Chapter 24: Next Year's Cake Table

Next Labor Day, I stood at the head of the cake table with a blowtorch in my hand and no one telling me where to stand.

The Aldrich-Delacroix reunion had moved to the lawn of the boathouse again, and the tent was white against a blue September sky.

Sixty relatives stood in a half circle around the baked Alaska.

They were all there, the bearded cousin and his new wife, the uncle who ate three slices, the cousins who had come to the dock with carnations.

I lit the torch, and the meringue went gold.

Cass filmed it on her phone, laughing before the torch even lit.

"You're a wizard," she said.

"I'm a woman with a blowtorch."

"Same thing."

Her husband stood beside her with a paper plate in each hand, practicing.

Gordon was at the grill with a spatula.

Samira had brought a tray of ma'amoul in a foil pan.

And she was explaining the wooden mold to a row of cousins who had never held one.

At my elbow, on the pink-checked cloth, sat a small lemon tart on a white plate.

Lark stood beside me, in her green dress, with her braid down her back and a thin cord around her neck.

On the cord was a brass key.

It was the key to the flat above my bakery.

She had worn it since February, on the day I opened the second drawer in the bedroom and told her it had been empty for six years.

It was no longer empty.

It held a salt-stained fleece, three pairs of wool socks.

And a canvas tote bag with a white pastry box folded inside it, because she refused to throw the box away.

Her boat still sat in slip fourteen in Charlestown.

And she slept there on the nights when the harbor was loud and she wanted to hear it.

Pru tapped her glass with a spoon.

The tent went quiet at once, from habit.

"Three announcements," Pru said. "Before the lobster."

Everyone grinned.

She was wearing her pearls and a navy cardigan, and she looked ten years younger than she had last year.

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