100 Days of Cake (34 page)

Maybe it's the authority in the way she says it, or maybe it's simply that she looks so much like Bea Arthur, and Dorothy rarely lies about anything important, but I believe her.

By the time I leave, I'm legit tired. I'm still not sure if I'll ever go back to Dr. Frankel, but I can tell that if I do it's going to be a shit-ton of work.

Of course I can't help but think about how different it is from when I used to leave Dr. B's office. Then I was practically giddy replaying over and over again each time he'd smiled or laughed at one of my jokes. It made feel so special . . . and wrong.

My stomach flops over at the word. Wrong.

Me crushing on Dr. B might have been what made it wrong at first, but at some point he started making it wrong too. And he had to know that—he went to freaking Penn! Suddenly I'm all rage-y thinking about him running away and happily starting over in PA. He's probably already picking up a pretty new reporter at the DMV . . . or maybe not.

Maybe he's sitting in a session with a new depressed girl with a dead dad. And maybe she's noticing that amazing jawline and the little temple depressions.

Fuck. Maybe Elle is right and I need to report him to the cops or some board of something or other. Maybe I will. Or maybe I will talk to V about it . . . or even Mom, someday.

All I really know is that for the first time, I'm glad Glen Brooks is out of the great state of Florida. As I pedal home on Old Montee, I feel . . . free.

H
er hair twisted up in another impossible braid, Mom is peeling roughly seven hundred apples in the model-home kitchen.

Plopping down at one of the bar stools at the island, I pick up an apple and a peeler and start adding to the pound of red skins. That nervous don't-scare-the-woodland-creature look from Mom again.

“So why
didn't
you tell me?” I say, out of nowhere, picking up the conversation where I left it eleven days ago. “About Dad, I mean.”

Mom puts down her apple and wipes her hands on her apron.

“Maybe I should have told you. My mother always said I need to let you girls know ‘exactly what kind of man he was.' ”
Mom imitates Gram's little old lady tone, and suddenly all those conversations I remember hearing when we were staying at my grandmother's make more sense. You can tell Mom is thinking about those, too, and it clearly still bothers her.

She takes a breath. “I love my mother, Molly, but she has no clue what kind of man your father was. She was always furious that we eloped, and she saw him maybe ten times total. To her he's just some guy who drove his car into a tree and screwed her daughter out of life insurance. I didn't want him to be that to you girls.”

How perfectly fake.

Perfect for V and Mom and me, ambling around this huge house decorated by stagers for some aspirational family, where people cook and sew and give their kids the most amazing toys. Where a giant portrait of the four of us hangs in the dining room, even though it's a giant lie and we never really were that family.

“So, what, it's better to mislead us?” Even as I'm asking it, I realize that's exactly what I did to Dr. B. and Gina and Tina, and everyone, mostly to me. I built a dad—two parts family sitcoms, one part old photographs. Much easier than the truth.

“Molly, your father was sooo much more than the way he died—more than some screwup in his brain that made him do what he did. He loved us very much.”

“How can you say that?” I ask, frustrated that Mom is still protecting him. If I can't have my
Family Ties/Growing
Pains
fantasy father, let's do this no-holds-barred. “You don't show your family how much you love them by choosing
not
to be with them. That's a dick move.”

“I felt that way for years.” Mom exhales. “I was so angry that I would sometimes turn up the volume on the TV and scream. But then I finally realized that one really bad thing didn't invalidate everything else.”

No, it shouldn't. But this is a pretty monumentally bad thing. And . . .

“It wasn't one bad thing, though, was it?” I ask. “People don't just wake up and decide to drive into a tree. You had to suspect something.”

“Yes, and no,” she says. “I knew he wasn't happy all the time, but neither was I—we had two young kids and no money. After it happened, I sifted through everything over and over, trying to find the evidence. That day when he didn't want to go out to dinner with our friends, was that a sign? Or how we talked about Kurt Cobain the night we met—should I have known then? It's impossible not to apply hindsight to history. Finally I just realized I'd never get to know exactly what he was thinking.

“But then when things started going bad for you, it brought back all that craziness. I just kept thinking,
How could I have missed this again?
So when V found me going over the accident report, I got this idea that she could be my ally. That maybe if Bill and I hadn't been so far away
from our families, someone else would have noticed. And if I told V, we could keep an eye on you together.”

Being the big sister: my job.

“But she was barely fourteen, and it was probably too much to ask,” Mom says.

After saying so much, we don't say anything for a while.

My sister, who's beautiful and popular and talented, and my mother, who's perfect and independent and successful—the kind of people other people assume have it so easy. Heck, I've assumed they have it so easy—have been living with this big stupid secret that was eating away at them.

“And the cakes?”

Mom utters a bittersweet semi-laugh. “I know that it sounds really dumb, but I did want you to have that cake you never had. The week before your birthday, we went to the bakery to pick it out—you wanted one with the fish from
Finding Nemo
—and for days you stopped total strangers to tell them about it. I'm sure you don't remember this, but after the accident—you had no idea what was going on—people kept bringing over food, and every time you'd ask if that was your ‘berday' cake.”

“But I do remember there being a cake.”

“At some point I had Gram run to the corner store, but all they had left was this stale Entenmann's crumb cake two days past the sell-by date. And we could only find two candles, but you were turning three.

“So,” Mom continues, “when I saw that 100 Days of Cake challenge, I figured maybe I could give you some great cakes to make up for that cruddy one, and that it might give you something to look forward to every day.”

“Mom.”
I'm going to cry . . . again. Because it is so sad and sweet that a day after her husband up and killed himself, my mom loved me enough to worry that I had only two candles on my cake. Because that is a kind of love that I can only hope to one day comprehend. A love that I am beyond lucky to have. So many people—people with both parents living—never get anything close to that.

And I remember that dream episode of
Golden Girls
where Blanche found out her husband had faked his death. With all those commercials in syndication and the time to resolve the dream plot at the end, it probably really only took Blanche fifteen minutes to forgive him. I'm not sure I can ever forgive my father for doing what he did, for giving me fucked-up genes and crappy hair. For putting Mom through this. Putting V through this. But I can easily forgive my mom for doing what she thought was best. And I can try to understand.

“Do you think sometime you could tell me about Dad? Like, what he was actually like? Not the Disney version.”

“I'd like that.”

So I ask her to tell me about the night they met in Miami.

And while we bake, she does.

T
he picture of our family in the dining room looks the same as it always has. Mom is still so impossibly luminous that she almost doesn't seem real but like some goddess slumming it down on earth with us. V is still all eyes peeking from a blanket. I'm still wearing my jumper, still holding the doll the photographer gave me to make me smile. And Dad is the same too. His hands are still ginormous and one of them is still holding my shoulder.

For some reason I thought that he might have changed since I found out the truth. That he might have morphed into something sinister or that I'd suddenly be able to detect something that I never noticed before. A can't-keep-your-shoelaces-tied sadness in his eyes. Some pain or longing in Dad's smile. But no, he looks the same.

Maybe Mom is right and he really did love us even if he chose to leave us. Maybe, at least in this moment forever frozen in time, Dad wanted nothing more than to protect me.

E
lle, Jimmy, V, Mom, and I are baking together in the model-home kitchen, because this is apparently something we do now.

Okay, it's pretty awesome. Even if Elle does require that everything we use
must
come in containers that don't leave a carbon footprint, and Jimmy sometimes feels compelled to turn the bowls and spoons into a drum kit.

“This next song is for Veronica my love,” he announces before an impromptu performance.

“Sorry, kid,” says V. “The whole rocker thing is the way to your sister's heart, not mine.”

“And Mom's,” I add. Toupee Thom told Mom he was so impressed with Alex's band at the FishTopia event that he decided to re-form his law school group—the Legal Eagles. Oh yeah, Mom and Thom are back on.

Curling up his lip, Jimmy proclaims, “You guys are weird.”

The glossy picture in
A Baker's Journey
shows a brown spice cake, topped with a white frosting and chopped nuts, so it makes perfect sense that Jimmy asks if we can make it purple.

“Jimmy,” Elle whines.

“You know.” Mom has her magical-idea look again. “I bet we
could
do that with food coloring.”

The suggestion seems highly suspect, but it actually turns out pretty badass—I mean, as much as any baked good can be badass.

“Is it okay if I take some over to Mark's later?” Elle asks, and Mom assures her there is plenty to go around. “His band is practicing tonight, and they're always starving afterward.”

His band . . . Alex. Elle's eyes nervously flick to me. Because she is sooo ooey-gooey
The Fault in Our Stars
in love, for a second she forgot about the whole me-Alex debacle—and that makes me happy. I don't want the people I love keeping their good news from me.

“How is the band?” I ask. I do not ask if Alex is with one of the Hot Topic girls or Meredith Hoffman. “Did they come up with a name yet?”

“They did, actually.” Elle looks at me as if I'm the world's most delicate blown-glass figurine. “They decided to call themselves FishTopia.”