Vanilla cake with a watery strawberry compote. A sickly sweet buttercream frosting that lingers on the roof of my mouth.

            I fork another piece into my mouth, trying to avoid eye contact with my on-looking relatives. As sad as my attempt at a cake is, I hope this is what I remember from the funeral. Not the way his face looked, stiff and foundation-caked, staring up at me from the open casket. Not the sound of my mother’s cries drifting in and out as if I were drifting simultaneously closer and farther away from her. But the cake.

***

            My brother loved baking. It was his “little thing”. My mom says we all have one. “Little things” are the small pleasures we glean out of our otherwise mundane daily routines. Those small moments where we can indulge in something just for ourselves and not worry about what it amounts to in the long run.

            He baked all the time. I would walk in the door after school to the smell of his newest creation wafting through our small two-bedroom apartment. He would smile at me as I tried to snag a piece on my way to my room.

            “Wait until after your homework’s done,” He would say, dragging the plate out of my reach. “It’ll taste better knowing you worked for it.”

            And he was always right.

            The guys at school made fun of him for it. They said baking was a girl’s thing. They would call him names, tell him he was no better than a housewife—as if there was something inherently wrong with making a home. But he didn’t care. It didn’t stop him from driving all the way to my middle school to hand-deliver my birthday cake, still warm from the oven. It was beautiful. He’d done that thing with the frosting I always liked. Where he managed to weave it in and out like lace across the whole cake. Everyone gathered around to sing Happy Birthday and cut into it. Red velvet. He hated red velvet. Always said it was the inferior version of a chocolate cake. But it was my favorite.

            Surprisingly, cakes were something he struggled with. They always seemed fine to me, but they were never up to his standards. He tried a million recipes, each one claiming to be the “best ever”, “fail-proof” recipe that would land him the ultimate not-too-dense, just-right cake. He wanted them to be perfect. And he was determined. He would bake the perfect cake. 

            “If it’s the last thing I do”, he said.

***

            The first time my brother tried baking a tiered cake was the morning after our dad left. I had woken up that Saturday to a quiet house. The sun was just barely slotting itself into position in the sky and the air was cold in my room. I padded down to the kitchen, following the smell lingering in the air. There was my brother, covered head-to-toe in flour, mixing bowls and spatulas scattered haphazardly across the counter.

            “What are you doing?” I asked.

            He turned to me with a smile on his face. He was always smiling. “What does it look like I’m doing silly? Baking a cake. Did you sleep okay?”

            I brushed a hand through my hair and pulled up a chair to the bar.

            “I guess so. Where’s mom?”

            “Still sleeping.”

            That was odd. Our mom was always the first one up every morning. She hated wasting precious hours of daylight.

            “And dad?”

            “He’ll be back soon. Why don’t you come help me here?”

            So we spent the rest of the morning making a mess of the kitchen. By the time we finished, our mom had wandered out of her room, hair and clothes disheveled. She didn’t greet us, just watched as we plated our creation.

            We ate in silence. The cake was too sweet. I couldn’t eat more than two bites before I pushed it over to my brother to finish off. My mom pushed hers around on her plate but didn’t attempt to eat any. We never did finish that cake. Our dad never did come home.

***

            It was a Wednesday. An average middle-of-the-week kind of day. Except it was his birthday. I was in college by then, in the city just over from our family house, where my brother still lived and worked. I caught the train after my last class of the day and headed to the Walmart bakery. I bought the first decent-looking cake that I saw, a 6-inch chocolate cake with blue buttercream stars scattered across the top. I held the cake in my lap on the train all the way to my brother’s house. By the time I arrived, the frosting resembled paint splotches more than stars. 

            I was halfway up the driveway when I got the call.

            “There’s been an accident.”

            The cake resembled a paint splotch on the concrete.

***

            I’d tried baking cakes before. Something always went wrong. Too much baking soda left a metallic taste in my mouth for days. Not enough baking powder resulted in something more pancake-like than cake in form.

            So I stood staring at the recipe on my iPad screen, wondering why I’d volunteered to do this. My mom had wanted to order a specialty cake for my brother’s funeral. But I refused. I told her I wanted to make the cake. Through my haze, I seemed to have forgotten that I didn’t know how to do that.

            I’d made a mess of the shared kitchen in my dorm. There were bowls and measuring cups and ingredients flung everywhere. I tried to remember the way that he used to do it.

            He used to crack the eggs easily in one hand. Never got any shells in either. I cracked one open with two shaking hands. I fished out the pieces of shell after.

            He knew just the right amount of flour and how to level it off but never packed it. I took uneven scoops and hoped for the best.

            It was too thick. I didn’t even know cake batter could get so thick. I added tablespoon after tablespoon of milk in hopes that I could salvage it. The spoon fought its way through the batter. Still too thick. My nose stung with tears I didn’t want to fall. I could fix it. I added more milk. Still too thick. I breathed in. My eyes were blurry. Too thick. I breathed out. Not right. Not right.

            Not right.

            I flung the spoon at the wall, sliding into a crouch against the cabinets. I didn’t care that there was batter in my hair and on the floor. I dragged a hand across my face. The flour caked against the wet tracks on my cheeks. He would’ve known how to fix it. He would’ve pulled me up and shown me some magic trick he’d learned from NYT Cooking that would save the batter.

            I dragged myself up and brushed off my apron. I didn’t read NYT Cooking. And I didn’t know how to fix this. But he would’ve wanted a cake. Even if he couldn’t taste it, he would’ve wanted one.

             I opened a drawer and fished out a clean spoon. I breathed in and started mixing. I heard him telling me to mix but not to overmix. I felt him guiding my hand like he used to when I was a toddler, trying to teach me to be gentle. To be patient. Because that’s how a cake is made. Step by step. With some trial and error. But that’s the beauty of it, he would say. You never know how it’ll turn out.

***

            As I force myself to swallow the last bite of cake, I look over to where my brother was just an hour ago, lying still in his casket. I think of how he might have reacted to know that I baked a fully-tiered cake without burning the house down. How he would have reached over and ruffled my hair, that wide smile curling up to his eyes.

            How he would have finished every last bite.

Anais Aguilera is an aspiring writer from Virginia. Her nonfiction work has been published in publications such as The Borgen Project, The Publishing Post, and The Game of Nerds. In her spare time, she likes hoarding as many hobbies as possible.