Chapter 26
Audrey
Nora pulls the front door shut behind her and follows me down the walk, talking the whole way.
"I'm just saying, if it tips on the floor, all your hard work is crushed." She reaches the car before I do and opens the passenger door, holding it wide. "Let me ride along. I'll hold the box, you drive, we drop it off, then I’ll come back."
"What about the kids?"
"Sophie’s ten now, Audrey." She steps back so I can get the cake settled. "She can handle her brother and a locked house for fifteen minutes.”
I lower the box into the footwell, flat against the carpet where nothing can slide.
The planets ride high on their sticks, pushed into the top of the cake so they hover over the glaze.
One hard bump sends the whole solar system tipping to the side of the box.
I steady it with two fingers until I'm sure it's set.
"I've got it." I straighten up. "But thank you."
Nora doesn't close the door.
She stands there with one hand on the top of it and doesn't move.
She doesn't say anything else about the cake.
Her eyes are doing something though. The thing they've done across kitchen tables and hospital hallways for two years.
Like she's waiting. Like there's a space she's left open, and she's giving me the chance to step into it.
The truth climbs up the back of my throat.
I should tell her. I've been meaning to for a week now, and every time I open my mouth to start, I can’t find the first word. Nora, I have to tell you something, and you can’t look at me while I say it. I don't know how to start a sentence that ends with his name.
No, not now. Not standing in the driveway with one foot in the car and the engine cold.
I have a cake to deliver, a rehearsal at four, and I'm already pushing the clock.
"You sure you're okay?" Nora asks.
"I'm fine. I'm good, actually." It isn't even a lie. "I'll be back by six."
She looks at me for a second longer. Then something in her lets it go, and she swings the door shut.
"Okay." She pats the roof of the car twice. "Drive slow over the speed bumps or it's planets all over the floor. Love you."
"Love you."
I get in the car, back out of the driveway, and watch her in the mirror, standing on the front step with her arms crossed, watching me leave. She lifts a hand. I lift one back.
I’ll tell her soon. When I find the right time.
The Pruitts live three streets from the church, in a yellow house with an Easter wreath on the door, even though it's August.
Diane meets me at the front door before I've gotten the box all the way out of the footwell, wiping her hands on a dish towel and already talking.
"Is that it? Come in, come in." She holds the screen door open with her back and waves me into a kitchen that smells like cut watermelon. "Set it on the counter. I cleared the space."
I set it down and lift the lid.
“It’s so weird that they’re having rehearsal on a—”
Diane stops talking.
That's how I know it landed. Diane Pruitt hasn't stopped talking since I pulled in and now, her entire body just—stops. One hand comes up over her mouth.
I watch her look at the cake. The mirror glaze—deep violet bleeding into navy bleeding into black, white flecks of stars caught under the shine—the whole top of the cake looking like a window cut into actual space.
Eight planets—cake pops on sticks pushed into the surface so they hover above the glaze, sized in order.
A marble-sized Mercury up to a fist-sized Jupiter.
Saturn ringed in gold, Mars rusted red, Earth the size of a plum with its little smear of green.
"Audrey." It comes out muffled. "Audrey, what is this?"
"It's a galaxy cake. The glaze is—"
"I thought you'd bring a regular cake." She's still staring.
"A normal cake. With one of those little plastic rocket toppers.
I'd have been thrilled with a rocket topper." She looks up at me. "Wyatt is going to cry when he sees this, and then I’m going to cry when he does, and I’m going to have to redo my face.”
I laugh. "Then I did my job."
"You did somebody's job. Not the one I asked for. I only told you that the party was space-themed and what flavors he likes." She's already reaching for her purse on the counter. "How much?"
"Diane—"
"How much, Audrey? I'm not playing." Her wallet's out. "I will not take this for free. It isn't right."
"I don't want money. I like doing it." I close the lid gently so the planets don't shift. "Birthdays are the only excuse I get to practice the hard stuff. You can't just pour a mirror glaze for a regular Tuesday. You did me the favor."
"That is the most backwards thing I have ever heard.
" But the wallet lowers an inch. "I mean it, though.
This is a hundred-dollar cake. More. You walk into any bakery in Harlow and ask for a galaxy cake with the whole solar system to scale, they'd laugh you out the door under two hundred. You need to be charging for this."
"Come on. We’re going to be late," I say and smile, sliding the box onto the top shelf of the fridge where nothing can fall on it.
But the comment follows me out to the car.
It isn't the first time. It isn't the fifth. Same sentence, different mouths—Diane now, Asher in my kitchen weeks ago saying it like it was the most obvious thing in the world. You should be charging for these. It's coming often enough now that it's starting to make a dent.
Maybe he has a point.
I file it where I keep the things I'm not ready to decide, and drive the three streets to the church with the windows down and my arm out in the heat.
The lot is half-full. I find the spot near the side entrance, under the maple where the shade falls in the afternoon, and cut the engine.
For a second I just sit there.
The morning has gone exactly right. The cake was beautiful.
Diane cried over a mirror glaze. I have somewhere to be where they're expecting me, where I have lines that are mine.
And tonight, after the kids are down, there's a man a thousand miles away who would rather skip dinner just so he can see me on the computer.
He'll ask about the cake before he asks about himself. He always does. How'd the planets survive the drive, doll face?
The thought arrives so clearly I can practically hear him saying it.
I catch myself smiling at the steering wheel.
I get out before anyone can see me doing it.
The rehearsal space sits at the far end of the fellowship hall, a platform Marcy's husband built out of plywood and risers, painted matte black so it stops looking like a regular room and starts looking like a real stage. The actual play will be in the gym to kick off the End of Summer festival.
"Audrey, good, we're running the garden," Marcy calls from the third row, clipboard against her chest. "The kids are too wired right now. I sent them to the nursery. Let's do you and Caleb cold."
Caleb Yarrow stands at the edge of the stage holding a prop apple like it might save him.
He's a few years older than me, broad and easy, here because almost no men signed up and the two who did both wanted Noah.
The ark, the beard, the drama of the rising water.
Nobody wanted Adam. So Marcy's son stepped in to help his mother out, the way grown sons do, with the specific patience of a man who has run out of ways to say no to her.
"You ready?" I ask, climbing the two steps up.
“God, no. You can thank me later though.”
“Why?”
“My mother was going to pin leaves on us. Leaves, Audrey. The stubborn woman already switched the talent show for this play. I told her the only way I’m doing this is if we wear robes the whole time. She finally caved.”
“Won’t that be confusing?”
“Don’t tell me you agree with her,” he says, utterly offended.
“No, no. I’ll take the robes.”
“It’s later, Audrey. You can thank me now.”
I bite down a laugh. “Thanks, Caleb.”
We get into position.
The lights aren't real, just the overheads, but Marcy has us stand inside two strips of masking tape that mark where the garden is, and when I step inside the tape, something in me settles into a different gear.
"From the top," Marcy says. "Caleb, you're naming the animals. Audrey, you come in on the fig tree."
We run it.
Caleb names the animals in a bored, perfect monotone, like the first man would absolutely sound this unbothered about inventing the word for hippopotamus. I come in on my mark. I have the lines now, all of them settled into my mouth so I don't have to search for them.
A few months ago I would've been terrified to stand up here.
Now I already know what he's going to say when I tell him about it.
You were always good enough, Audrey.
Like that's the easiest thing in the world to believe.
I cross to the place where the tree is supposed to be.
"It's the only thing we're told not to touch," I say, lifting my hand toward the empty air where the branch would hang. "Everything in the garden is ours. The whole world, ours. And the one thing kept back is the one thing I can't stop looking at."
"Then don't look at it," Caleb says, naming a giraffe behind me.
"I've tried."
I let the silence sit the way Marcy taught me, a full beat, my fingers curling closed on nothing.
"There's a difference," I say, quieter, "between being given everything and being trusted with it. I want to know which one I am."
I reach up and close my hand around the apple that isn't there.
"Hold," Marcy calls. "Hold right there. That's it, Audrey, don't lose that. Caleb, you're a beat early on the giraffe, come in after she reaches." She's scribbling. "Run it again from her cross."
We run it again. And again. By the third time, my hand finds the air automatically, and the line about being trusted lands low in my chest before it reaches my mouth. Marcy stops writing and just watches, and when we finish she's quiet for a second.
"Good," she says. "That's a real performance. Take five, then I want the flood crew."