Black Cake(17)

Benny turns the measuring cup over and over in her hands. The plastic has cracks here and there from repeated drops and house moves, plus the hot liquids that Benny’s mother had warned her never to pour into the cup, but which she’d done anyway.

Benny, plunking butter into the measuring cup and melting it in the microwave.

Benny, drinking mulled wine out of the measuring cup, sitting alone at a table set for two.

Benny, eating soup out of the measuring cup, the bruises on her face and neck aching with each spoonful.

Benny, sipping tea from the cup, feeling that her own brother had turned his back on her.

Benny hugs the cup to her middle now and runs a finger back and forth across the remains of the manufacturer’s label. In nearly fifty years, it has never fully disintegrated. Her mother’s hand would have touched that fuzzy gum every time she measured out a cup of flour or rice or beans or oil, every time she used it to cook for a birthday party, a holiday dinner, a fundraiser. She wondered, could there still be a bit of Ma’s DNA on this cup? Could her mother, perhaps, not be fully gone from this earth? Scientists have found DNA in ice dating back hundreds of thousands of years.

Benny pulls her smartphone out of her jeans pocket and dials up her voicemail. For the umpteenth time, she listens to her mother’s message from the month before.

Those four words: Benedetta, please come home. She lowers her head, swallows hard, hears the soft tap of a teardrop in the measuring cup.





Homesickness





Benny hears Byron calling to her from the other end of the hallway, but she ignores him. She’s not ready to go back to hearing her mother’s story. She needs to think. Benny looks around at the turquoise-colored walls of the room where she slept almost every night until she was seventeen. Her parents painted it this color because she’d insisted on it. She smiles at the memory. Why didn’t she come back to California sooner?

Benny could have seen her mother a month ago, even a week ago, but she didn’t realize that her mother was ill. And, of course, Byron, dammit, didn’t call until it was too late. So Benny had hesitated, hoping that this would be the month she’d secure financing from a bank for her business plan. Hoping to go home to Ma and Byron with something to show for all that time she’d spent away. Hoping to prove that she had been right all along to follow her own path, instead of the one that her parents would have chosen for her.

While Benny’s mother stood leaning against her kitchen counter in California, a blood clot quietly inching its way up from her pelvis to her lungs, Benny was still back in New York, getting fired from her afternoon job and boarding the wrong bus and finding herself standing in front of the kind of coffee shop that she wanted to have for herself. The café, with its too-early Christmas decorations, stood next to a small bookshop in a neighborhood that hadn’t yet had the stuffing gentrified out of it.

Inside, Benny found comfort in the sound of a thick, enameled cup as it settled into the saucer in front of her, the shriek and crunch of the coffee grinder, the smell of bacon grease settling into the weave of her woolen cape. Benny didn’t eat meat but even she had to admit that there was something about the smell of bacon that could take the edge off a feeling of homesickness.

This coffee shop reminded her of the old place back in California that she and her brother used to go to with their father when they were kids. There was a spigot and a bucket in the parking lot where Dad would let them soap up the car, rinse it off, then leave it to dry in the sun while they went inside to eat things that you found only in such places. It was well before Benny moved away to college, then to Europe, then Arizona, then New York. Years before she ever imagined not getting along with her dad.

Her dad had been gone for six years now, and Benny was nearly thirty-seven years old, still working a jumble of jobs and still unable to convince a bank to lend her the money to open her own café. But just as a person could feel the breeze switch directions and pick up speed, Benny could sense that her life was about to change. She’d been saving money, she was doing better emotionally than the year before, and she wanted to make one more attempt before giving up altogether on her business idea. Especially since she had no idea what to do otherwise.

This café she’d stumbled upon in New York was going out of business. There was a sign on the front door. If she could manage to pay the lease on a place like this, she’d put in lounge chairs and coffee tables with phone-and laptop-friendly electrical outlets. She would keep the lighting soft and the colors warm but declutter the central space. She would offer a super-short menu and only one signature dessert per season. Her winter dessert would be her mother’s black cake.

Benny needed to find more work right away. She’d made a mess of things, getting fired, and yet she was still feeling somewhat righteous because she’d refused to lie to a client. It wasn’t that Benny didn’t know how to stick to a call center script, as her supervisor had suggested. It was that she understood that one of the things that made you human was your willingness to deviate from the script. The problem was, scripts were like battles. You had to choose when to go with them and when not to. And you had to be prepared to live with the consequences.

Benny had responded to the customer call with the standard “My name is Sondra, how can I help you today?” You never gave your real name at that company. You adopted a moniker that was easy to pronounce, even better if it was just different enough to seem authentic, as in Sondra with an aw sound as opposed to Sandra with an ah. Benny had become practiced at that sort of thing, making people feel comfortable. The script helped, with a list of appropriate greetings and a checklist of things to ask for. Error code, serial number, just a moment, please, et cetera, et cetera.