The Name That Stopped the Legion Hall
My mother got to the cake knife before either of us could reach it.
One second it was lying on the table beside the cake on the table, and the next it was in her hand, raised a little, like a prize she had won at the county fair.
“I’m having a girl!” she yelled, and before Josh or I could say one word, she pushed the blade straight down into the middle of our cake.
Pink. It was pink all the way through, a bright strawberry pink against the white frosting, and fifty people in the American Legion hall made a sound that was half a gasp and half a cheer.
I stood there with my hand still out where the knife had been. Josh had his hand over mine.
We had practiced this. We had talked about it in the truck, how we would hold the knife together and count to three. We never got to one.
People clapped, because that is what you do. Folks in southern Illinois will clap for nearly anything if it happens in a Legion hall and somebody is holding up cake.
They clapped politely, the way you clap when you are not sure what you saw.
Josh looked down at me. He did not say anything. He did not have to.
I could see the question on his face as plain as a road sign, and the question was, do you want me to handle this, or do you?
I looked at the cake. There was a hole in the middle of it now, a ragged pink hole, and a smear of frosting on the tabletop where Mama had set the piece down too fast.
I should back up and say how my mother knew. Because she did know.
She yelled it before the knife went in, and nobody yells “I’m having a girl” at a cake unless she already knows what is inside it.
Josh and I found out at our twenty week appointment in Carbondale. We asked the sonographer not to tell us.
She smiled, wrote it on a slip of paper, folded it twice, and sealed it in a plain white envelope that I held on my lap all the way home.
We drove that envelope straight to Kim’s Bakery on the square, the same bakery that did our wedding cake two years before.
Kim’s niece was working the counter. We handed it over and asked for a white cake, pink or blue inside, whatever the paper said.
“Nobody knows but you,” I told the girl. “Not my mom, not his mom, not anybody. You are the only person on earth who knows.” She laughed and said she would guard it with her life.
Mama offered to pick the cake up Saturday morning. I said yes because I had a dozen other things to do, and because it never crossed my mind that she would ask.
She asked. She told me later she stood at the counter for ten minutes, charming that poor girl, saying she was the grandma and she had a right, and could the girl just nod if it was pink. The girl nodded.
The Legion hall in our town sits a block off the highway, a low tan building with a gravel lot and a flagpole that the Post keeps lit at night.
Inside it smells like coffee and floor wax and a hundred years of fish fries.