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 sprang 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.”
Kacy headed for the exit. 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-Meyers 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. There wasn’t anything wrong with bowing 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 Bud. 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.
