Chapter 30
SAWYER
Iwoke up at four in the morning to bake a cake.
This was, without question, the most ridiculous thing I had ever done.
I had survived a war. I had taken a bullet two weeks ago.
I had stormed a farmhouse to rescue the woman sleeping beside me.
And now I was standing in a kitchen in the dark, in someone else’s house, with one working arm and a phone propped against the sugar jar showing a recipe for chocolate cake that required skills I did not possess.
But it was Chloe’s birthday. And she had forgotten.
I had found out by accident. Dollie had called the day before, whispering into the phone like a spy delivering classified intelligence, and told me the date.
Tomorrow. Chloe had not mentioned it. Had not hinted.
Had not circled it on a calendar or dropped a single clue, because the woman had spent the last two weeks being kidnapped and rescued and worrying about whether I was going to get shot again, and somewhere in all of that her own birthday had slipped through the cracks.
That was not going to stand.
I cracked the eggs one-handed. The first one went into the bowl. The second one went onto the floor. I stared at the yolk spreading across the tile and considered my options and then cracked the third egg with more care and decided the floor could wait.
Dollie arrived at five. She let herself in with the key Josh had given her and found me in the kitchen covered in flour with a bowl of batter that looked questionable and a mess that looked criminal.
“Oh, Sawyer,” she said.
“Do not start.”
“You have egg on your sling.”
“I said do not start.”
She took over the parts that required two hands.
Mixing. Pouring. Greasing the pan. I handled what I could, measuring ingredients with the same precision I used for lumber, because if there was one thing I understood it was that the right measurements made the difference between something that held and something that collapsed.
The cake went into the oven. We stood in the kitchen and stared at the oven door like it was going to betray us.
“Did you get the decorations?” I asked.
“Streamers. Balloons. A banner that says Happy Birthday in pink letters because that was the only one the store had.”
“Pink.”
“Pink, Sawyer. It is a color. It will not hurt you.”
Josh arrived at five-thirty. He brought plates, a party hat that Dollie immediately put on his head over his protests, and the quiet competence that made him the kind of man you wanted in a crisis or a birthday surprise, which were apparently similar operations.
Emma woke up at six. She appeared in the kitchen in her pajamas with Sir Chomps-a-Lot under her arm and her hair standing in every direction, and she looked at the three adults surrounded by balloons and streamers and said, “What are we doing?”
“It is Mama’s birthday,” I said.
Her face lit up like someone had plugged her into the sun.
“I want to help.”
“You can frost the cake.”
This was a strategic error. Emma frosted the cake with the enthusiasm of a child who had been given unsupervised access to a frosting tube, which meant the coverage was wildly uneven, thick in places and bare in others, with a green dinosaur in the center that she insisted was Sir Chomps-a-Lot and that I had to admit did bear a passing resemblance.
She wrote HAPY brTHDAY MAMA across the top in blue frosting, missing several letters, and stepped back to admire her work with the satisfaction of an artist who had just completed a masterpiece.
“It is perfect,” she declared.
It was not perfect. It was lopsided and chaotic and missing half the letters in birthday. It was the best cake I had ever seen.
We hung the banner. This was where things went wrong. Dollie stood on a chair holding one end while Josh held the other and Emma supervised from below, offering directions that contradicted each other every ten seconds. The result was a banner that leaned distinctly to the left.
“It is crooked,” I said.
“The banner is fine,” Dollie said.
“It is leaning to the left.”
“It has character.”
“It looks like it was hung by someone who was blindfolded.”
“I was standing on a chair with one hand while Josh held the other end and Emma supervised. You are lucky it is on the wall at all.”
“Let me fix it.”
“You have one working arm, Sawyer. Sit down.”
“I can fix a banner with one arm.”
“Sit. Down.”
I did not sit down. But I stopped arguing, which for me was the same thing.
Emma helped me blow up the remaining balloons.
She had the lung capacity of a marathon runner and the focus of a hummingbird, which meant balloons were inflated with great enthusiasm and then immediately released to fly around the room while she chased them, shrieking.
We tied them to door handles, light fixtures, the hallway table, anywhere that would hold a knot.
The streamers went up next. Josh and I handled those, twisting pink and gold ribbons together and taping them along the hallway walls.
My shoulder throbbed with every reach above my head but I did not stop because this was for Chloe and a man does not stop decorating his woman’s birthday hallway because of a bullet wound.
Emma made signs. She sat at the kitchen table with every crayon she owned and drew dinosaurs holding flowers on sheets of paper, writing HAPPY BIRTHDAY MAMA in letters of wildly varying sizes across each one. We taped them to the walls between the streamers.
By seven-thirty, the kitchen was transformed. Streamers. Balloons. A crooked banner. Dinosaur signs. A lopsided cake with a green frosted dinosaur. Plates stacked. Coffee made. The whole room looked like a party had collided with a natural disaster, and it was exactly right.
We were finishing the last touches when Emma’s voice cut through the careful quiet we had been trying and failing to maintain.
“Papa, the cake has a dinosaur on it!”
“Shh, Emma. We are being quiet.”
“WHY ARE WE BEING QUIET?”
“Because Mama is sleeping.”
“OH. OKAY.” Then, in what she believed was a whisper: “Papa, the dinosaur looks like Sir Chomps-a-Lot.”
I heard a sound from the bedroom. A shift. The creak of the bed. She was awake. I looked at Dollie. Dollie looked at Josh. Josh looked at his party hat with the resigned expression of a man who had accepted his fate.
Emma crept to the bedroom door. Opened it a crack. One eye. Then both eyes. Then her entire face.
“Mama. Are you awake?”
A pause. Chloe’s voice, muffled and sleepy. “I might be.”
“Can you stay asleep for five more minutes?”
“Why?”
“No reason.”
“Emma.”
“No reason, Mama. Just stay asleep. Close your eyes.”
The door closed. Emma sprinted back down the hallway, her bare feet slapping on the floor, the opposite of subtle.
“She is awake! She is awake! Hurry up!”
I straightened the plates. Checked the cake.
Wiped a smear of frosting off the counter.
My hand was steady but my chest was not.
It was doing something that I would never admit to, a tightening, a fullness, the feeling of a man who had spent a decade in silence and was now standing in a kitchen full of balloons waiting to surprise the woman he loved on a birthday she had forgotten.
“Everyone ready?” I said.
We lined up. Dollie in front, hands on her hips.
Josh beside me with his plates and his hat.
Emma in the center, holding the cake with both hands, her face nearly splitting in half from the grin.
I stood at the back, my arm in the sling, my expression under control, or what I believed was under control until Dollie looked at me and said, “Sawyer, you are smiling.”
“I am not.”
“You are absolutely smiling.”
“Focus, Dollie.”
Chloe appeared in the doorway.
She was wearing my flannel shirt. The one she had stolen weeks ago and claimed as her own, too big for her, the sleeves hanging past her hands, the hem hitting mid-thigh.
Her hair was messy. Her feet were bare. She looked like she had just woken up, which she had, and she looked like the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, which she was.
Her eyes moved across the room. The streamers. The balloons. The banner, still crooked. The signs with the dinosaurs and the flowers. Dollie beaming. Josh with his plates. Emma with the cake. And me, standing at the back, watching her face change as the realization hit.
“HAPPY BIRTHDAY!” we shouted.
All four of us. At the same time. Dollie clapping. Josh raising the plates. Emma bouncing on her toes with the cake swaying dangerously. And me. I smiled. The real one. The one that I was learning to give more freely because of the woman standing in front of me.
Her hand went to her mouth. Her eyes filled with tears and her chin trembled and she stood there in the doorway in my flannel shirt and looked at us with an expression that broke me open.
“I forgot my own birthday,” she said.
Her voice cracked. The tears spilled over and she pressed both hands to her face and cried, and the sight of her standing there crying because four people had baked her a lopsided cake and hung a crooked banner hit me in the chest with a force that was harder than any punch I had ever taken.
Dollie reached her first. Pulled her into a hug. “That is the point. You forgot, so we remembered for you.”
“The cake has a dinosaur,” Emma said, holding it up. “I made the dinosaur. Papa made the cake but I did all the important parts.”
Josh set down the plates. Put his hand on her shoulder. Squeezed once. Said nothing. Josh.
I walked to her. Through the balloons and around the table and past the banner that was, I will admit, leaning to the left. I stopped in front of her and she looked up at me with those blue eyes full of tears and I lifted my good hand and wiped them from her cheeks with my thumb.
“Happy birthday, Chloe,” I said.