Black Cake(2)

“Let me just warn you,” Mr. Mitch is saying now. “About your mother. You need to be prepared.”

Prepared?

Prepared for what? Their mother is already gone.

His ma.

He doesn’t see how anything after that is going to make much of a difference.





B and B





There’s an entire file box labeled ESTATE OF ELEANOR BENNETT. Mr. Mitch pulls out a brown paper envelope with their mother’s handwriting on it and puts it on the desk in front of Byron. Benny shifts her seat closer to Byron’s and leans in to look. Byron removes his hand but leaves the packet where Benny can see it. Their ma has addressed the envelope to B and B, the moniker she liked to use whenever she wrote or spoke to them together.

B-and-B notes were usually pinned to the fridge door with a magnet. B and B, there’s some rice and peas on the stove. B and B, I hope you left your sandy shoes at the door. B and B, I love my new earrings, thank you!

Ma only called them Byron or Benny when she was speaking with one sibling or the other, and she only called Benny Benedetta when she was upset.

Benedetta, what about this report card? Benedetta, don’t talk to your father that way. Benedetta, I need to talk to you.

Benedetta, please come home.

Their mother left a letter, Mr. Mitch says, but most of their mother’s last message is contained in an audio file that took her more than eight hours, over four days, to record.

“Go ahead,” Mr. Mitch says, nodding at the packet.

Byron cuts open the envelope and shakes out its contents, a USB drive and a handwritten note. He reads the note out loud. It’s so typically Ma.

B and B, there’s a small black cake in the freezer for you. Don’t throw it out.

Black cake. Byron catches himself smiling. Ma and Dad used to share a slice of cake every year to mark their anniversary. It wasn’t the original wedding cake, they said, not anymore. Ma would make a new one every five years or so, one layer only, and put it in the freezer. Still, she insisted that any black cake, steeped as it was in rum and port, could have lasted the full length of their marriage.

I want you to sit down together and share the cake when the time is right. You’ll know when.

Benny covers her mouth with one hand.

Love, Ma.

Benny starts to cry.





Benny





Benny hasn’t cried in years. At least, she hadn’t, until last week, after being fired from her afternoon gig back in New York. At first, she thought her boss was being crabby because he’d seen Benny thumbing her smartphone while taking customer calls. There was a rule against that sort of thing, but there was a message from her mother. Four words that she just couldn’t shake out of her head.

Actually, the message had been in her voicemail for a month already, but just then, Benny had been looking at her cellphone, wondering what to do. She hadn’t really spoken to her mother in years. Not talking to your own ma for that long took a certain kind of gall, Benny knew. But so did not standing by your own daughter when she’d needed you most.

For years, it had been easier for Benny simply to stay away, to not respond to the rare message from back home, to steel herself against every birthday and holiday away from her family, to tell herself that this was a form of self-care. In her weaker moments, she’d plug in the old digital photo frame that she kept under some sketchbooks in a desk drawer and watch as a series of smiling faces that she’d thought would always be part of her life popped onto the screen, one after the other, then off again.

One of Benny’s favorite pics showed her with Byron and Dad, arms linked and dressed in black tie for some event, the kind of fundraiser or tribute or gathering of lawyers at which her father had often taken the lectern. The resemblance between the three of them was striking, even to Benny, who had grown up with this fact. And from the identical light in their eyes, you could tell who had been taking the photograph. Her ma.

Benny’s boss was raising his voice at her now.

“You weren’t doing your job,” he said.

Benny slipped her phone into the pocket of her cardigan.

“Your job is to read from the goddamned script. Your job is not to volunteer social commentary on the durability of consumer electronics!”

Oh, that. Not the phone.

By the time Benny figured out what her supervisor was talking about, she was out of a job.

Benny was still dry-eyed when she walked out of the call center with the only personal items she’d kept in her shared cubicle: a coffee mug with stained, fractured insides and a fringy-looking plant. What kind of plant it was, Benny could not recall, but it had never let her down. Nothing seemed to deter it, not a lack of water, not fluorescent lighting, not the plastic-smelling office air, not her supervisor’s noxious language. Every once in a while, she would lift the plant’s tiny stems with her fingertips and wipe the dust from its fronds with a damp cloth, just so.

It was fifteen minutes before Benny realized that she had taken the wrong bus. She got off at the next stop and found herself standing in front of an old coffee shop with fake-pine garlands and fake-velvet bows on its doors. She hadn’t realized this kind of place still existed in the city. At the sight of the spray-on-imitation-frost lettering spelling out Happy Holidays across the plate-glass window, at the thought of yet another year without having a coffee shop of her own to run (though with less kitsch), at the sight of a young father inside the café kneeling down to button his child into a puffy, lilac-colored jacket and tucking her dark hair into the lilac fur-lined hood, Benny burst into tears. Benny had never liked lilac.