Eat Cake: A Novel by Jeanne Ray Page B

another state, you know. That’s a long ride.”
    Camille trotted off to the liquor cabinet with great authority, but my mother saved her the trouble of looking. “No Wild Turkey,” she said. “It’s not anything we stock.”
    “Is it all right for you to have a drink?” I asked.
    “A drink? A drink is good for me. That’s what the doctors all say now. I’m not talking about a scandal, just one drink. How is it you could have such a nice house and no Wild Turkey?”
    “I’ll go get some!” Sam said, and jingled his car keys in his hand to prove that he was good to go.
    “Oh, Sam,” I said, “after all the driving you’ve done? Relax, have something to eat. I can go to the liquor store.”
    Sam gave me a look of sheer desperation. I knew immediately what he wasn’t saying: He had driven across Iowa with my father and now he needed an excuse to be alone, if only for the amount of time it took to drive to the liquor store. “I’ll be two minutes.”
    “Get the big bottle,” my father said. “They’ve got a plastic one. You could drop that sucker on the floor all day long and you’re not going to break it. There’s some money in my wallet. Here, just reach in my back pocket.” My father turned around, offering up said pocket, but Sam declined to reach in.
    “Well, it’s good to see you haven’t wasted your life,” my mother said. “You’ve managed to learn something.”
    “Put a sock in it, Hollis,” my father said lightly. “I come in peace.”
    I heard the back door click closed and realized Sam had left without any of the social formalities of departure. Without him, the remaining members of our party stared at one another with unbridled awkwardness. I tried to remember the times I had been in the room with both of my parents. There was the year that my father drove halfway across the country for my birthday. He showed up at the door with a doll in a grocery sack, a pink paper hat on his head, a noisemaker hanging out of the corner of his mouth, which he blew into hard when my mother opened the door. That in itself almost scared her to death. She started yelling at him and he started saying, “For God’s sake, it’s the kid’s birthday.” Which it wasn’t. My birthday had been a month earlier. It wouldn’t have been awful, his getting the date wrong, but as it turned out he had a job to play at a club in town. He was planning on being there anyway.
    “How about some dinner?” I asked.
    “Oh sure, dinner would be good. It smells good.” My father stood there, arms out, as if he were waiting for someone to tell him when he might be allowed to unscrew them.
    I took a light hold of his upper arm and walked him over to the table where he sat down in Sam’s chair. Camille pulled up a chair next to his.
    “All those pills they give you, they make your stomach feel a little funny, you know. I think some food would take the edge off things.”
    “I thought that was the Wild Turkey’s job,” my mother said.
    I glared at her. “Do you have medicine you should be taking now?” I picked up plates and put them in the sink. I had the feeling we were all done with eating.
    “Sam’s got the pills. A whole suitcase full, you wouldn’t believe it. That Sam, he’s as good as a doctor. I guess when you hang out with them long enough, you know all the right questions to ask, but everybody was really taken with him in Des Moines. I told him on the way home, I think he should go to medical school. Wouldn’t that be something, Ruthie? You could be married to a doctor after all.”
    “Dad’s too old to go to school,” Camille said.
    I cut off a piece of lasagna and put it on a plate with some bread and a little salad. My father had gotten so frail. I was glad to have the pistachio cake.
    “You’re never too old to learn something and you’re never too old to start over, right, Hollis?”
    My mother stared down at him. She hadn’t taken up her seat at the table again. “Would you stop