by Doug Dorst
She asked him how the plans for the wedding were going.
“The groom hasn’t run away to Mexico or anything. So I guess we’re in good shape.”
“You know, Joel,” she purred, “you never told me about the cake you’re getting. The Rona Silverman.”
“We designed it together. Nine tiers, white and dark chocolate—El Rey and Scharffen Berger, of course—with chocolate-dipped strawberries on top and decorations that’ll knock everyone’s socks off. And it’s going to taste incredible .”
“The water.”
“Like I said, it’s magic.”
“When does the plane get in? I could pick it up. I could assemble it for you, help with the decorations.”
“No need. One of Rona’s assistants flies in with the cake.”
“Still,” Kacy said, “I have to taste it. I mean, I’d like to. Or see it. Could I see it?”
“I don’t see why not. Professional courtesy, right? It’s coming in on Friday, the day before the wedding. Let me check the time. Hang on.” Then, in the background, Kacy heard a woman’s angry voice ask him what in hell he thought he was doing. The voice demanded that he hand over the phone.
“We have no need for your services,” the voice said to Kacy. “My husband should have made that clear ages ago. And you’ve kept calling him—”
“I have not,” Kacy said.
“Don’t lie to me. You’ve been all over our caller ID. Know what I think? I think you’re stalking our cake.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“It’s freakish, is what it is. I promise you, if you come anywhere near us, I’ll have you hauled off to jail. This is my only daughter’s wedding, and it will not—repeat, will not—be fucked with. Not by you. Not by anyone.”
What was her problem? Kacy wasn’t going to do anything wrong. She just wanted to see this cake that everyone thought was the best goddamned cake ever in the whole wide world. She opened her date book to look at the days that she’d blocked out for the Dinaburg wedding. When she got to the right page, she saw that her notes had been obliterated by huge, childish, purple-crayon letters: KENNYS BIRDAY! I AM 6! She had forgotten. Good Lord, she was a freak.
That week Roger finally won a trial, and he and Kacy slept together. It was passionate and dramatic, celebratory and desperate, with lots of twisting and licking and shoving and clutching and sweat. When they rolled apart from each other, Kacy felt herself melting away with a warm, dreamy clarity she hadn’t felt in ages.
They were awakened when Kenny’s panicked cries tore the quiet of the dark house. Roger slung on a robe and went to help him. Through the half-open doorway, she saw them walk hand in hand toward the bathroom. She heard water running; heard Roger talking in a hushed, reassuring voice; saw him carry the towel-wrapped boy back to his room; heard clean sheets shaken open; and heard Kenny murmuring quietly, the sound of a child feeling safe and loved. A clot of emotion formed behind her eyes, filling her head with a dense, wet pressure. She’d been finding herself choked up a lot lately, suddenly and for no good reason—a happy ending in a sitcom, the taste of cinnamon, a rainbow in the mist at the car wash. She wasn’t prone to swings like these, and she distrusted them, but this one seemed to make sense. Roger was a good man and a good father. Her eyes teared up, and in her vision the light from the hallway sent out fuzzy winking-crystal rays.
Kenny’s light snapped out, and Roger came back into the room. He sat on the edge of the bed with his back to her. She admired his silhouetted shoulders. Honest shoulders, she thought.
“He shit the bed,” Roger said.
“Was it a bad dream? What was he saying?”
“He said he had a scary dream about his mommy.”
“Should I go in there and show him I’m all right?”
“He was scared of you, not for you.”
She stared up at the ceiling. She was getting what she deserved; that was the worst part.
When Roger’s breathing slowed into a rhythm of sleep, Kacy got out of bed and crept down the dark hallway to April’s door. She turned the knob quietly. She wasn’t intruding; she just wanted to watch her daughter sleep, watch her breathe, watch her wake up in the morning, watch as her fingers went to her head and started pulling.
She was inching open the door when it hit something solid. She pushed a little harder, but the object wouldn’t give. She leaned her weight against the door, but she couldn’t get any traction on the carpet in her slippers, so she kicked them off. Leaned again. Still nothing. She put her eye up to the narrow crack and saw what was stopping her: April had barricaded her bedroom door with her desk, the beautiful cherrywood writing desk that Kacy had spotted at an auction and bid on ferociously because it was just so perfect for her daughter. She sat down, beaten, with her back against the wall. The central heat clicked off, and somewhere downstairs the dog sneezed, and then everything was still.
The day before Kenny’s party, Kacy drove all over town, picking up party favors and groceries and film, swearing that she’d make up for whatever she’d done wrong and give Kenny his best birthday ever. She was ruthlessly efficient in her shopping, and on the way home, since she’d gotten everything done in half the time she’d allotted, she took a quick drive out to the airport. She put on her sunglasses even though the day was cloudy, and she drove around the airport loop again and again, hoping she’d get lucky and spot the cake. She tailed a shuttle van from the Four Seasons, watched as passengers climbed on, but they were all corporate types with briefcases—nobody burdened with a nine-high stack of cake boxes. After ten or fifteen passes through the loop, a policewoman waved her down and asked if everything was all right. The officer’s scrutiny burned through her. “I’m supposed to pick up a friend,” Kacy managed, “but I guess he’s not here.”
“Can’t keep driving through,” the officer said. “Park and go inside, if you want.”
She would not remember driving home. Inside the garage, she opened the trunk to find that the ice cream had melted and one carton had leaked, sending out skinny liquid-strawberry fingers that pointed every which way.
She made Kenny’s birthday cake that evening—a perfect reproduction of his baseball glove in sweet, sweet yellow cake and milk-chocolate icing. She’d found the mitt in the garage, cradled inside Roger’s larger mitt, each with the same smell of leather and grass and neat’s-foot oil. She incorporated every detail into the cake’s design: the checkerboard webbing, the smudgy grass stains on the fingertips, the violent slice down the middle of the palm from when Kenny had left it in the yard and Roger had hit it with the lawn mower.
The house was quiet; everyone had gone to bed. Often, when she baked, she’d enter an intense state of focus—a trance, even—and when she was done, she’d be surprised at how much had gone on without her. She looked at the clock. Dinaburg’s cake must have arrived. It was there. In downtown Austin. At the Four Seasons. One-point-eight miles from where she was sitting in her white, white kitchen in Travis Heights. I will not try to find the cake, she told herself. I will not go there. I will not call there. She sat at her desk and shoveled fistfuls of Tootsie Rolls and lollipops into little paper loot bags for Kenny’s friends. The air held the sweet, buttery smell of baking and the homey warmth still radiating from the ovens. This usually calmed her—the aroma, the heat—but now it just reminded her that she’d spent all night baking a childish yellow cake instead of the crowning work of her career, the cake that would win her customers in New York and London and Paris, the cake that would land her in the pages of Bridal Elegance. She picked up the phone and called the hotel. An eager-to-please young woman told her that the Dinaburg-Fleischner wedding would begin at five-thirty the next day. There was no problem, Kacy told herself. Kenny’s party would end at six. She could do it all: make Kenny happy, talk to Dinaburg, see the cake in private before it got wheeled out to the reception. She could even bow out of the party a little early. Roger and Marisol could handle it.
Upstairs, she changed for bed and
slid under the covers next to Roger. He was snoring lightly. She nudged him awake and told him she might have to leave Kenny’s party as soon as it was over. Or maybe just a tiny little smidge early. He harrumphed and turned away. She lay still, letting her mind zoom from image to image: Dinaburg’s cake, chilling inside the hotel walk-in. Kacy bursting into the reception and knocking the cake to the floor as five hundred snobby mouths drop in horror. Running into Rona Silverman herself at the wedding and calling her a gum-paste fraud. The cake in the walk-in again, only this time, Dinaburg standing with her, boasting, gloating.
Holding the image of him, she slid her hand down her bare stomach and touched herself. She could seduce him tomorrow, if she wanted to, right there in the walk-in. She could undo the trousers of his tux and coax him into hardness even as the cold air prickled their skin and made his scrotum shrink tight around his balls. Yes, she could take him there, could lay him down on a serving tray and take him, fuck him, own him, while his wife and his daughter and the guests and the rabbi and Rona Silverman all looked at their watches and wondered where the hell the father of the bride was.
The weather held, so they had the birthday party outside. Wearing a gold mylar birthday-boy crown, Kenny opened all of his presents, flinging shreds of brightly colored wrapping paper into the air faster than Kacy could collect them. The entire cake was wolfed down in no time—why had she bothered with all the details?—along with quart after quart of ice cream, and the backyard was humming with sugar-fueled little boys with buzz cuts and wide-open mouths that were short on front teeth. Mooch the beagle nosed around under the redwood picnic tables, lapping up bits of cake from the grass. Skillet was there, too. He’d appeared in their yard that morning like a stray, his dyed-black hair sticking up in unruly tufts. He wore a pair of blue service-station coveralls with a name patch that said WOODY. There was an angry silver spike through the skin beneath his lower lip, and Kacy noticed he was trying to grow a mustache, without much success.
Marisol sat with her, watching the boys play. Kacy tried to sneak a glance at her watch, but Marisol saw her. “You do that all afternoon,” Marisol said. “Why?”
“I have a wedding after this. I can’t be late. I know that sounds awful, but I have other responsibilities. It’s just a fact.”
Marisol nodded. “I am a mother, too, Mrs. Burroughs.”
“So you know how I feel.”
“You go when you must go. I will take care of the things here.” Marisol gathered up all the used paper plates and plastic utensils and carried the garbage bag up to the house.
April—wearing a dirt-smudged beer-logo bucket hat that Kacy guessed was Skillet’s—was playing with the boys, letting them chase her, weaving and feinting with more agility than Kacy had thought her blocky frame would allow. When Kenny hurled himself at April’s leg and clung while she ran, April laughed—a rich, honest, adult laugh that Kacy couldn’t remember hearing before. Skillet was camped out on a chaise longue with a cup of fruit punch, watching April with a dazed, sleepy smile.
Roger, to whom she’d hardly spoken all afternoon, appeared on the patio and blew a four-fingered whistle that stopped the boys in their tracks. “Know what time it is, fellas?” he called out, lifting a huge papier-mâché baseball out of a cardboard box. “It’s piñata time!” He held the ball over his head proudly, and the kids clustered around him as he walked across the grass to the sturdy live oak that grew in the yard. With a short length of rope, he hung the piñata from the tree’s lowest limb.
Kacy seated herself at one of the picnic tables and surveyed the scene. She’d leave soon. Right after the piñata. “I think that’s going to be too high for them,” she called out.
“No, it’s not,” Roger said in a sugary, carefree tone that she knew was meant to rankle her. He looked up at the baseball, and then down at the little people jostling around him. “They can ride on my shoulders.”
“Whatever you say,” she said. She flicked a glob of brown icing off the table and sucked her nail clean.
Roger told Kenny to be polite and let his friends go first, so Kenny just danced in place and sized up the ball with eager eyes. April tied a blindfold on the first boy in line and then handed him a broomstick after Roger hoisted him up on his shoulders. Roger bobbed gently through an orbit around the ball, letting the kid get a few licks in, but never allowing him enough leverage to do more than rock the ball harmlessly. After a few more boys had their turns, Skillet took over piggyback duty, and Kacy was pleased to see that he was following Roger’s lead, rigging the game so the birthday boy could strike the killing blow. When it was Kenny’s turn, April lifted him onto her shoulders. She brought him close to the piñata and stood still, but Kenny missed the ball entirely, slashing wild verticals through the air.
Kacy looked at her watch. It was 4:52. Hit it, Kenny. Why can’t you hit it?
“Level swing, Kenny,” Roger coached. “Focus.”
Kenny hit the ball dead-on. Nothing happened. Twice more, and still nothing happened.
“Hold on,” Roger said. “I have an idea.” He jogged over to Kenny’s pile of presents and picked up the baseball bat he’d given to his son, a gleaming piece of lacquered ash. When he’d brought it home the week before, Kacy had tried to convince him that the bat was too big for Kenny, but he’d waved her off, tied a blue bow around it, and hidden it in their closet. Every time she’d looked at the bat since then she’d been more and more certain that it would break something of hers. It was just a question of when and what and how badly.
Roger slid off the bow and handed the bat to Kenny, who squealed when he felt the heft in his hands.
“I don’t think that’s smart, Roger,” Kacy called, but at the same time she felt herself drifting, disconnecting, her attention captured by the faint but steady chik chik chik of the sprinklers next door watering Mr. Weeks’s garden.
Roger turned to her with his hands on his hips. “It’s fine,” he said. “It’s a baseball bat, for Christ’s sake.”
“My mother says you shouldn’t take the Lord’s name in vain,” a redheaded boy said.
Roger turned to him. “Thank you, Peter,” he said.
At that moment, Kenny swung so hard he lost his balance, and April lurched sideways to keep him from falling off her shoulders. Someone shouted, and Kenny swung again just as Roger turned back to look. The bat caught him squarely in the face. Kacy heard bone crunch. She guessed it was his nose. She’d watched it happen without really seeing it; she’d thought vaguely of shouting a warning, but her mouth felt heavy and slow and it had stayed closed.
April screamed, and Roger fell, his hands clutched to his face. Kenny lifted his blindfold, saw his father bleeding, and burst into tears. Kacy ran to them and took charge. She ordered the boys—including the bawling Kenny—up to the house, where Marisol could watch them. She lifted Roger by the elbow, silently cursing him for getting hurt when the danger was so obvious, and now she’d have to waste hours waiting in a hard plastic chair outside the emergency room and she’d miss Dinaburg and the cake entirely. She had her car keys already in her hand when a better solution struck her. After all, Roger wouldn’t be any worse off if she met him at the hospital later.
“Take your father to the hospital,” she said to April. “I have work to do.” When the stunned faces turned to her, she felt the warm, buzzy lightness that comes with decisions you can never unmake. Blood streamed through Roger’s hands and speckled his sweatshirt and jeans. His eyes on Kacy were calm and lucid, which Kacy thought was remarkable, considering the pain he had to be in. “I warned you,” she said. He shook his head slowly, said nothing, and hiked up the sloping lawn toward the garage, stopping halfway to pick up a crumpled party napkin off the grass and clamp it to his face. From inside the house, Kenny let loose a piercing, frightened wail that Kacy knew would be heard for blocks, and then the screen door slapped open, and Kenny ran outside and launched himself at Roger’s leg, clinging, crying. Kacy watched as Roger knelt and spoke softly to hi
m, wiping one bloody hand dry on his jeans before running it through the boy’s hair.
Kacy looked at April, at her chunky legs and acne-pitted cheeks and the little half-moon of scalp that interrupted her hairline, and she saw the only thing she could save. “Change of plans,” she said. She took the key to the car off her ring and handed it to Skillet. “You drive him, William,” she said. “April, you’re coming with me in the minivan.”
Skillet stood still, the car key resting in his open palm. The key was the same silver color as the piece of metal he’d seen fit to stick through his face. He looked stupefied. Kacy wondered if he was on something.
“We should be with Dad,” April said in the van. “This is fucked. This is so fucked.”
“There’s something I want you to see,” Kacy said, “some people I want you to meet.” She imagined the Dinaburg girl, a pale East Coast beauty, slim and beautiful in a Vera Wang dress, with a torrent of tight, dark, beautiful curls. “And let’s clean up the language.”
The tires squealed as Kacy turned onto South Congress, narrowly beating a red light. April, with the filthy bucket hat clenched in one hand, started running her other hand through her hair, front to back, front to back, front to back, in a perfect, metronomic rhythm. Her eyes were far away. “Don’t worry, honey,” Kacy said as they drove across the bridge. “Everything’s going to be all right. You’ll see.”
They arrived at the Four Seasons at 5:21. Kacy left the van with a valet and hurried into the earth-toned lobby, pulling April along with her. Between two lemon trees in terra-cotta pots, a sign with Dinaburg-Fleischner Wedding in white plastic letters pointed guests to the east wing. They went downstairs, where Kacy knew they’d find the dressing rooms for the wedding parties. She heard Dinaburg’s voice raised high with good cheer and, with a tug on April’s arm, followed it to a half-open door. Dinaburg, wearing a white yarmulke, stood with his back to them, a glass of red wine in his hand. He looked good in his tuxedo, she thought; his shoulders sloped more than she liked, but his butt had a cute little curve to it—not like Roger’s sheer-drop wall of an ass. She caught a glimpse of a long white dress in the far corner of the room. The bride was surrounded by people—one of whom, Kacy guessed, was Dinaburg’s snarly bitch of a wife—but she could tell that the girl was a tiny thing, with porcelain skin and a button nose and thin wrists and the dark curls that Kacy had imagined.
