But where did the cake come from? The boy didn’t know. Wrapped inside a piece of wax paper, the cake had been hidden in the back of the family freezer, deliberately, it seemed, behind the ice trays, where it remained for years. A tiny slice, barely three or four bites. Through the paper, the icing appeared thick, unappetizing. Why did someone go to such lengths to preserve this cake? Who would want it?
The boy asked his father.
His father said, “Don’t ask me about the cake.” He was doing the crossword on his cellphone while watching baseball on TV, the way he sometimes did. He had his feet on the coffee table; the boy could see holes in his socks. The holes made his father’s socks look like puppets.
“But,” the boy said.
His father didn’t say anything. He made the face he made whenever the crossword had gotten the best of him.
The boy asked his mother.
His mother told him he wasn’t to touch the cake, ever. Would he promise her that? Please?
“Why?”
Because it was a special cake, his mother said. She turned a smile on him that wasn’t really a smile.
“Special, how?” the boy asked.
But his mother didn’t answer him. She ran the dish disposal and the kitchen faucet at the same time, which was just about the loudest sound in the house, unless you counted the car starting up in the garage, which the boy didn’t.
Time passed. The boy grew older. Taller. Able to reach all the way inside the freezer whenever he felt like it, which wasn’t often. Most of the time, he could find whatever he wanted in the refrigerator. Milk, soda, cheese, or orange juice. The boy had gotten good at tightening the cap on the orange juice and shaking it upside down before pouring it into a squat glass, the way he’d seen his parents do. The boy could close the refrigerator door with just a tap of his hip.
The boy’s parents grew strange, more mysterious. His father took to staying up late watching the news, the TV on mute, the family room suffused with blue-green light. His mother bought a kind of bicycle that did not move, upon which she pedaled furiously, the bike commanding her to go faster, faster. His mother obeyed, as if trying to escape. Whenever the boy thought he’d figured out something about his parents, it was like shining a flashlight down into the basement: one part was brilliantly revealed, but the rest was in shadow. How did they manage to do that?
One day, when the boy was old enough to stay home by himself, he opened the freezer and looked for something to eat. His parents had gone to the store together to buy whatever they bought when they went to the store together. The boy pushed aside frozen vegetables and fish sticks, pizzas wrapped in cellophane. The boy moved one ice tray aside and then the other. Reached his hand deep inside the freezer. Lifted the cake from its hiding spot. Closed the freezer door behind him.
When his parents found him at the kitchen table, the wax paper opened before him, dotted with crumbs, they asked him how could he? How could he? His mother began to cry. Her shoulders shook. His father’s face turned red and raw. The boy said he was sorry, too quiet to hear. But he didn’t understand.
His parents sat down beside him. They gave one another looks the boy wasn’t sure how to read. And then his parents told him about the boy. The other boy. The first boy. The one who came before him. The one who didn’t make it. They told him how there had been a funeral, and a reception. How there had been a cake.
The boy looked down at the wax paper, empty now, save for a few yellow crumbs and smears of cheap icing, and moved his tongue along his lips. His first taste of loss.
Anthony Varallo is the author of a novel, The Lines (University of Iowa Press), as well as four short story collections. New work is out or forthcoming in The New Yorker “Daily Shouts,” One Story, STORY, XRAY, DIAGRAM, The Best Small Fictions 2020, and elsewhere. Currently he is a professor of English at the College of Charleston in Charleston, SC, where he is the fiction editor of Crazyhorse. Find him online at @TheLines1979.