday by suppertime for the rehearsal.

There is no cell signal at that cabin. None. Kyle’s family likes it that way. You have to drive eleven miles to the gas station at the county road to get one bar.

I called Nate anyway. It went straight to voicemail. I left a message, then I texted, knowing it would sit there until he drove out for ice or bait.

“Call me when you get this,” I wrote. “Everything is fine with us. Your mom canceled the cake. I’m handling it. I love you.”