A Long Line of Cakes Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Map

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Simple, Classic, Melt-In-Your-Mouth White Cake

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  They came, like secrets, in the night.

  The Cake Family:

  Emma Alabama Lane Cake

  Benjamin Lord Baltimore Cake

  Jody Traditional Angel Food Cake

  Van Chocolate Layer Cake

  Roger Black Forest Cake

  and

  Gordon Ridiculously Easy No-Knead Sticky Buns Cake

  Their parents were with them, of course:

  Leo Meyer Lemon Cake

  and

  Arlouin Hummingbird Spice Cake

  Somehow, there were also four dogs.

  * * *

  Thank goodness there was a suitcase rack on top of the car, and bicycle racks front and back. The Cake family had driven across the miles with the windows down, and everyone’s hair was whisked to a froth.

  The night air smelled like honeysuckle. A wispy fog rolled over and around the town as the Cakes arrived. It played leapfrog with the muggy summer air, just as that clever Cake fog always did. And then a cooler breeze, soft and snappy, began to dispatch the fog … just as it always did.

  The breeze tickled the leaves of the majestic silver maple tree behind the post office on Main Street. Leo Cake turned the Ford Econoline onto the sandy lane that ran behind the post office and Miss Mattie’s store. Their new bakery space—an imposing old structure—sat between those two buildings.

  The radio was playing “King of the Road.” King Leo Cake parked the car under the silver maple and leaned his forehead against the steering wheel.

  “We’re here,” he said in a weary, dusty, long-time-­traveling voice.

  The car began to boil with boys trying to be the first to escape.

  “Out of my way, birdbrains!” shouted twelve-year-old Ben. Lord Baltimore indeed.

  The boys never noticed anything. Did they even notice they were moving their entire lives across the country—again? Emma Lane Cake wondered.

  She was the only one, it seemed, who wanted to stay in one place.

  “Already?” she’d asked her mother, when the packing had begun once again.

  “We go when it’s time,” said Arlouin. “You know that.”

  “I know that I’ve moved seven times that I can remember,” said Emma. “And more times that I can’t.”

  “We suit up and we show up, Emma!” Leo Cake had told his daughter, with the delight in his voice that new beginnings always brought him. What was different this time for Leo was two lines of a poem that had floated into his head as they’d begun their trip:

  “Yes,” he had answered the poem. Then, “No. I don’t remember.”

  Now Emma’s brothers and the dogs tumbled to the ground, a tangle of arms and legs stumbling over one another, glad to be free-free-free of their confinement and squash-ed-ness. Emma lingered in the space their absence created and stared at a knothole in the silver maple tree. Inside the knothole was a sliver of pink. A piece of paper? A secret note? She wanted to touch it.

  A bright-orange moon shellacked the night. The boys were giddy with the happiness that comes with finally arriving. Without speaking of it (which was how it usually worked), they had a plan. They raced across the sandy lane, turned their backs to Emma and their parents, and challenged one another to a peeing contest. Ben—always the ringleader—shouted, “Go!”

  “Boys!” called Arlouin. “Mind your manners! There’s a bathroom upstairs!”

  “Aw, Mom!” whined Roger, only seven. “We couldn’t wait!”

  Emma, who was used to her brothers’ shenanigans, got quietly out of the car and walked a few soft steps to the tree. The moonlight slid over her straight-as-a-stick brown hair and highlighted the spray of freckles across her nose.

  The tree warmed to her touch. She felt its rough pulse under her fingers. It was the oddest feeling. She removed her hand and then put it back. There it was again, like a heartbeat. If trees could smile, this one would. She looked around her in wonder. Was she mistaken, or did everything about this town feel alive and waiting for her?

  On tiptoe, she peered into the knothole of the silver maple. It was a note! Her fingers itched, wanting to tug on it.

  “Quiet!” Arlouin shushed her boys, who were whooping and hollering through their contest. “It’s midnight! You’ll wake the dead!”

  “No one lives on Main Street,” said Leo. He put his arm around his wife. “Not even the dead.”

  “We passed two cemeteries on the way here!” shouted Jody in his high angel-food voice. Ten-year-old boys are practiced at being informative when necessary … and even when not.

  “No one will hear us,” Leo assured Arlouin. “And we’ve been cooped up for hours.”

  He used his index finger to push the bridge of his glasses up on his nose as he walked toward the boys. “Good idea,” he said.

  “I won!” shouted Jody.

  Then Ben shoved Jody who shoved Van who shoved Roger, which made Gordon, the littlest Cake, cry. The dogs began to bark as they swirled around the shoving boys.

  “Where’s my baseball glove?” shouted Ben, in his Lord Baltimore voice. “I just had it!”

  Jody—who was no angel—jumped like a frog and waved Ben’s baseball glove in the air. “Keep away!” he shouted.

  “I’ve got the ball!” cried Van in his thick chocolate-layer-cake voice, an unusually low voice for an eight-year-old.

  “We live on Main Street now,” said Arlouin as she swooped the wailing Gordon into her arms. “And we will mind our manners. Cakes always mind their manners. Boys! Bedtime!”

  Leo was right. No one else lived on Main Street. Long ago people often lived above their stores in little Southern towns, but now people lived in houses of their own, away from Main Street. No one in Halleluia, Mississippi, saw them arrive, because it was midnight and everyone was tucked in bed, asleep—all four hundred good friendly folks, and a few old soreheads.

  “Emma,” said her exasperated mother, “take Gordon, please, while I round up the hooligans.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Gordon, who at four years old
wanted to be like the big boys, held out his reedy arms for his sister, his favorite. Emma’s itchy-fingers spell was broken, and she smiled at her brother. “Come here, Sticky Buns,” she said with a sigh.

  “Emma,” he sniffed. He tucked his head under her chin.

  Emma’s eleven-year-old arms were muscled from hauling bags of flour for the bakery and stirring so much soup for the lunches the Cake Café served every weekday. She could tote a twenty-five-pound bag of carrots all by herself. Her brother was as light as a cinnamon stick. Gordon wasn’t built like her other brothers, who were as solid—and thickheaded—as baseballs.

  The boys, relieved of balls, gloves, and full bladders, scuffled to the back of their new home between the post office and Miss Mattie’s Mercantile. The last tendrils of fog and the breezy dark shadows of the silver maple played across its surface.

  “It looks gothic,” said Emma.

  “It’s haunted!” Jody declared with delight.

  “I’m hungry!” said Van. He grabbed Roger’s arm and pretended to eat it.

  “Mom!” whined Roger.

  “Shhh,” said their mother.

  There was a milk-box cooler by the back door, used for dairy home deliveries. Leo opened it to find a glass jar of milk, a clutch of eggs, and a pound of butter inside. “How thoughtful,” he said.

  Arlouin unlocked the tall red door with a long metal key. It turned with a solid click in the metal keyhole.

  Emma gave the silver maple one last look before walking through the doorway of her new home. She imagined the note had been left for her. It was easy to imagine it when a tree had almost talked to you.

  “What will we find in this new place!” Leo Cake crowed, suddenly revived. He loved the first moments of a new life in a new place. Everything was possible and nothing was spoiled. There was no disappointment. The world was born again, every time they stepped across a new threshold.

  The door swung open. Their story began.

  Eight Cakes banged up the back stairs with their suitcases and dogs, and hurtled into their new beginning. They flipped on lights, carved out territory, and assessed their new living quarters.

  “The movers will be here tomorrow with the kitchen equipment,” said Leo.

  Arlouin nodded. “The upstairs kitchen will do fine for now.”

  “There’s only one bathroom!” yelled the boys.

  “Emma goes first!” called their mother.

  “I’m sure there’s another downstairs,” said their father.

  “Bunk beds!” yelled Jody and Van. They began to argue over who got the top.

  “Bunk beds!” whined Roger.

  “It’s a dorm room,” said Ben.

  “It’s the living room,” corrected Arlouin. “It will do nicely for five boys.”

  “It will be fine for now,” said their father. “We’re lucky to have this much room on such short notice.”

  “It was short notice,” agreed Arlouin, which brought tears to Emma’s eyes. She had hardly had time to say good-bye to her newest best friend, Annie, and she couldn’t stop thinking about the loss.

  The family’s new-arrival fizz ran out quickly, and soon the Cakes settled themselves and fell quietly and gratefully asleep in the beds that had been waiting for them:

  A cozy feather bed in the front bedroom facing Main Street for Leo and Arlouin.

  Two sets of bunk beds for the boys and the dogs, in the living room. Gordon, sniffling, squished in with Roger, who was not happy about it, but was too tired to protest. “We’ll figure it out tomorrow,” said their dad.

  And finally, a lopsided four-poster double bed with a soft old quilt for Emma, in her own small bedroom at the back of the building, facing the sandy lane.

  Emma opened her window, snapped on the bedside lamp, and surveyed her new sleeping arrangements. This bed would be big enough to include Emma’s brainy best friend, Harriet, the friend Emma had left behind when she was eight. It would be perfect for her fussy best friend, Evangeline, whom she’d left behind when she was nine, and her bookworm friend, Mariposa, whom she’d left behind when she was ten. It would even be big enough for the twins, silly Marcy and Drucy, whom she’d left behind when she was six. They had laughed at Emma’s bad jokes, had praised her six-year-old drawings, and were the first friends to sample her very first attempt at making her now-famous chicken soup.

  Emma lugged her suitcase onto the bed and snapped it open. On top of the shorts and shirts and shoes and pajamas and one good Sunday dress was her carefully rolled and rubber-banded Map of the Known World and Friends, According to Emma Alabama Lane Cake. That was its long name.

  She had tried calling it her Friend Geography Map or just Geography Map for short, or Friend Map, but none of these seemed just-right. It wasn’t a map in the topograph­ical sense, anyway. It was more a record of her life, a periodical she occasionally published more of, just for herself, outlining and adding to the places she had lived, and the friends she had left in those places.

  She had finally settled on calling it her Friend Atlas, which pleased her. The word atlas was perfect. She had learned it in Mrs. Forthright’s class last year. She had arrived as a new student just before the maps-and-globes unit started, and had moved just after it ended, right in the middle of the explorers unit, scarcely twelve weeks later. It was as if the idea of atlases had been waiting for her at that school like a gift. She had changed the atlas definition to suit her purposes:

  An atlas is a book or collection of maps and charts and pictures and drawings and lists and facts and history and stories about special places and people and things in your life. Especially friends.

  Now, with the house quiet around her, room to move and breathe and think, and a tranquil breeze coming through the window, she sat on the bed, unrolled her Friend Atlas, and tried not to cry as she pored over the special friends from each place she had lived. There was nothing like a best friend. And tonight, in this new place, she had none.

  She put her Friend Atlas back in her suitcase and looked out the window at the silver maple in the moonlight. She heard a symphony of snoring from the living-room bedroom. Her brothers were numbskulls, but they had personality, she had to give them that. It was impossible not to like them. They would each have a new friend before breakfast. They knew they had no time to waste.

  Neither do you. The thought came with a practical clarity she had never before experienced. It was as if the tree or the breeze were whispering to her, and the idea sounded so reasonable she allowed herself to believe it.

  There would be little time, this time, said the tree, said the breeze, said her rational mind, for her usual careful consideration and selection of friends. But there might be a friend waiting for her in the knothole of that tree. Hurry!

  Her heart began an excited thump-thump-thump in her chest.

  She slid off the bed and dug her notebook and favorite pencil out of her satchel. By the bittersweet light of the moon she wrote a note, drew a little picture to go with the words, because that was her habit, folded the note twice, and tiptoed down the stairs and out to the silver maple tree.

  She tucked her note inside the knothole, next to the pink one.

  She looked around her in the dark. This place. Maybe this place is finally the one. Maybe we can stay. Forever.

  Could she even allow herself to have such a thought? Of everyone in her family, she was the most levelheaded, pragmatic one.

  But not tonight. The sweet-tempered breeze that had scattered the fog now eddied around Emma and whispered:

  Yes.

  Emma blinked. Then she said softly to the tree, to the breeze, to the noisy crickets who sang from the tall grass:

  Please.

  commandeered by Miss Phoebe “Scoop” Tolbert while Ed Edwards is away on vacation to New Orleans

  In a surprise two-step turn of events in downtown Halleluia, Doc MacRee—who has always had more patients than he can shake a stick at—has cut his medical practice in half along with his office space. At t
he same time, Jerome Fountainbleu, owner of the Pine View Café, across the street from Doc MacRee’s office, has announced the retirement of Misanthrope Watkins, also known as “Old Widow Watkins,” who made the best coconut cream pie in the state of Mississippi.

  “Lemon meringue, too,” said Fountainbleu. “We don’t know what we’re going to do without her. Customers come just for our desserts. We may have to close.”

  This reporter knows that that sentiment is ridiculous. The Blue Plate Special at the Pine View Café is also famous county-wide and creates a line out the door at noon Wednesday, when fried chicken and butter peas are on the menu. There just must be something done about dessert.

  Cornelia Ishee, known colloquially, locally, as Aunt Tot to most residents of Aurora County, volunteered at last night’s Eastern Star meeting to take over in the pie-making department. There was general unrest from the assembled, as well as a murmur of “Not on your life” heard distinctly from the back row, although all present pretended they had heard nothing. I can faithfully report, however, that the voice definitely sounded like it belonged to Miss Mattie Perkins.

  I see I am out of room. More about Doc MacRee in our next installment!

  Yours faithfully, PT

  The sun was just pushing itself up and awake as Miss Mattie Perkins arrived at the back door of the Mercantile, next door to where the Cakes were sleeping. She was tired. Yesterday’s 200th anniversary celebration for Aurora County had included a ball game, a pageant, and a Fourth of July picnic that had attracted people from the far reaches of the county, including folks she hadn’t seen for years.

  It had involved way too many people for her taste. She had given a short, heartfelt speech at the last, something she never did, but something she felt compelled to do to honor her friend Norwood Boyd, who had recently passed away. She had wanted to put the rumors to rest so everyone would just go home.

  Now here she was, back at work again and way too early, considering how late a day yesterday had been.

  The first yellow sun rays winked off the side mirror of the Ford Econoline parked under the silver maple tree. Miss Mattie took one look at the car, snapped out of yesterday, and said, “Humph! Eula!” She sailed into her store like a Viking wearing a horned helmet. She grabbed the telephone and dialed Miss Eula’s number.