The Top Tier I Sent My Niece

The Forty-One Who Came

The knife was my grandmother’s, silver gone soft gray at the handle, and my hand did not shake when I set it to the cake.

I had decided in the car that morning that it would not.

Seth stood behind me with his palm flat against my back, and the hall smelled like buttercream and the lilacs somebody had cut from their own yard and crowded into mason jars down the middle of every table.

Forty-one people watched me cut it. I had counted them twice during the toast, the way you count a thing when you cannot quite believe it is holding together.

The front two tables sat empty. Somebody had set them, folded the napkins into little tents, filled the water glasses.

Then nobody came to sit in them, and the glasses sweated themselves into rings on the paper cloth while the fiddle player tuned up.

Those two tables were for my family. I had asked the church ladies to reserve them.

My mother, my father, my sister April, my niece Kaylee, two aunts, a set of cousins. Eleven chairs, give or take.

Eleven chairs, and not one of them filled.

“You want the first piece, or you want to feed it to him,” Darlene whispered at my elbow.

Darlene did the flowers and the cake for half the weddings in the county out of her kitchen on Route H, and she had done mine for cost because she said she liked my face.

“I’ll feed it to him,” I said.

So I cut a corner piece, the white cake with the lemon between the layers, and I turned and put it to Seth’s mouth gentle as I could, and he took it and got frosting on his chin on purpose to make me laugh, and I did laugh, and the forty-one people clapped like it was the best thing they had seen all year.

Maybe for some of them it was. We are not a county with a lot going on in June.

That is where I want to start, with the cutting, because by then the worst of it was already behind me and I had made my peace with it standing at the cake table in my mother’s borrowed veil.

But you cannot understand the top tier, or the card, or the phone call that came three weeks later and undid every brave thing I had told myself, without going back to how those two tables came to be empty.