Just the Two of Us

It’s my tenth birthday today. My mum got me a piece of chocolate cake. But it’s not just any chocolate cake, rather my favorite one. It has three layers of moist chocolate sponge cake separated by the creamiest hazelnut mousse I have ever tasted in my few young years of life. To top that, it is covered by a chocolate ganache with cocoa powder. It is the ultimate chocolate cake experience. But it is not how it looks, taste or feels that makes the cake special; it’s the memories that I have of it. My mum and I would always stop by the bakery near my school to buy this piece of chocolate cake after she picked me up at the end of the school day. We would take it, sit on the wooden bench outside the bakery, and share it. Just the two of us. My mum always had a sweet tooth and the smile that it would put on her face after taking a bite made the experience unforgettable.

So, here I am in the kitchen staring at the chocolate cake sitting on one of mum’s ceramic plates with a blue lit candle on top of it. It’s calling out to me, but I always wait for mum to take the first bite. Out the corner of my eye, I can see the shadows of my parents lit up in my dad’s office waving their hands at each other erratically. They are trying to be quiet behind the closed glass door of the office but that could barely silence the cries of my mother. These pain-filled sounds seemed to have become a normal occurrence these past few months, though the reason for them was too complex to explain to a ten-year-old when I asked.

They finally open the door. My mum heads towards me while my dad remains in the office, goes on his phone, and closes the door again. He is always on the phone talking to someone. “Darling, thank you for waiting for me. Let’s have some of our special cake”, she says as she sits down next to me. Her face was covered in dried tear streaks, her eyes swollen, and her cheeks were flushed red. She took the first bite of the cake and she smiled as she usually does, but her smile was crooked and was wavering at the edges. “Finish it up darling”, she told me and so I did as she just stared with that crooked smile of hers and watched me eat our little special cake. The next day she was gone.

The years have gone by and as I have grown older it seems that I cannot forget that memory of my tenth birthday, while my father acts like it never happened. Like she never happened. He still always talks to the phone to someone. Anyone over me. Even more now that it is just the two of us.

It’s my thirtieth birthday today. I stopped by the bakery. It shut down a few years after she left and now only the sign remains still loosely attached on the empty building. I buy my piece of chocolate cake from somewhere else now. I bring it home, place it on one of my mother’s ceramic plates that father hadn’t thrown away, stick in a blue candle on top, light it up and wait. Father never shows up on this day. Coincidentally, he has a conference that he needs to attend to across the country every year. But it never bothered me, it’s not him who I wait for. As I sit in my kitchen, staring at the plain cake, I also glance at the clock above the stove. At seven pm I bring the cake home, at seven thirty I light up the candle, and then I sit down and wait. That’s all I do anymore. Waiting. And waiting. And waiting. And waiting. And waiting. Hoping.

“It’s just the two of us again,” I whisper as the clock hits midnight. I stand up, pick up the plate with the cake and throw both in the trash can.