A Long Line of Cakes

by Deborah Wiles

  Indeed he had, when Ruby had followed the Cake boys into the store after retrieving her notes from the silver maple. He could recall every word.

  “Who are you?” Ruby had asked. Full stop. Ben had just stared back. Nobody, he’d wanted to say, but he hadn’t said a word. None of your business also occurred to him, but he hadn’t said that, either.

  “That’s my eldest, Ben,” sparkled Arlouin Cake. “Benjamin Lord Baltimore Cake, meet Ruby Lavender. She’s not very sweet.”

  “What a mouthful,” said Miss Mattie, who had not accepted a muffin to eat, but did take several to put in a basket by the cash register. “Is that the name on his birth certificate?”

  Arlouin nodded. “Absolutely! We named each of our children after the cake we were baking when they were born.”

  “Let me hear them.” Miss Mattie crossed her arms in front of her chest. Each Cake boy spoke around the muffin he was eating and muffled out a name.

  “Humph!” said Miss Mattie. “And I suppose you”—she gave Arlouin a sharp look—“are the only family member without a cake name, since you married into the family.”

  “Oh no,” said Arlouin quickly, happily. “I took my husband’s name, Cake, when we married, and added Hummingbird Spice! We had a hummingbird spice wedding cake. Four layers tall. With Corinthian column support pillars!”

  Miss Mattie pursed her lips as if she was trying to keep herself from making a remark she might later regret.

  “We’ll be opening the bakery just for experimental purposes for the next week or two … or more … while we work out the kinks,” said Arlouin, as if she’d been asked about this. “The Grand Opening celebration will be a week or so after that. Our landlady, Miss Eula Dapplevine, has secured our permits and has been most generous about seeing that we have what we need to get started here in Halleluia.”

  Miss Mattie looked to the heavens, from whence her help did not come. “Why are you here?” she asked Arlouin.

  “She’s here because I rented them the building,” said a voice from the front screen doors.

  “Miss Eula!” Ruby forgot all about Benjamin Lord Baltimore Cake and ran to embrace her grandmother.

  “It’s been too long!” Miss Eula said, her granddaughter in her arms. “And no, that grandbaby Leilani is not cuter than you are, and Hawaii is not better than Halleluia, and I told you I’d come back, and I did, just like last time. I left you a note already—did you get it?”

  “I did,” said Ruby, all smiles. “I didn’t want to wake you up too early, because Mama said you’d be close to dawn getting in.”

  “Well, I’m here,” said Miss Eula, as she looked beyond Ruby to the assemblage. “And it looks like everyone else arrived in good order as well.”

  “We did, indeed,” said Arlouin Cake. “Thank you so much for all you did to make us comfortable last night.”

  “My pleasure,” said Miss Eula. “My friend Tot brought the milk and butter and eggs. You can thank her when you meet her.”

  “If she brings food for a welcome gift, don’t eat it,” said Ruby.

  Mary Wilson, Cleebo Wilson’s mother, strutted purposefully through the front doors. “I’m all out of starch, Mattie,” she said, “and we’re about to open.”

  “This way,” said Miss Mattie, glad for something concrete to do.

  “Eula!” exclaimed Mary Wilson. “Glad to have you home. You missed quite a game yesterday. My Cleebo was a hero!”

  “So I heard!” said Miss Eula. She turned to Arlouin. “You’ll want to know Mary,” she said. “She owns the Sunshine Laundry, three doors down, and she’s your best bet for clean aprons, kitchen towels, tablecloths, and such.”

  Mary Wilson nodded at Arlouin as she followed Miss Mattie to the starch. “Pleasure to meet you,” she called as she waved a hand, disappeared down an aisle, and broke into the Sunshine Laundry jingle: “Sunshine Laundry! Send us your sheets! Under new management! Can’t be beat!”

  Arlouin laughed. “I surely will,” she called back.

  Then she gathered her basket and her boys. “Cakes always know when to take their leave!”

  “I’m not done with your boy,” said Miss Mattie.

  “Keep him for as long as you need him, anytime you need him!” chirped Arlouin.

  And with that, she was gone, with Jody, Van, Roger, and Gordon trailing like obedient ducks behind her.

  Ruby had run out with the boys, which had left Benjamin Lord Baltimore Cake inside with Miss Mattie, and now outside, standing beside a compost pile he’d just been congratulated on turning.

  “Go get your glove,” said Miss Mattie, as she followed Ben’s gaze to the ball field where a gaggle of kids had gathered. “I expect you’re done for today.”

  “Yes, ma’am!” Ben shouted, already halfway to the back door of the Mercantile.

  “Hang up your apron!” she called after him. “Ask Eula if she needs any help first!”

  Ben smiled to himself as he ran back inside the Mercantile, grabbed his glove from the counter and shoved it in his armpit, and waved at Miss Eula, who shooed him out the door. All things considered, he was doing well so far in this new place. He had a job! He had a ball field right next to his house, so there would always be baseball, no matter what else happened. Next up, he told himself: Find a friend.

  All across Aurora County, at the same time Arlouin Cake was delivering her muffins and making friends (such as one can) with Miss Mattie Perkins, the children who had participated in the Aurora County 200th anniversary pageant and ball game against the Raleigh Redbugs the day before began to wake up. They yawned and stretched in their beds.

  Cleebo Wilson, the All-Stars’ first baseman, had stayed up late rereading the biography of Jackie Robinson his dad had given him long ago. “Met him once,” he’d told Cleebo. “Had a catch with him while he was still in the Negro Leagues. I was just a kid.”

  Now that Cleebo knew that Pip, the eighty-eight-year-old hero of yesterday’s All-Stars game, was his town’s Jackie Robinson, he had a new appreciation for the man and his story.

  Then there was Finesse, Pip’s great-granddaughter, she of the theatrical black curls accented with blue tips. Finesse, with her bangling bracelets and her broken French. She woke up smiling as wide as the sun, ready to embrace her biquettes. Yesterday had been a hard-won triumph for her, getting the boys to agree to dance, the girls to play ball. Everyone together, the symphony true, she thought with a smug smile. House had taught her about the symphony true—it was part of a poem—and she remembered.

  Melba Jane Latham woke up with her clipboard next to her bed, made a note in it that she thought Finesse would appreciate, and put on her second-best sundress and a pair of white lace gloves, even though it would be hot enough today to fry a round egg on a flat rock.

  Honey, House’s little sister, was already dressed in her shorts, shirt, and pink tutu. She ate a steaming plate of scrambled eggs that her father fixed for her. She spooned several bites into Eudora Welty’s bowl. The old pug dog smacked her lips appreciatively. She wore a pink tutu as well.

  Mr. Norwood Boyd’s creaky, vine-covered house was through the woods on a path from Honey’s house. It was empty now. Norwood had drawn his last breath earlier this summer, with House sitting next to him reading Treasure Island.

  For years, Aurora County kids had claimed the house was haunted, had run quickly past it when they were on the county road, and had called Norwood Boyd terrible names behind his back, when none of them but House had even seen the man in all their lives. They hadn’t understood.

  But after yesterday’s game, especially after Miss Mattie’s speech, they knew differently.

  Without planning it or saying a word to one another about it, the Aurora County All-Stars, ballplayers and dancers alike, began to show up at the baseball field behind Miss Mattie’s store, in ones and twos and threes, like weary little ground balls that bump from home plate to the bases, most of the stuffing popped out of them.

  Even House showed up. He wor
e his battered baseball cap and a sling that cradled his left elbow. They had won the game yesterday with House pitching for them, but he had destroyed his arm in the process. It hurt.

  At the moment everyone arrived, Arlouin Cake emerged from Miss Mattie’s store with a triumphant smile on her face. She was almost run over by Jody, Van, Roger, and Gordon. Ruby wasn’t far behind, although she didn’t run to the ball field. She sat on the back stoop of Miss Mattie’s store and read her two notes.

  “More kids!” shouted the Cake boys, although it sounded like muff kuff, as their mouths were full of muffins. They streaked across the sandy lane like the tail of one large comet minus their fiery nucleus, Ben.

  “More kids,” whispered Emma Lane Cake from her kitchen window outpost. Here were more kids in one place than she’d ever experienced on a first morning in a new home. Her brothers were accomplished at making a new friend before breakfast, but twelve new kids at once was a record.

  “More kids?” asked Leo, who had finally found the coffee cups. He opened the window over the kitchen sink to let in the breeze and the clangor, and took a long, appreciative sip of coffee he had drowned in sugar and milk. “This place is going to be a friend bonanza,” he declared.

  Emma thought of Annie, the friend she had just left, the friend who loved to braid Emma’s hair. Annie looked like the tall, brown girl on the baseball field, with the blue-tipped hair clipped to the top of her head, who was so seriously poring over something on a clipboard that a girl with short buttery curls and a fancy dress was showing her.

  Emma hadn’t even put Annie in her Friend Atlas yet. She had cried for so long in the car after they’d left, she’d made herself sick somewhere in Arkansas. “We’ll write,” she and Annie had told each other, but Emma and her friends always said that and they never wrote.

  It wasn’t that they didn’t want to be friends anymore. It’s just that writing wasn’t the same as being with someone. Writing required a remembrance of the pain of parting, for one thing. For another, life happened so fast and so much and so often, it was hard to even decide what to put on paper. Emma was better at drawing than writing, anyway.

  * * *

  The Aurora County kids were clustered under the chinaberry tree next to Halleluia School, which was on the far side of the ball field, when they spotted the Cake boys and dogs running for them.

  “Hey!” shouted Evan Evans and Wilkie Collins.

  “O mon père!” whispered Finesse.

  Melba clasped her clipboard to her chest.

  “Who is it?!” chirped Honey.

  “Boy howdy!” cheered the Tolbert Twins, Ned and Boon.

  George Latham, Melba’s oldest little brother, screamed, “Score! Score! Score!”

  And that was that. They took off running to meet their new friends halfway.

  Jody, Van, Roger, and Gordon were right in the middle of the Aurora County kids now, a mess of dogs (theirs and others’) barking around them. Jody and Van and their new buddies were happily pulling the Cake bicycles off the Ford Econoline. Wilkie Collins waved a bat and shouted for order. Evan Evans ran the bases, just for fun. Cleebo Wilson arrived, skidded his bicycle to a halt in the crowd, and almost ran over the Tolbert Twins, who threw their baseball gloves at him. “Score! Score! Score!” shouted little George Latham.

  Melba wore her elegant white gloves and pointed to her important ideas on her clipboard. Eudora Welty plopped her ancient self in the morning shade near the schoolhouse, away from the Cake dogs and all the action. Van and Jody lobbed a ball back and forth and called for a pickup game, while Roger whined about his bike tires being flat, and Gordon watched Honey twirl in her tutu at home plate.

  It was a glorious mess. It’s the dazzle of day, thought House Jackson. He liked that line from Norwood Boyd’s favorite poem in his favorite book by his favorite poet, Walt Whitman. House owned that book now. The dazzle of day, the symphony true. That’s what it looked like to him.

  House saw a new boy his age trotting over from Miss Mattie’s store. He raised his good hand in greeting. “Hey,” he said as Ben Cake got closer. Then he tugged on his baseball cap.

  “Hey,” Ben said back. No one needed to tell Ben that he would like this boy best. He already knew it.

  * * *

  Emma watched the messy glory from the upstairs kitchen and felt the tiniest tug on her heart. She shook her head. “I’m going to do the dishes,” she told her father in a determined voice.

  And that’s when someone began pounding on the Cakes’ back door downstairs.

  “I know you’re in there!” shouted Ruby Lavender. “Open up! I’m here for the soup!”

  “Don’t let her in!” cried Emma. “I’ve changed my mind!”

  “About what?” Leo made his way downstairs. “We have to be neighborly,” he insisted.

  “I don’t care about neighbors!” Emma shouted after him. “Please don’t open the door!”

  “We can’t pretend we’re not here!” her father called back. “Whoever it is knows we’re in here!”

  Leo opened the door. There she stood, Ruby Lavender, waving her note. Leo gave her a quizzical smile. His glasses slid down his nose. He invited her inside.

  The four Cake dogs were ready for breakfast. An open door was an invitation. They pushed themselves in behind Ruby, ga-bump, ga-bump, ga-bump, ga-BUMP, before Leo could shut the door. As each dog galumphed past her, Ruby’s body waved like a spindly sapling in the breeze. She struggled to keep from dropping her note and falling into Leo Cake. He stood with his arms out like he was trying to direct traffic.

  “Whoa! It’s rush hour at the Cakes’!”

  When the dogs were past them and scrambling for the stairs, Ruby stood up straight, shoved her hair out of her face, and announced herself.

  “Hi,” she said, breathless. “I’m Ruby. Your dogs love me.”

  Leo Cake laughed. “And they know it’s time to eat! Come on in! We’ll feed you, too.”

  “No, thanks,” said Ruby. “I’m here to meet your soup cooker.”

  “Ahh,” said Leo. “That would be Emma.”

  “That’s what your boys told me at Miss Mattie’s store. You’ve sure got a lot of them.”

  “That we do,” said Leo Cake.

  Dishes crashed in the sink. Leo looked toward the stairs.

  “And we’ve got one beautiful girl.”

  Ruby pulled up her errant overalls strap. “I hope she’s not too beautiful. We’ve got enough girls trying to be beautiful in this town.”

  Leo smiled at her and pushed up his glasses. “Emma!” he called up the stairs.

  More crashing. The dogs whined for their breakfast. Or was it lunch?

  Leo frowned. “Wait right here. I’ll be back.” He took the stairs two at a time.

  Ruby heard a bag crunch and a cascading ping ping! ping!! into a metal bowl—several metal bowls—and dogs hungrily smacking their chops and growling warnings at one another and diving into their food. Someone turned up the radio. An old song about a buffalo herd sang out over the stairwell: “… you can be happy if you’ve a mind to!” Water ran. Pans clattered. Something crashed to the floor and broke. The dogs kept chomping. They were loud eaters.

  And underneath the noise came the muffled sounds of a heated discussion. Ruby tiptoed up the stairs.

  When she couldn’t make out what they were saying in their strained, low voices, she peeped her head around the top of the stairwell. There stood the soup cooker. She had her back to the sink and was waving a wooden spoon at her father. He was sweeping up some broken glass. Packing boxes were everywhere.

  The cook—she must be Emma Lane Cake—wore an apron that said I EAT PIE on it. Her face was on fire as she ­whispered fiercely, “I don’t feel like it! Please!” The water filling the sink created a gigantic cloud of suds that began to cascade over the lip of the counter and onto the floor.

  “Hey!” Ruby yelled, just as the splashing started. She leaped to the sink and turned off the water.

  Th
e tension evaporated. Leo, Emma, and Ruby stared at one another. The radio kept wailing. “All ya gotta do is put your mind to it!” The dogs kept chomping. Emma blinked at this red-haired girl in overalls—the one she had written to without knowing who she was.

  Leo broke the standoff by dumping the pieces of glass from the dustpan into the trash and turning off the radio. “Ruby, this is Emma,” he said. “Emma … meet Ruby.”

  “I don’t want to meet Ruby,” Emma said, her voice still full of that strained quality. She had thought it, but she was surprised she’d said it.

  Ruby tried to think of what to say to that. She held Emma’s note in front of her with two hands, close to her chest, like it was treasure. “I’ve got an invitation,” she said with great ceremony, as if the paper’s contents were a secret pact, written in blood. “I’m To Whom It May Concern!”

  Leo Cake knew better than to try to get in the middle. “I’m going to help your mother with the shopping,” he said. “We’ve got a bakery to get started.” He slipped out of the kitchen.

  Emma could see the determination on Ruby’s face. But she was determined, too.

  “I changed my mind,” she told Ruby. But she couldn’t take her eyes off this girl with freckles like hers and a lopsided ponytail.

  “Change it back!” popped Ruby.

  “Nope.” Emma stood up straight and held on to her promise to herself. “Sorry. No soup.”

  It was a stalemate. Neither giving in, neither looking away. So they looked each other in the face, resolute, for what felt like an ice age while they each wondered: Now what?

  The sounds of a pickup baseball game drifted through the open kitchen window and Ruby couldn’t help herself; she followed them. She looked at the field outside the window and back to Emma. Ruby was a good ballplayer, and she itched to bat against those new boys. But she decided to stay where she was.

  The big black dog that Ruby thought resembled Comfort’s dog, Dismay, began to lap at the water on the floor. Emma grabbed his water bowl. “Stop it, Bo-Bo!” she shouted. “That water’s got soap in it! And there might be glass on the floor!”