Frosting on the Cake

by Karin Kallmaker

  “I was just trying to do something to commemorate it. I wanted to show you that I’m not jealous of her anymore. Not a lot, anyway.”

  “I’m an idiot,” Rayann admitted.

  “No, you’re not.” Teresa opened her arms and Rayann happily nestled into her body. “Sometimes it hurts and you don’t expect it. I didn’t expect it either. It’s a beautiful tapestry, but I shouldn’t have touched it. It was for you to do.”

  “You live here, too. You’re not a guest.” Rayann felt Teresa’s shoulders unknot and realized she had not made that point often enough.

  “I’ve been afraid that you only cared for me because I wasn’t at all like her. She was so…perfect. And I’m so not perfect.”

  Rayann had to laugh. “She wasn’t perfect. Nearly, but not perfect. You have your moments.”

  “But it’s different, isn’t it? The way you feel about me compared to her. Oh, forget I said that.” Teresa had gone stiff again. “I don’t want you to answer.”

  Rayann kept holding Teresa tight. The answer was yes, still yes, might always be yes. But that didn’t matter. “I’ve been asking myself that question. What would I do if she suddenly walked through that door?”

  Teresa tried to pull away. “Don’t—I don’t want to know.”

  “Why?”

  Teresa’s voice was thick with tears again. “Because if you say you’d pick me I would know you’re lying. If you say you’d pick her I—I don’t know what I’ll do.”

  “I don’t know the answer. While I was wandering around I realized that the answer just isn’t relevant. She isn’t going to walk through the door. I’m not secretly biding my time, hoping that she will. I did that after she died, but not anymore.” She looked up into Teresa’s face. “I’m here with you. My choice isn’t you or her. It’s you or misery. Because I love you.”

  “I want to believe you,” Teresa whispered.

  Rayann was suddenly inspired by something her mother had done when Rayann was a child to demonstrate how love really works. Her mother had been trying to explain that though Rayann’s father had died, the love didn’t. “Stay right there,” she told Teresa.

  “Okay.” Teresa looked dubious as Rayann dashed into the kitchen.

  Junk drawer, in the back—a box of slender birthday candles and a lighter.

  “You’re going to think this is hokey,” she called. “Come on in here.”

  Teresa definitely looked askance at the candles. “We don’t have a cake.”

  “We don’t need one. Okay.” She lit one of the candles and set the lighter aside. “This is me. This is my love for myself.” She picked up another candle. “This is my dad. You know he died a long time ago.” She lit the second candle with her own and dripped enough wax at the far end of the tile counter to hold her father’s candle upright.

  “I get the metaphor,” Teresa said. “Your candle is still lit, and so is his, though it’s far away.”

  “This is my mom. This is Ted and his family.” She set two candles close by. “This is Michelle. You’ve heard about her. She goes way over there. Zoraida—”

  “Zoraida gets to be closer than Michelle,” Teresa ruled. “I liked her when she dropped by that day.”

  “Yes, she’s much closer. Here’s Judy.” She lit Judy’s candle and set it right in front of her.

  “Everyone still has their light, they’re just closer or farther away.” Teresa almost shrugged. “It makes a pretty display.”

  “Here’s Louisa,” Rayann said quietly. She set the candle next to Judy’s. “She’s close. Her light is still very bright.” Teresa said nothing.

  “Look at my candle, Reese. That’s the point. My candle has just as much light as it ever did.” She picked up the final candle. “Enough for you.”

  Teresa wiped away a tear as Rayann dripped wax and set Teresa’s candle down just in front of Louisa’s. She crouched down to level of the flickering lights. “Her flame is still there. Yours is in between us now,” she finished as she lit Teresa’s candle.

  “I was thinking earlier today that I’m in her shadow.”

  “Honestly, I was thinking that way too. Not you in her shadow, but our relationship in the shadow of what I had with her. It doesn’t have to be that way.” Rayann glanced toward her father’s distant candle. “I’m just realizing that if I were to light a candle for everyone I loved or who has loved me, I’d burn the place down. I’m so lucky.”

  As soon as she said it, Rayann realized she’d crossed a threshold into a new beginning. After Louisa’s horrible accident and lingering death, Rayann had never thought she would consider herself lucky. All those candles, and she hadn’t lit one for everyone. Ted’s family was really three candles, because Tucker and Joyce loved her. There was Judy’s lover, Dedric, who was a solid friend. Their baby, Joyner a whole different kind of love. And the people who had loved Louisa and therefore her as well: Danny, Marilyn, Jill and more.

  Teresa crouched alongside Rayann to look at the lights. “Okay, this is corny,” she said. “But I see everything differently. Her light…it illuminates me, too.”

  “I’ve taken you for granted,” Rayann said softly. “Let me start over today”

  “I’ll start over too.I’ve just realized that my light illuminates hers in return.”

  Rayann didn’t want to blow out the candles, but her mother’s candle abruptly fell over. So she snuffed them all out while Teresa blew her nose. “It’s not too late to go to the movies, you know.”

  “I have no intention of going to the movies,” Teresa whispered.

  Rayann slept soundly, but Teresa didn’t want to go to sleep, not yet. She searched her feelings for the shadow of dread she’d been carrying around, expecting any day for Rayann to realize that what they had simply didn’t compare and wasn’t worth pursuing. The day had taken an unexpected turn instead.

  She felt confident now. As far as Teresa was concerned, there was no subject more serious between them than Louisa, and they’d finally been able to talk about it. They’d probably have to talk about it again. Anything else that might come up would seem like child’s play by comparison.

  Rayann didn’t wake up until Teresa accidentally stepped on her hair as she tied the last corner of the tapestry to the post nearest Rayann’s head.

  “Reese, what are you doing?” “Sorry, I’m almost done. I didn’t want to wake you. But I thought you wouldn’t mind this now.”

  Rayann cleared her throat and said sleepily, “Oh. I don’t.”

  Teresa settled under the covers again. In the dark the moon and stars seem to glow of their own accord. “It’s beautiful.”

  Rayann snuggled closer, her head next to Teresa’s. “I always loved looking at it. I’m glad to have it back.”

  She was soon asleep again. Teresa felt peaceful yet aware of the moment. She’d been in love all this time and had not wanted to accept how incomplete it was, not believing she was loved in return. Roses and vines framed the sky as she realized she had stepped into a new beginning.

  Published: Characters:

  Setting:

  Unforgettable

  2000

  Rett Jamison, singer

  Angel Martinetta, genetic scientist Lt. Natalie Gifford, retired Army Cinny Keilor, real estate agent Los Angeles, California, and Woton, Minnesota

  Ten Makes a Celebration, Loud, Loud, Loud!

  Unforgettable, That’s What You Are

  (4 weeks) The heat made me think of her. Even with all the windows down, it was sweltering in the car and there was no nearby shade. When I’d told my mom who I was going to meet she’d given me one of her piercing looks and said, “You get what you deserve when you play with fire, Natalie.”

  “They taught us that in the Army, mom. It’s just business.” We both knew I was lying.

  I closed my eyes to the September sun and thought about Cinny Keilor, like I always did of late. There had been times in my past when she had popped into my mind, but since the dance we shared at the class
reunion a month ago she has never been far from my thoughts. I indulged myself by savoring them again. After twenty years in the Army fantasy was my private luxury and it certainly passed the time.

  I spent those twenty years tied to computers in places all over the world. Sometimes I would watch a tall blonde walk by and I’d think about Cinny. Other times a husky voice would put a chill down my back and I’d think about Cinny. It always seemed like wishful thinking. Until 1991, sitting in a cold, dank hangar in Biloxi, waiting for the boarding signal. Looking back, that’s when everything changed.

  It was very quiet. The faint scratching of pens on postcards or paper was the only steady noise. I had bought extra stamps and even passing them around it seemed like everyone spoke in hushed tones. We were all thinking hard and trying to write positively about the next few days, weeks.

  I kept repeating to myself what I knew for a fact. We outgunned them. We had better tech. We had for damned sure better people, even if some of the enemy had been trained by us for a different war. There was no way we weren’t going to win. But that didn’t mean some of us wouldn’t get hurt along the way. Some of us might die. It could be any one of the other seventeen people. It could be me.

  I was writing a note to my parents. I told them not to worry, of course. They would, but I wanted to remind them that I would be where the computers were. Later, in Bosnia, I would be closer than I ever told them afterward, but when we got to Kuwait I would be safe in a bunker, keeping the information flowing. I said I was sorry I had to cancel my leave and wouldn’t be able to help with the planting. I’d always bitched plenty about loading seed bags and driving the tractor, but at that moment I’d have given just about anything to be at home.

  I knew there were things I was willing to die for, but oil wasn’t one of them. I wanted to go to the Cokato Corn Festival again, lie out under the summer sky and watch lightning bugs dance, gossip with my mom, and daydream about girls. My ego was not invested in some line in the sand. It would be in Bosnia, but this war it wasn’t.

  The signal came and the petty officer collected everyone’s notes and cards and promised they’d get in the mail out of Biloxi.

  We lined up and climbed aboard the cargo-class aircraft. We were the last unit on. The next stop was the Persian Gulf. I know I wasn’t the only one thinking I’d written to my loved ones for maybe the last time. I joined the Army because I wanted to serve my country, which I loved for all its history and mistakes. I loved it mostly because our American mentality was founded on the idea that tomorrow can be better than today. Defending my country’s interests and obeying the orders of my commander are a link in a very big chain that helps bring better tomorrows.

  That’s the way I’ve always looked at it, anyway. That’s why I joined up, then went to school to learn encryption and ended up with a degree. That’s why when the master sergeant said I had a chance at officer’s training, I took it, pretty much deciding I’d do the full twenty years right there.

  When I’d stopped going round and round in my head about what I knew and how I felt, there was a flicker of something else.

  That was when I thought of her. It was the first time I was going into a war zone and there she was in my head. Cinny Keilor. I was remembering her the way I’d seen her during my last leave back home. She’d been helping with the Christmas Carnival at Hubert H. Humphrey Elementary, though she had no kids of her own. Everyone was going home and Cinny was smiling and saying ‘bye to folks. I’d always liked to look at her, like a jacket that’s way too expensive or a car that’s way too small and too fast.

  That night was different. I caught her in a moment of tiredness, maybe. That was what I was remembering. She looked sincere enough as she shook hands and hugged people, but she also looked like she wanted to be someplace else. Almost as if she wanted to be someone else. I understood the look. I saw it in my own eyes sometimes. I remembered all at once how she smelled and moved and I sat there shivering. Cargo planes are noisy and cold and not usually the place where dreams find fertile ground. I wanted to be snuggled with her someplace sunny and warm.

  That was the moment when I told myself that if ever there was a way I could campaign for Cinny Keilor’s heart, I’d do it because happiness deserved some sort of effort after all. If I lived through whatever the Army threw at me, that is. If I survived.

  So that’s what happened. I was going to war and she was in my head. She became more than a fantasy. Cinny Keilor, heart, mind and body, became an objective founded on private desires.

  What happened for years after that really doesn’t matter much. It was predictable and unexciting—mostly. When my mom wrote a few years ago that Cinny had finally married, I thought that was that. I’d always known my objective was unachievable. The Cinny Keilors of the world, with their leggy unaging beauty, don’t go for the Natalie Giffords who lust after them from afar. I didn’t have any of Rett Jamison’s talent and charm, and if Rett Jamison couldn’t get Cinny, I didn’t have a chance.

  Cinny wasn’t the reason I didn’t have a romantic life, though. There were times when other women definitely had my interest, but it never went further than that. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell sucks as a policy. It was wrongheaded and made things much worse than they were before, but I lived up to and beyond it because I’d taken an oath. I threw all my energy into soldiering, working out and, when I had the chance, dancing. After the first ten years, celibacy is actually easier than dating.

  When I retired with my twenty years in, I went home because I’d no roots anywhere else. Celibacy hadn’t just kept me from potential lovers, it had robbed me of friends, too. Everyone assumed Natalie Gifford with the short-cropped hair and lean, angular body was a lesbian, so the straight women tended to avoid me unless they wanted to experiment. The lesbians either avoided me because they were afraid they’d be outed by being my friend or they pursued me as a potential affair. Ergo, I made no friends except among some of the men—the gay ones, I suspected, though I never asked and they never told.

  Woton, Minnesota, isn’t exactly overflowing with lesbians. True, there was a small support group of ex-Army dykes in Minneapolis and I’d enjoyed myself at a couple of potlucks, but they were all in couples, every last one of them. Wait, that’s not quite right. One woman was willing but she was also an alcoholic, which made her not my type.

  Everything changed at the class reunion last month. I’d always had a crush on Rett Jamison. Who didn’t? She was so talented and cared so little about what anyone thought of her. Back in high school she dressed how she liked and didn’t take crap off of anyone. I wanted to be like her so much. There was a line ahead of me, though. Angel Martinetta—I was half in love with her, too. The school brain and totally hooked on Rett.

  Rett, on the other hand, was completely into Cinny Keilor. Back in high school I’d been out hiking and seen them kissing. At the time it made me weak for Rett, but that might also have been when Cinny Keilor snuck into the back of my mind, waiting for that moment in the plane to the Gulf, when I thought of her.

  Cinny came out at the class reunion. She left her husband that week and I think she was hoping to hook up with Rett after all those years of saying no in high school. Rett and Angel had finally gotten their wires uncrossed, though, and Cinny was left on her own. It was like a sign. I had finished my commitment to the Army. I was only forty and I had a lot of life ahead of me. I wanted that life to be as full of love as the first half had been empty.

  So a couple of days ago I went for a ramble and had a long talk with myself. I was sitting in the sweltering afternoon sun, waiting for Cinny, because I now had a solid, considered strategy to bring Cinny into my life.

  I figured to have a chance with her, I had to do five things. First, I had to show her who I really was. Second, I had to conquer my own damned shyness. Third, she needed to see the person I wanted to be. Fourth, we had to have some time together without me letting her know I wanted to rip her clothes off. Last, I had to prove to her that I knew the mea
ning of romance.

  I had already taken care of the first strategy. I figured that if she danced with me while I was wearing a tuxedo and Florsheims, she understood that I’m butch and there’s no other way to cut it.

  She danced with me. The whole town was buzzing about her being a lesbian and leaving her husband, and she danced with me. She was wearing a wild red sheath cut up to paradise, showing off a body as firm as it always had been, but more lush in the places where lush is what I spent twenty years dreaming about.

  She danced with me, all perfume and scarlet lipstick. It was a crazed salsa dance, her breasts heaving against mine. All those years I’d burned energy dancing and working out let me show her I could pick her up in my arms, hold her and keep up with her wild moves.

  She danced with me and the whole town was looking as her body stretched the length of mine. It was the only time she danced all night, and that one time she danced with me.

  The second strategy to conquer my shyness was what I was working on today in a roundabout way. See, after that dance, after she stepped away, holding her head up like she didn’t care about the stares, well, I hadn’t been able to say a word. Not one word. The kind of conquest I had in mind would take at least a little bit of talking. Like “hello” and “nice to see you.” I had let her walk away.

  Four weeks passed. I’d even seen her on the other side of the street and not crossed over to say something. That made me shit-on-a-shingle and I really needed to work on it. I needed to find a way to talk to her that was logical.

  My stroke of genius: she’s a realtor and I need a place of my own. When there was business to be done, I was never shy.

  While I was having that long talk with myself I’d come to the conclusion that a woman like Cinny isn’t going to be permanently attracted to someone who’s only thinking about how to get her into bed. That led me to my third strategy. She needs to see that I have dreams. I am thinking about tomorrow and how to make tomorrow include her interests and ideas. I have a nice retirement pension from the Army and when my folks pass away, I’ll have a good piece of land that farms well. God willing, that won’t be for another fifty years. But neither of those things will really show her who I want to be. I’m 40 and I’m still living with my parents. On the surface, I don’t look too promising as mate material.