100 Days of Cake by Shari Goldhagen Page A

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.
    â€œWell,” 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.
    â€œSo, 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.”
    â€œIt’s different.” V raises eyebrows at me again.
    â€œAre those the heels Gram called the ‘street walker special’?” I ask, changing the subject.
    â€œCrap, you’re right.”
    Mom goes back to the laundry room in search of a more perfect shoe solution.
    â€œWe cannot let her take this mess,” V whispers to me.
    â€œI 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.
    â€œGreat,” 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.
    â€œWhat 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.
    â€œYou know how Molly always has those gross whole-body sneezes,” V adds.
    â€œI’m really sorry,” I say again.
    â€œIt’s not your fault,” Mom says, but she’s got that level-red panicky look in her eyes.
    â€œThat bakery by Jaclyn’s is still open, and it’s on the way,” V offers. “We can just pick something up there.”
    â€œWe 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