A Long Line of Cakes

by Deborah Wiles

  “So we’re decided,” said Arlouin. “No scones tomorrow, a luscious carrot cake, and yes to chicken soup. I’d like to hand out samples of everything, to get folks excited for the Grand Opening. Chicken soup is your specialty, you know.”

  “I know,” said Emma, without enthusiasm.

  Arlouin changed the subject. “I see you hung your Friend Atlas.”

  Emma sighed. “I did.” She hadn’t been able to resist doing it, after she’d walked out of Miss Mattie’s store. She needed to be with her friends. She’d unrolled the atlas and cried. A cloud moved away from the sun at that moment and the low afternoon light spilled into Emma’s room. It seemed to whisper, Over here … on this wall … I will shine on your very true friends … friends who would never embarrass you … and I’ll bring you love and best wishes from them at the end of every day. It was a comfort.

  And so she had hung her atlas. She stared at it for a long time. Remembering. And yet, even with the Friend Atlas, some memories were becoming hazy. She hated that.

  She still needed to add Annie to the atlas. So she spent the hour before supper drawing her friend from memory and affixing the sketch to her atlas. She would add details later. Both of their addresses, the map from Emma’s house to Annie’s house, the time Emma had learned to cornrow Annie’s hair and Annie had learned to French braid Emma’s, the fact that Annie was a faster runner than Emma but Emma was a better climber than Annie, and how saying the word petunias would send them both into fits of laughter. It became their secret password. She would keep working on these things as she had time.

  Now, outside in the gloaming, Arlouin gave Emma’s arm two pats. “I’ve left friends, too.”

  Emma gave her mother a doleful look, close to tears, and Arlouin gave her daughter an understanding smile. “Do you remember Franny Chapman’s mother?”

  Emma shook her head. She didn’t even remember Franny Chapman.

  “Well, maybe it was before your time,” said her mother. “Or maybe you were too little to remember. Anyway, she was my best friend about eight moves ago. I still miss her. Her name was Nadine. We went bowling together on Tuesdays. In a bowling league!”

  Emma stared out at the empty ball field. Mother and daughter sat together, each lost in her own thoughts. A mockingbird began to sing with confidence from high in the silver maple tree.

  “It’s trying to imitate a Carolina Wren,” said Arlouin. She smiled.

  As Emma listened, a lumpy, shadowy figure came into view, walking on the sandy lane from the direction of the Sunshine Laundry.

  Arlouin’s eyes narrowed. “Who is that? I need your father’s glasses!”

  Emma squinted in the direction of the lump. It was short. Soon, Emma could see it was a girl. In overalls. Wearing flip-flops. Carrying a chicken.

  Emma swallowed. “That’s Ruby Lavender,” she said, as the lump was almost upon them.

  Arlouin sighed. “She’s not very sweet.”

  “She’s not sweet at all,” said Emma.

  “I heard that!” called Ruby.

  Ruby stopped in front of Emma and her mother. The chicken filled Ruby’s arms. She looked to be asleep. Emma judged it to be the same chicken she’d seen out the window.

  “Hunting for chickens, dear?” asked Arlouin with a half smile.

  “This one is mine,” said Ruby. “I just came to introduce her to Emma. To show her that she wasn’t an eating chicken.”

  “It looks like she eats plenty,” noted Arlouin.

  “I mean, she’s not a chicken you eat,” said Ruby, trying to be clear.

  Arlouin stood up and gathered the glasses. “I am going to supervise showers,” she said, “or none will be taken. Then I am getting a long, sweet soak after this long, hot day.” She gestured to Ruby to take her folding chair. “I will make friends with chickens you don’t eat another day, dear.”

  As the cicadas’ chorus softened, Emma could hear the crickets’ insistent serenade. She heard one fat bullfrog from the mudhole near the outfield—the same mudhole she’d pulled Gordon out of, tutu and all, earlier. And was that an owl calling from the tall pines at the other side of the ball field? Already? The birds had barely gone to sleep. The night world was coming awake.

  Ruby didn’t sit down. “This is Rosebud,” she said. “She used to be small enough to fit in my front overalls pocket. I took her everywhere then. Miss Eula and I rescued her mother and two more hens from certain death when Peterson’s Egg Ranch closed two years ago and they sent all the hens away to be chicken for your chicken soup.”

  Emma slapped at another mosquito. She said nothing. What was there to say? Hi, Rosebud? Sorry your girl is so mean?

  The hefty Rosebud opened one round eye and looked at Emma, like she was waiting for a reply, then closed it.

  Ruby spoke again. “That’s why when you wanted to wring her neck it upset me.”

  Emma mustered her most sarcastic tone. “I wasn’t upset at all.”

  Ruby ignored Emma’s remark. “I don’t eat meat,” she said. “Neither does my grandmother, Miss Eula.”

  “Well, I do,” replied Emma. “Why should you care?”

  “I don’t care if other people eat chicken,” said Ruby. “I just don’t want them to eat mine.”

  Emma sighed. “It was a joke.”

  “I can’t joke about my chickens.”

  “No kidding.” Emma stood up and slapped at a last mosquito. “I’m getting eaten up out here. I’ve got to go.”

  “Hey. I’m trying to tell you I’m sorry,” said Ruby. “You don’t know how rare that is! You should be impressed!”

  “You didn’t seem sorry at all this afternoon at Miss Mattie’s store!” Emma shot back.

  “I’m sorry for that, too,” Ruby said quickly.

  “Do you know how embarrassing that was for me?”

  “You surprised me!”

  “I stood in line for ten minutes! Long enough for you to stop being surprised!”

  “No,” said Ruby. “What you said. That’s what surprised me. Didn’t you see me blink? I blink when I don’t know what to say.”

  “And you glare.”

  “Okay, I glare. I was still mad. Now I’m not.”

  Emma raised her eyebrows and gave a long look to the girl who might have been her friend. She didn’t see the point in arguing. She said nothing.

  Ruby put Rosebud down. The chicken shook herself awake and trotted to the base of the silver maple, where she began to scratch in the dirt and make little staccato sounds, tuck-tuck-tuck-tuck-tuck.

  Rosebud was cute. And portly. Emma couldn’t imagine her fitting into Ruby’s pocket. But she shook her head. She would not be dissuaded.

  “Thank you for the apology,” she said in a decisive voice, “but you’re not my type of friend.”

  “What is your type of friend?” Ruby asked, a distressed edge in her voice.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Emma, frustrated that Ruby would not let this go. “Loyal, faithful, hard-working.”

  “I’m all those things!” gushed Ruby. She waved her arms for effect.

  “Honest,” Emma continued.

  “That, too! Ask anybody!”

  “Calm.”

  “Okay, okay,” said Ruby. “I’m not calm. But I am honest. Always. And all those other things! Just ask Miss Eula. She’ll tell you the truth of it.”

  Then they were silent until another thought occurred to Ruby, an honest one, and she voiced it. “Miss Eula says I can be an acquired taste, but so is she, and that’s a good thing. We just have to find the people who appreciate how wonderful we are.”

  Emma laughed, again in spite of her resolve. Wonderful, Ruby was not. She was pushy, where Emma was considered. She was explosive, where Emma was careful. She was irrational, where Emma was practical. Not a good match.

  Rosebud scratched for bugs, but her heart wasn’t in it. She made sleepy cooing sounds and flopped onto her bottom, on a root, tucking her feet under her.

  “She really wants to g
o to sleep,” said Ruby. “It’s past her bedtime.”

  “Mine, too,” said Emma. She stood up with great speed, a final decision made. “I’m sorry, Ruby. It won’t work.” She headed for the back door of her house.

  “Wait!” Ruby raced ahead of Emma and plastered herself, like a giant squid, against the tall red door, arms and legs outstretched. “Wait!”

  “I have work to do,” said Emma, even though she was impressed. She would go upstairs and work on her Friend Atlas and fill out index cards about Annie, a true friend, a perfect friend, a friend who would never embarrass her on purpose.

  But Ruby would not move and Emma did not know how to peel her off the door. This crazy girl was chasing after her, insisting and insulting at the same time. Emma had no map for this kind of friendship.

  Ruby could sense Emma’s hesitation. “Want to see the greenhouse where my chickens live?” she offered. Without moving.

  Emma tore her eyes off Ruby and concentrated on the milk-box cooler on the stoop, the one that had held the butter and eggs and milk the night they’d arrived, the night she’d first spied the note in the tree and had written one herself, back when she had believed for a few minutes that all things were possible and had longed her heart out for a friend. A sane friend, it occurred to her now.

  Ruby fretted. “It won’t take long. Do you want to see it?”

  The edges of Emma’s resolve began to fray. She looked at Ruby again. The longing for a friend was written all over Ruby’s face, and Emma understood that longing so well. It spoke to her.

  Emma lifted her head to the wide night sky and sighed.

  “Yes,” she said. Of course she did.

  Just like that, Emma was lost. She was hopelessly, helplessly, happily lost in a new friendship. She gave herself to it completely. Suddenly she knew everything about her new friend, because Ruby told her every story she could cram into the short walk from Emma’s to Miss Eula’s house.

  She heard the story about the daring chicken rescue, two years ago, of Ivy, Bemmie, and Bess. She heard about the old war between Ruby and Melba and how Melba had thrown a brick at the greenhouse one night, had shattered a window, and how two of Ivy’s chicks had died before they were born. Rosebud was the one who had lived. No wonder Ruby was so attached to her.

  She heard about Melba’s blue hair accident, and Mrs. Varnado’s fear of chickens and Aunt Tot’s terrible cooking and Ruby’s baseball career and her fights with Cleebo, and her arguments with Miss Mattie, and her disagreements with Miss Eula, who had first left her two years ago to go to Hawaii to see a new grandbaby—Ruby called her Hortense—and how Miss Eula finally came back with four hundred pairs of flip-flops to sell in Miss Mattie’s store.

  “I’m sure you fight with a lot of people,” said Emma in a matter-of-fact voice.

  “I don’t fight!” Ruby protested. “I discuss.”

  “I have seen how you discuss,” said Emma.

  By the time they reached Miss Eula’s house, the Pink Palace, Ruby was running out of stories. And that was fine, because the walk in the darkness had worked its magic on Emma. As the two friends came to Miss Eula’s house, Emma put up a hand and said, “Shhh!”

  “Isn’t it great?” asked Ruby, pride in her voice. “Miss Eula and I painted it ourselves after Grandpa Garnet died.” Even in the moonlight, the Pink Palace was very … pink.

  “Shhh!” Emma repeated. She felt something familiar.

  She had had her doubts about listening to a talking tree or a chatty breeze or even her own good heart, but now, walking through the rich warm night with its enchanted sights and sounds and smells, she wanted to believe.

  In a way she couldn’t articulate, this town knew her. Every living thing was alive and calling to her. She would ask her father again to remember.

  They let themselves into the backyard through the garden gate. Black-eyed Susans grew along the fence and by the greenhouse. Emma reached out to touch them. She felt them reach out to her in kind.

  “They were my grandfather’s favorite,” Ruby said as she picked one and handed it to Emma, which brought Emma back into the moment with Ruby.

  Rosebud sprinted to the greenhouse. Ruby opened the door for her. “C’mon,” she whispered to Emma as she waved her inside. “Just a peek.”

  A jasmine vine grew on an old bean trellis nearby, and the night air was sweet. Stars began to twinkle high in the sky as Emma stepped into the greenhouse. The floor was strewn with fresh pine shavings. Eight chickens crowded together on their wide ladder-like roost that leaned against the far wall, where the moonlight softly silhouetted them.

  Like eight Cakes, thought Emma, crowded together, sleeping in our little upstairs roost at the bakery.

  Ruby pointed to the three red hens on the highest rung of the roost, their heads stuck under their wings, fast asleep.

  “That’s Ivy on the left,” said Ruby. “She’s Rosebud’s mama. Next to her is Bess—all she does is eat and complain. And there’s Bemmie—she’s the mama of those four hens on the next rung down. See ’em? Rosebud’s nudged up there with them.”

  “The orange ones?”

  Ruby nodded. “Their names are Parallax, Paratrooper, Parchment, and Parliament.”

  Emma’s eyes widened. “Really?”

  “Really!” said Ruby.

  “Whyever for?” asked Emma.

  “Those were words I was reading in the dictionary when they were born,” said Ruby. “I read them the dictio­nary. They love it. It calms them. I’ve been through the dictionary three times now.”

  Dove was the friend who first saw Ruby reading the dictionary to her chickens. Dove understood Ruby’s delicious acquired taste.

  “You think I talk a lot!” said Ruby, as if Emma had said so. “Wait until you meet Dove! She’ll be back to visit next summer.”

  “You do talk a lot,” said Emma, who had not been thinking that at all, “but I don’t mind.”

  Ruby realized with a jolt that she had been starved for this friend. To think that she had almost lost her! Lucky she had course-corrected in time. She was proud of herself for that. She was good at this friend business.

  “Herman is the Four Ps’ daddy,” she was saying now. “He’s Rosebud’s daddy as well.”

  “Where is Herman?” Emma asked.

  “Banished!” Ruby declared. “Actually, he’s a rooster so he lives over at the Butterfields’ house, along with Elvis. Elvis is Bemmie’s boy.”

  Emma shook her head. “I’m so confused.”

  “It’s confusing until you live with them. They’re a family, even if they don’t all live together. And Miss Eula and me, we’re their family. Miss Eula is their grandmother, too. I used to have a grandfather but he died two years ago. It was the saddest thing ever. Accident. Bridge. Grief. I still can’t talk about it.”

  Emma thought she was talking about it just fine. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  “Do you have a grandfather?” Ruby asked.

  “Yes,” was all Emma said. She did not say Archibald Carrot Cake, Blue Ribbon Bona Fide Grand Champion Baker and Citizen of the World. She did not know him or her other grandfather. They had died before she was born. She was sorry about that, too.

  “I have five brothers and a mom and dad,” she finally said.

  “You have way too many brothers,” Ruby told her.

  “You said Ben is cute,” Emma reminded her friend.

  “I was crazy,” said Ruby. “I’ve course-corrected. But did you see Frances? She’s already in love with Ben. She moons over him! I don’t know how he can stand it!”

  “Who’s Frances?” It was easy to forget; there were so many kids in this new place.

  “She calls herself Finesse now, but she’s just Frances Schotz, great-granddaughter of Parting Schotz, who owns the barbershop in town. Frances comes here for the summer but she lives in Jackson—that’s about an hour away—and she goes to the Lanyard School there and takes too much French and too much drama. Melba Jane wants to be just lik
e her.”

  Emma remembered—Finesse, the girl like Annie, but not. “She invited me to a party tomorrow! The Dr. Dan Deavers Going-Away Soiree!”

  Ruby rolled her eyes. “Are you going?”

  “I said I would …”

  “Well, prepare yourself. It will be the most … the most …” Ruby thought a moment and then came up with the word that had eluded her. “The most mundane thing you’ve ever done. I read that word to the chickens yesterday. ‘Lacking interest or excitement.’ Mundane. In fact,” Ruby added, “it will be worse than mundane.”

  “What’s worse than mundane?”

  “Comatose. That’s when you’re not even conscious! And you won’t be when Finesse starts her interpretive dance. It goes on for hours. And the last time she did one, she ran into House and broke his arm! It’s no wonder he ruined it again in the All-Stars game. It wasn’t completely healed up yet.”

  The Four P’s and Rosebud began to murmur and stir on the second rung of the roost.

  “Cousins,” said Ruby, nodding. “Let’s let them sleep.”

  “Good night, girls,” whispered Emma. She wasn’t sure what to make of these pet chickens, not to mention this kooky friend, but she was not at all surprised, in this new world, to find that her heart was beating that calm way it beat when all was well with the world.

  Gone was her hesitation. Gone was any hint of a question about making a new friend. She’d made one, the one, not an acquaintance, but a best friend. Someone to share secrets with and have adventures with and figure out the world with. Here she was, and in this astonishing, mysterious new place.

  She knew she was risking her heart, but she also knew she was just going to do it. Yes. Please. Again.

  So there they stood, Ruby and Emma, outside the greenhouse, under the moon, between yes and no, over the hard part, in the beginning of a brand-new friendship.