2006 Family Circle Fiction Contest Winners

“My daughter was just born two weeks ago so this is a pretty good month for me!” Melanie said when we told her she had won the contest. Melanie currently lives in southern New Hampshire with her husband, infant daughter, Lila, and 2-year-old son, Alexander, and is working on her M.F.A. in creative writing at Lesley University.

"The Simplest of Acts"

It’s strange that her kitchen is still alive, that the refrigerator hums and the light clicks on when I gently tug the door open. The faucet still sputters hot and cold even though she’s not there to drink or wash or feel the rush of water spilling over her hands.

If I let myself, I can see her standing at the sink with tufts of bubbles rising to her sharp elbows. “Dishwashers will never do,” she says, her small hands circling our dinner plates with a checked cloth. “Nothing beats a human touch.”

There’s an overturned teacup in the strainer. A jelly jar curves sunlight from the sill above the sink. It’s empty, awaiting offerings of wilted violets and dandelions from the fists of children. There’s a pie on the counter, and it still looks edible beneath its shiny, plasticky skin. The cracks of the crust are stained deep red.

Only days ago she baked this, and I stare at it expectantly, as though I’m waiting for it to speak. To tell me what she hummed as she rolled out the dough or how her hands felt, patting and pressing and pinching. I place a hand over its humped crust. Tell me what to say.

I’m here to gather inspiration for the eulogy no one else is willing to write. “You’re the writer, Eve,” Jillian explained over the phone, though her wobbly voice made it difficult to understand her. I imagined her curled on her bed surrounded by clumps of tissues, her eyes swollen and nose pink and ruddy. No one would dare ask Jillian to perform our mother’s eulogy. “And besides,” she said, composing herself momentarily, “you’re better at this sort of thing.”

She meant death. At 13, I let her slide into bed with me on the nights Mom spent at the hospital with Dad. I French braided her hair and helped our brothers with their ties before the funeral. I held our mother’s hand through the entire service.
The truth is, I needed Jillian’s warmth beside me as much as she needed mine. I braided her hair and tied the ties only because I had learned from Mom how to find peace in the simplest of acts. She had taught me that there’s a sense of calm in the patient weaving of hair over and under and over again, and in the slow rolling of a piecrust to just the right thickness, knowing it by the feel of cool dough between your fingers.

It started with my father’s vision. His glasses became thicker and thicker until the lenses made his small eyes pop like blue marbles behind their curved glass. By the time school let out, he was forgetting simple things, like how to position his fingers for the chords on his guitar or how to pronounce our dog’s name. During the final damp breaths of the summer, my father was diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer. By Christmas he was confined to his bed and by Valentine’s Day he was a resident of the hospital.

He outlived all our expectations, the doctors liked to tell us proudly, as though watching him deteriorate into a nonsensical clatter of bones and gray skin and Coke-bottle glasses over a longer period of time was a blessing provided by their care. 

*     *     *

The phone rings. It’s Jillian. “No one’s making the cake, Eve,” she says, her voice teetering dangerously.

“The cake?”

“The almond pound cake,” she explains. “No one’s making it for the wake. No one even has the recipe.” Her voice cracks. “Can you get that while you’re there?” She hiccups. “Eve, we can’t have her wake without her pound cake.”

“Yes, yes, I can get it,” I say quickly, and hang up before I’m caught in the torrent of Jillian’s tears.

*     *     *

When we were small, we followed Mom as she baked. We’d spin around the kitchen shaking boxes of confectioners’ sugar so that it fell like puffs of snow on our hair and cheeks. Jillian would tilt her head to the ceiling, her tongue wagging over her lower lip, licking the sky for sugar. As we grew older, we were given jobs. Egg cracker. Batter stirrer. Dough roller. Pie presser. Crust pincher. By the time we had each graduated from high school we had learned the simple tricks for everything she made. Except the almond cake, her signature.

It was her ritual to bake the cake alone and very early in the morning. We’d wake up to the sweet scent of amaretto and find Mom sipping tea at the table, patiently waiting for the timer to go off.

She called me on a Sunday afternoon, nearly a decade ago. I was in my own kitchen, hammering breasts of chicken with the butt of a mason jar, a newlywed improvising Sunday dinner. “So, I’m in remission now,” she said matter-of-factly, as though it was something as obvious and uninteresting as the weather.

I stood still, my fingers wrapped around the lip of the jar, the phone crooked between my chin and my ear, staring down at the lumpy heaves of shiny breast, partially flattened on my counter.

“What did you say?”

She had battled bladder cancer alone, didn’t want to worry us.

“What good would it have done to tell you?” she asked. “Prepared you for the worst, just in case, meanwhile, I’d have turned into a patient. A victim. All our visits would’ve been filled with it. ‘How’re you feeling? What’d the doctor say?

 When’s your next appointment?’”

“Mom, stop. That’s not the point.”

“You’re right. The point is life’s too short. Some things are best kept to oneself.”
 In her kitchen I find her wooden recipe box. I bring it to the table and begin fingering through the weathered cards, through decades of Sunday dinners and birthday cakes and holiday celebrations.

I pull out a dog-eared card for meat loaf and stare at it. Dad’s favorite, Mom’s least. Meat loaf, mashed potatoes, thick brown gravy, peas—small, soft and straight from a can. Mom made it every year on his birthday, even after he died. She’d set two places and not eat a bite.

*     *     *

She died in a hospital room that was sea-foam green and always cold. I stayed with her overnight, listening to the machines click and watching drops slide down the tangle of IV’s feeding into her arm. Her veins were raised from beneath her papery skin, like a map of blue-green canals twisting the length of her arm. The more I stared at the arm, the less it looked like hers. The more I stared at her spectral face, the less she looked like my mother. The less I felt like her daughter.

*     *     *

Pumpkin Cream Bread. Spice Nut Cake. Tiramisu. White Chocolate Raspberry Truffle. I’ve emptied the box. There are notes written in her handwriting, scribbled in pencil on the borders and scrunched between titles and cook temperatures. Small remnants of her spread across the table like a puzzle missing its final piece.
She baked it so many times, she probably didn’t even need a recipe, I think while organizing the cards back into the box. My only hope is that she may have baked one and frozen it, as she did with cookies before the holidays.

Her freezer is fully stocked. Bags of frozen vegetables, chicken bones, fluorescent-colored ice pops laced with freezer burn. I rummage through the first drawer; it’s filled with baked goods. A bag of cookies labeled “Peanut Butter.” A no-name, dateless brick of aluminum foil that feels like a fruitcake. Another bag of cookies, this one labeled “White Chocolate Chip.”

My knees crack as I squat to pull out the next drawer. There, I find three identical boxes, each white with fancy green script that reads “Mrs. Farber’s Specialty Cakes.” I gasp as I slowly pull one out. On the side of the box is a picture of Mom’s almond pound cake. “Only 20 minutes to homemade!” it says in bold letters.

My ankles roll and I lose balance, falling backward to the floor, clutching the box to my chest, laughing. Then I begin to cry as I hug the frozen cake to my chest.
Shhhhh. I can almost hear her hushing me as I weep.

Finally, I pull myself up and study the box. Here is my mother’s secret recipe:

Preheat oven to 350˚ and bake for 20 minutes.

I turn on her oven, pull a baking sheet from the cabinet and set the frozen cake down in the middle. Then I fill her teakettle with water and set the table for two.