100 Days of Cake (10 page)

Nodding, he says this is something I should definitely bring up with my doctor and offers to give me the name of a psychiatrist. “We can also try adding an extra session each week for a while. That might help too.”

I start to tell him that would be great, but stop.

“Do you think my insurance will cover it?” Already our co-pay for the sessions is pretty hefty. Even with Mom's Coral Cove salon domination, the weekly cost has got to be eating up a chunk of her checks.

“Let's not make money the deciding factor in your treatment. I have a sliding scale for these things, so we can just say that your current co-pay covers whatever your insurance company won't.”

“Seriously, Dr. B.? That's, like, beyond nice.”

All at once I sort of pink up and actually get a little excited about Dr. B. getting me back on track.

“Now tell me about these bad days,” he says.

“The other night I was supposed to go see my friend's band, and I just couldn't do it.”

“You couldn't drag yourself out of bed for Burning Dante?”

“
Flaming
Dantes. But they're called Headless Naked Ken now.” I regret this the minute I say it. Dr. B.'s face remains neutral, but something flickers across his eyes, and I just know he's thinking that this is more immature high school stuff.
He's probably regretting that he offered me extra sessions.

“We've talked about this before, Molly.” Leaning forward, he nods. “Being depressed means sometimes you're not going to feel like doing things—that's okay. But sometimes you need to push yourself to get out there.”

“Fake it till you make it?”

“In some ways.” He crosses his hands in his lap. I notice for the first time that they are really big hands, a little like my dad's, except the fingers are more delicate, like maybe he plays piano or something.

“Given your history with Alex, the show might not have been the best thing for you to attend anyway, if you don't want to send him mixed messages. But you should try to get out and do things with your friends. You know, see a movie on a Friday night.”

I think of my sister in her barely there bathing suit heading to Chris Partridge's house, and Elle's story about Meredith Hoffman falling all over Alex. “You're kind of dating yourself there, Dr. B. Kids these days really aren't headed to the drive-in anymore.”

“Your generation. First no mix tapes, now no movies.” He smiles and shakes his head. “You guys are missing out. The first time I got to second base was with Lizzie Mapleton at the mall movie theater.”

“Okay, so what exactly is second base? Does the bra have to come off?”

Dr. B. laughs. “That's a question for your regular doctor.”

“What did you see? At the movies with Lizzie Mapleton?” I ask.

“
Say Anything . . . 
”

“Never heard of it.”

“Really? John Cusack? Ione Skye?” He seems incredulous. “ ‘In Your Eyes'?”

“Nope.”

“It's only the single greatest romantic comedy of all time—in my humble opinion. I'm bringing in a copy for your next session. It should be required homework for every patient.”

We talk some more about the bad days and about maybe adding some sort of exercise now that I've quit the swim team. Endorphins are good for the brain and all that.

In his crabitat on the desk, Pickles taps the wall.

Narrowing his eyes, Dr. B. looks into the cage. “Does he have a little couch in there?”

“Yeah, it's actually from the dollhouse I had when I was a kid,” I say. “My mom always tells the story of how my dad stayed up all night Christmas eve putting it together so it would be ready for me in the morning.”

Dr. B. nods. “Yeah,” I add. “My dad did a lot of stuff like that.”

M
om is worried about today's cake.

We're supposed to have dinner at my grandma's house tonight, and because of all her crazy cake making, Mom volunteered to bring dessert. She has the day off and spends most of the afternoon tinkering in the kitchen before summoning V and I to take a look. It does not look good.

“Is it supposed to be grayish like that?” V asks.

Not if it's supposed to look like the picture in
A Baker's Journey
, which is open on the counter. That cheesecake is a pretty pastel green.

V and I taste a bit of the filling; it does not taste good either.

In fact it's probably Mom's worst cake effort to date, but that might be a flaw in the recipe. Why would anyone think green tea would go well in a cheesecake?

I glance over at V; she raises eyebrows back at me. We
cannot
take this to Gram's.

Here's the thing about my grandma. She is the polar opposite of Mom. Only twenty years older, she's always been this gray-haired granny type—even when we were little kids and she was barely in her forties. Since the beginning of time, she's worn housecoats, had plastic covers on her furniture, and talked about “nice young people.” I actually don't think she's ever said an unkind word about anyone . . . except my parents.

I guess my mom and dad weren't the best financial planners, and apparently Gram had never been crazy about my father to begin with, but I still remember hearing Mom and Gram arguing when we were staying with her after Dad died. My grandma went on and on about how Dad left us “high and dry.” But then, she wasn't particularly supportive when Mom opened Dye Another Day either. She kept proclaiming that no one in town would ever pay more than twenty-five bucks for a haircut. And when we moved into the model home? Sheesh, was Gram huffy puffy. Each accent pillow she touched, every walk-in closet she walked into, my grandma asked my mom if she could afford it. “Yes, Ma,” Mom would say, with growing annoyance.

“Well,” Gram fired back, “aren't you fancy.” If anyone in town ever heard the way sweet Amelia Vance talked to her daughter, they'd probably keel over from shock.

Mom goes out of her way to be extra perfect around Gram, and that just escalates everything. Like, Mom is usually so effortlessly stylish, but today she's wearing an unflattering pencil skirt with this overly fussy shirt. And she spent ten minutes going through her stash of shoes in the laundry room.

Short story long: this cake has got to go.

“So, what do you think?” Mom asks with the odd panic she reserves for her mother and talk of me being depressed. “When I tried it, I couldn't really tell if it was right.”

“It's different.” V raises eyebrows at me again.

“Are those the heels Gram called the ‘street walker special'?” I ask, changing the subject.

“Crap, you're right.”

Mom goes back to the laundry room in search of a more perfect shoe solution.

“We cannot let her take this mess,” V whispers to me.

“I know. Maybe it could have an accident?” I whisper back, and V nods emphatically. Mentally, I scroll through a list of sitcom plot points. “Fake sneeze?” I suggest.

“Great,” V says. “You are such a disgusting sneezer.”

I stash my annoyance away; we have limited time.

While Mom is still buried in the laundry room, I make this incredibly loud
ahhh-choo
noise, and V and I hurl the cake onto the floor. It lands with a gross squishing sound.

V's dramatic “Oh shit” is so much more believable than mine.

“What happened?” Mom is back, with two different sandals in hand. Her eyes widen as she looks from V and me to the dead corpse-gray cake on the floor.

I apologize and explain how I accidentally pitched forward.

“You know how Molly always has those gross whole-body sneezes,” V adds.

“I'm really sorry,” I say again.

“It's not your fault,” Mom says, but she's got that level-red panicky look in her eyes.

“That bakery by Jaclyn's is still open, and it's on the way,” V offers. “We can just pick something up there.”

“We could even take it out of the box and pretend we made it,” I add.

Mom laughs a little. “She'd know. My mother always knows everything.”

Gram's house is in the older part of town, and we pass our old house on the way. That rickety swing is still in the backyard; it's just not ours anymore.

In one of her baggy shift dresses, Gram meets us at the door. “Well, don't you girls look pretty?” She hugs V and me. Taking in Mom's overly complicated dress shirt, she adds, “You must be burning up in that in this weather.”

“Good to see you,” Mom says without skipping a beat, and hands Gram the cherry pie from Coral Cove Bake Shop. “Unfortunately, we had a little bit of a spill with the cake I made.”

“Probably best this way. Lisa, you're a pretty girl, but you've never been much of a cook.” Gram laughs warmly, like this is a funny shared joke.

V and I exchange a look.

“Well, I've been trying,” Mom mumbles.

Nothing in Gram's house has been redone in my entire life. Same paisley couches, same olive-colored kitchen appliances, and a shag carpet that has managed to survive three decades relatively unscathed. There is something really nice about the fact that her house is always a constant. The only “new additions” to the place are a couple of these Georgia O'Keeffe–like flower paintings I made in junior high art class that Mom and I had framed for one of Gram's birthdays. Seeing them I have a momentary flicker of sadness. Art is the one extracurricular I kind of miss, even if I did drop out because I didn't have any “themes or underlying messages” in my work and felt like a giant fraud.

“Are you working on any new pictures, Molly?” Gram asks when she notices me looking.

“Not right now,” I say, not adding anything about the fraud stuff.

I brought Pickles in his crabitat, and Gram takes a
genuine interest in him, letting Pickles crawl across her arm and getting him some veggie treats from the kitchen.

Gram is actually a pretty good cook, and when we were really little, V and I used to get out all her pots and pans and pretend to help her. When V was maybe six, she told Gram how much she loved this sausage-and-pepper dish that Gram had made. V had kind of a lisp back then, so the way she said “delicious” was really cute, and Gram was tickled. So now we're pretty much stuck with that every time we come over for dinner, even though V would never normally eat sausage anymore. Who's gonna be the jerk to say something about it to an old lady?

Like clockwork, the second we're all sitting down to eat, Gram turns to V. “Well, how is it?” she asks.

“Still de-liss-ous,” V assures.

“I would have made those brownies you girls like, but your mom said she was handling dessert.”

“I'm sure the pie will be great,” I say. And it
is
tasty when we try some twenty minutes later, but I feel like a traitor eating it. Maybe we should have let my mom bring the horrible cheesecake?

On the ride home Mom is quiet and visibly bummed.

“You know,” I say, “everyone loooved my hair when you braided it the other night. Maybe you could do it again tonight?”

I glance at V in the backseat. She rolls her eyes and shakes
her head, but then joins in. “Maybe you could do mine, too? I have to open Jaclyn's tomorrow, and it might save me a ton of time if I didn't have to do my hair in the morning.”

“Okay.” Mom pinks up a little. “That might be fun.”

And it actually is.