I brought the cake in earlier. They only offer single slices on their dessert menu, and if you ask me, a single slice is not enough for a birthday.
“We’re ready for our special delivery,” I say to the waiter with a wink. He looks nervous. Then again, I suppose thatwassuggestive.
“Oh, you know about it?” he says, which is sort of confusing, because duh, I’m the one who made the arrangements.
“Of course,” I say. His expression immediately eases, as if I’ve taken a weight off his mind.
“What’d you do?” Bryn says, but she’s sipping an Old Fashioned, and she sounds fond and indulgent. “You got us another princess cake, didn’t you?”
“You’ll see.”
When we were little girls, we always wanted a princess cake—the super freaky kind where it has a doll’s head, but the body is edible. I mean really, what the fuck? But kids are weird, and we were no exception, so we begged and cried for it. We never got one, of course, so a few years ago, when we turned thirty, I had one made for us. I’ve done it every year since.
The waiter leaves our table, and I watch him go, feeling a bit of little-kid excitement. It’s stupid because the cakes really are terrifying, but I guess I'm the kind of person who occasionally likes terrifying things.
Except the person who comes back with the cake isn’t the waiter.
He’s our father…
Although I’ve had video chats with Auggie before, neither Bryn nor I have seen him in person for decades.
