by Matt Dube
Junie Rosedale’s parents died when she was so young, she had no memories of them, and she was raised by a collection of aunts who did what they could to preserve her from more of life’s bumps. They petted and buffered her and made her path so smooth that she almost believed that bad things only happened to other people. That’s part of why she left Plainview for Coaling. She didn’t think that Coaling was especially touched by tragedy, but it was about the same size as Plainview, hovering around ten thousand souls for decades, and far enough away that no one could stand between her and the stuff of life.
It didn’t take long for life to find Junie. She had only been working at the mail processing facility for a week when one of her co-workers, an older man named Martin Hickson, passed away. One day, Martin was there, smoking as he sorted the letters by carrier route, the long tip his cigarette blessing the circulars and letters with a fine rain of ash, and the next, he was gone. Another of her co-workers, Christine, asked Junie if she wanted to go with her to the visitation the next day. They’d been given the afternoon off to attend, but even if they hadn’t, you couldn’t have kept Junie away.
That night, Junie went to the matron of the boarding house where she lived and asked for permission to use the kitchen. She turned the pages of the spiral notebook of recipes and instructions to get out stains and schedules for planting a kitchen garden for something she could bring to the visitation. She settled on baking a lemon cake. She couldn’t remember ever eating it herself, but she thought it was just the thing for a funeral gathering, something sweet that you could share, tart enough to shake you out of your grief. She took her notebook with her to the IGA and collected the ingredients, and then she stayed up late to assemble the cake. She did a good enough job cleaning up her mess that the boarding house matron allowed her to borrow the cake carrier Junie found in the back of a lower cabinet and took it with her to work. They still had to sort that morning, and Junie was bad at it, distracted by the cake in its white plastic cloche behind her, anticipating the world it bought her access to.
The visitation was held at Martin’s home, in the front room of a single story, single family home on one of the quiet streets facing Dease Park. Christine saw someone she knew on the porch and stopped to talk with her, leaving Junie to go inside by herself, her cake held in front of her like a shield. It was noticeably cooler inside the dim house; someone had pulled the blinds so the sun didn’t intrude. The only illumination came from a floor lamp that cast a circle of light on the ceiling, but not much beyond that. Junie stopped in the doorway and felt goose bumps raise up on her arms. There were three people, two women her age and one older, who stood talking, their heads bowed together, and when one of the younger women patted the older woman on the back, the older woman began to sob. It ran through Junie like an electric current and she had to remind herself how to walk, one foot at a time, past them to the kitchen.
She unloaded the cake and snapped the empty carrier shut and wandered into another room where someone had set out a tall pitcher of lemonade and a casserole dish with manicotti. She took a glass and a small plate and stood, quite happily, in the corner watching as people came and went in front of her, men in suits that held the outline of their hangers and women in simple but still pleasingly somber dresses. That’s where Christine found her maybe ten minutes later; Junie hadn’t tasted her manicotti or her lemonade.
“Did you already introduce yourself to Martin’s wife?” Christine asked. Junie shook her head no, and Christine led her back into the room she’d first passed, with the floor lamp. The older woman was still there, talking to a small man with a shining pate. Christine, easy as you please, walked up to her and Junie tried to follow without drawing attention to herself.
“We worked with Martin,” Christine said, taking in Junie with her remarks. “We’re sorry for your loss.”
The older woman, Martin’s widow, took Christine’s hand and gave it a curt shake.
“Martin really loved to smoke, didn’t he?” Junie said, wanting to add something to the conversation.
A tear sprung at the corner of the widow’s eye. “It gave him more pleasure than anything else, even when he knew it was killing him,” she said, and didn’t take Junie’s hand though she offered it. “He wanted what he wanted, and no one dared to cross him.”
“We’re sorry for your loss,” Christine repeated, and slid a hand behind Junie’s waist and led her toward the front door.
“Do we have to leave so soon?” Junie asked, and Christine laughed at her, lightly. “We don’t have to go back to work,” she assured Junie, “but there’s something I want to show you.” Junie followed eagerly down the three wooden steps from the porch to the street and down past the corner where Christine stepped under the canopy of an old oak tree. She turned when Junie joined her under the canopy’s shade and put her hands on Junie’s hips, pulled her close, and kissed her.
It was more a surprise than unwelcome, and Junie meant to kiss her back, but she was distracted.
“Well,” Christine said. “That’s embarrassing.” She pulled her hand through the hair at the back of her neck.
“It’s the cake carrier,” Junie said. “I left it at Martin’s and my landlady will murder me if I don’t bring it back.” Christine turned back to look at her, her face open and curious and just the kind of face no one in Plainview had ever looked at her with. “I’m serious.”
“Well, let’s get it.” Christine gave her hand a tug to pull her from under the tree’s canopy, and then when they were on the street, they walked side by side but without touching. They shared kisses in secret places after that, then they moved their stools side-by-side at the post office. People called them best friends, and sometimes Junie detected a note of jealousy when they said it. She sometimes wondered who the jealousy was directed at. Did someone want to steal Christine away from her, or did they want to steal herself? But she didn’t wonder about it often.
Being with Christine, who’d grown up in Coaling, opened up Junie’s life in a way it would have taken her years to connect with on her own. Christine knew everyone, and they went to church socials together, with the Catholics and Methodists, to eat spaghetti and watch Easter pageants. Christine’s twin brother, Christopher, taught at the high school and ran for the school board a couple years after they got together, and the two of them knocked on doors to ask people to vote for him. They went together, Junie assumed, because, of course, the sister would be partial but Junie was an outsider, and could, therefore, be trusted. He lost but didn’t take it too badly. They were still so young then, not even thirty. They went to funerals, which were still Junie’s favorite, just to see how people moved around in the houses of the recently dead; she dreamed of drawing floorplans and tracing the steps people made to avoid standing where the recently departed had stood, like they didn’t want to take up that space yet. And of course, when they went to the visitations or wakes, she brought her lemon cake. They celebrated their fifth anniversary in secret, in the kitchen of a little house Junie had been convinced to buy because the market for it would never be better than it was in the early nineties. Christine got Junie her own cake carrier, a gnarled pink glass plate with a crystal-clear cover that wasn’t original but still was lovely.
The cake stand was a family heirloom, a piece of glassware that Christine and Christopher’s grandmother had collected from the bank during the depression, piece by piece, for making regular deposits. The family had so little to live on that sometimes Christine’s mother went hungry, and someone had donated the shoes she wore. The glassware, in spite of what it cost, was considered quite the inheritance, and Junie was touched that Christine wanted her to have it. When Junie left it behind at another funeral, she tried to laugh it off. “I couldn’t wait to get home with you,” she told Christine. She knew Christine was feeling bad about herself, how her middle was spreading as she got older, and she meant to make her partner feel better.
“Bullshit,” Christine said. “I’ve seen you with stars in your eyes and I’m not the one who puts them there. I’ve seen you at those events; your jaw goes slack and you, frankly, you’re scary to watch.”
Christine, Junie noted, had been prickly and quick to anger lately. Junie poured them both a glass of screw-top wine and walked over to rub Christine’s back where she was sitting in the high-backed canning chair in Christine’s kitchen.
“Don’t touch me,” Christine sobbed when Junie went to put her hands on her. “I used to think you were morally retarded. Like however many times I showed you people being people, hurting inside, you never understood what they might feel.” She paused and pursed her lips and took a drink from her wine glass. “But I don’t think that anymore. I’m know better. You’re predatory. You’re a vampire.”
“Christine,” Junie said. Christine had a hundred nicknames and sweet endearments that she called Junie by. Junie had none for her lover.
“I want you out of my house,” Christine said, her voice firm but her face crumpling. “I revoke your welcome here. Isn’t that what you do with vampires?”
Junie didn’t know what to do. She put her wine glass down on the table and watched Christine, waiting for her to change her mind. To say she was just tired or stressed about work. That the cake plate wasn’t important, not really. But Christine turned her head and cried and Junie left and walked back to her small house.
When she was supposed to work, Junie instead called in and burned first one week and then a second of accrued vacation time. She went back to Plainview; she hadn’t returned in years and her Aunt Jack was failing. She thought, in her muddled state, that she’d finally see a funeral, something her aunts had always tried to shelter her from. But Aunt Jack rallied, and Junie felt underfoot. She didn’t belong there anymore. So she returned to Coaling. At work, she moved her station from where she formerly sat next to Christine (Christine had, in her absence, moved her own station). And then, two weeks later, she found a new job after nine years in the post office sorting facility.
Some people, when she saw them out socially, would ask after Christine, but most people either didn’t know enough to ask or felt like it had been kept a secret when it was going on, so why talk about it now. At least that’s how Junie felt, as she rediscovered her place in Coaling. There were still the irregular funerals, and she found vicarious pleasure in the grief groups, one at the Catholic Church organized by the new pastor there and another at the Methodist Church. She was regularly solicited in these groups to share stories about her loss, but she demurred. Aunt Jack passed, eventually, but Junie wasn’t there to see it, and after all the effort they’d made to keep her from death, she didn’t even go back for the funeral.
Years passed, and Junie had become a kind of fixture in Coaling, a little old lady, maybe one who death trailed in her wake, or even one who, as Christine suggested, gorged herself on the sorrows of others. There were worse things, Junie knew, than being thought of as eccentric, and she felt, in spite of the lack of visible evidence, that she’d lived a full, rich life, even without more than the one love and only having really spent any time in more than two places. Then, sometime in her sixties, she heard from a stranger at the grocery story that Christine’s brother Christopher had died.
Junie was there already, so she collected the ingredients for her famous lemon cake and drove home and baked it. She imagined that there was a service, some small room someplace with sideboard tables loaded with au gratin potatoes and macaroni salad. But that didn’t do justice to Junie’s relationship with Christine, even though it had been two decades since they’d really spoken. Junie wasn’t sure she’d be able to go back to the home Christine exiled her from, but Christine had moved and was living in the house where she’d grown up. It was a narrow three-story house on a leafy street, with gray scalloped wood shingles that covered the walls like waves on a rainy sea. Junie had gone through a dozen cake carriers over the years, lost or given away to people who admired them. Standing in front of Christine’s house, she was back to the simple opaque plastic model whose lid snapped into a ring on the base, and she smoothed it nervously before knocking on the door.
Christine opened the door in a box black dress and a short jean jacket. Junie didn’t think she’d ever seen her in a dress before and stood on the stoop, unsure what to do next till Christine reached out and took the cake carrier out of her hands. “Come inside,” she said, and Junie stepped over the threshold.
Christine walked deeper into the house, past the entryway which was cramped with a coat tree and shoe rack, and Junie followed her into a bright white kitchen where Christine set down the cake beside a row of covered dishes. “My freezer is full of this shit,” Christine said. “I’m lucky that trash pickup is tomorrow, because there’s no way to keep some of this stuff from going bad.” She turned her back and reached up to one of the high cupboards and pulled down two small blue plates. She passed them to Junie, who held them stupidly, unsure what to do next.
Christine pulled out a drawer and passed Junie two forks and then, taking out a large knife, popped the lid off the cake carrier. It burped a little when the air got in. “You’ll have a piece of cake with me?” she asked Junie.
“I’ve never tried it,” Junie admitted, but when Christine cut a piece, Junie passed her a plate. When they both had pieces, Christine led Junie to another room, where there was a drop leaf table and wicker backed chairs. The table was covered by so many floral arrangements that Christine had to clear a space for them to sit near one end. “The flowers are killing my allergies,” Christine said and rubbed at her watery eyes.
Junie took a bite of the cake, and Christine did the same.
“My god, this is terrible,” Christine said, chewing and then stuck out her tongue, coated with cake. “This is maybe the worst cake I’ve ever eaten.” She was laughing a little.
“Is it?” Junie asked, starting to laugh too. “I can’t taste anything.”
“It’s awful.” She chewed a little more, and returned her plate to the tabletop, leaving the fork on the plate. “This is what you’ve been bringing to people for forty years?”
“I thought people wanted something sweet,” Junie said, and put her own plate and fork down.
“You’re still grieving, aren’t you?” Christine asked and looked directly at Junie.
“I’m the same as always,” Junie said. She didn’t come here to add to Christine’s troubles or to derive sustenance from her sorrows. She didn’t want to cry.
Matt Dube teaches creative writing and American lit at a small mid-Missouri university. His stories have appeared in Moon City Review, Pomme, Front Porch, and elsewhere. He’s not picky and likes every kind of cake.