“Now,” I said, picking up the cake knife, “there’s something else you should know, Janet.”
She looked at me warily.
“I’ve known you for forty-one years. I was at your christening. I held you when you had chickenpox. And I have watched you, for four decades, try to make yourself the center of every room by making someone else smaller in it.” I cut the first slice of the real cake. “My seventieth birthday. Michael’s promotion party. And tonight — my fiftieth anniversary, three years after I buried my husband — you decided the evening needed your signature.”
“Mom,” Michael said quietly, but I held up a hand.
“I’m not finished.” I put the slice on a plate and held it out — not to Janet, but to Barbara, who took it with tears in her eyes. “Barbara, thank you for coming. You have been my friend for forty-eight years, and I love you.”
Then I turned back to Janet. “As for you — you’re welcome to stay for cake. But I want you to understand something.” I looked down at the ruined display on the floor. “You didn’t ruin my evening, Janet. You just showed forty people exactly who you are. And you did it” — I gestured at the frosting on her shoe — “for absolutely nothing.”
Someone laughed. Then the whole rooftop was laughing — not cruelly, but with the relief of people who had just watched a bully swing at air.
Janet opened her mouth. Closed it. Looked at her mother, who would not meet her eyes. Then she picked up her purse and walked to the stairs without another word.
The toast
We ate the real cake under the string lights, and it tasted exactly like 1976 — lemon and sugar and fifty years of mornings I got to wake up next to James.