KATHERINE VAZ, FEATURED IN THE NEW OCEAN STATE REVIEW

The Earth Cake

Her first day on the job at the Garden Café, Ana was stunned at the sight of Cecilia Weber—young and blonde, as tall as a Valkyrie—as she whirled around in the kitchen and said, grinning, “Welcome. Here’s a grater.” 

Since Henry’s death, Ana had perfected an image of what a daughter might look like if they had had a child, and Cecilia was its incarnation. Ana quit staring and fell into the rhythms of the mad rush, hurling butter onto a griddle, shredding cheese. Cecilia brought down a knife in a diagonal the moment Ana flipped a work-of-art grilled sandwich onto a board. Manny Garabedian, the pleasant if frazzled owner, his black-white hair wiry, carried it to the dining room as customers cartwheeled in; shoppers from nearby Bloomingdale’s loved this spot with its elongated vases shaped like Siamese cats. As if energized with Henry’s ample, golden bearing, Cecilia plucked a bowl of cucumber salad off a shelf and set it gently in Ana’s grasp. Had she noted Ana’s trembling? How to express the oddness that even Cecilia’s black-velvet headband was a favored adornment in Ana’s fantasies?

They sliced and chopped and pared, passing implements like surgeons, every move communicated by silent urgency, by blood, as if they had known one another a lifetime. Restaurant work’s non-stop bodily effort always obliterated her brain: Here was a span of hours that effaced her obsessing over debts. Which in turn got slathered over a missing of Henry that still slowed her limbs as if to replicate his faltering to a halt.

As the lunch crowd ebbed, Cecilia, her features large and open, blue eyes cloudless, loaded the dishwasher while unleashing an aria. Ana lay her hand below her collarbone, as Henry had done in the audience the night they met, while listening to her solo in the college choir. In the dining room, Mr. Garabedian and the stragglers had paused too. Ana sank onto a chair, as if this angelic voice, not the top-speed labor, finally made her feel her age.

Cecilia said, “Mr. G. insists I let loose a few times a day. He thinks it’ll attract customers, get word out. I hope you don’t think I’m a show-off jerk.”

“No, you’re incredibly beautiful,” said Ana.

Manny Garabedian was leaning in the doorframe, his skin buttery from the stove’s heat. He declared, “Isn’t she something, Miss Ramos? Cecilia, did you give Ana your news?” 

“Like there’s been tons of time to talk, Mr. G.”

“She’s got an audition with the Metropolitan Opera,” he said. “We’ll miss her.”

Ana’s heart slammed into a rib-bone. How silly to think: I just got here; how can you leave me? Instinct warned her against flaunting a credential of being a hobbyist warbler decades ago at Baruch College, but she understood a thing or two about talent that seemed a destiny and not a delusion. She had been good, but Cecilia was the real thing, ethereal, star material. Ana agreed that yes, it would be a shame to lose her.

As the afternoon lull descended, Cecilia told Manny, “Go home, Mr. G. We’ve got everything covered. Right, Ana?”

“Sure.”

As Cecilia shooed him, he did a funny mock-stagger, and they shared a laugh, Ana joining in.

With the Garden Café empty, Ana and Cecilia rested at a table with a view of the storefront that had once been the famous button store. The pharmacist who doubled as a notary and sold lavender soaps had vanished too, another rent victim. Cecilia explained that Manny’s wife had early-onset Alzheimer’s. “Their daughter helps when the nurses flake out, and Mr. G. does the rest. May I ask you something? He said you won a James Beard award. What’re you doing here?”

Ana still felt a pulsing in her neck when anything remotely adjacent to the subject of The Incident threatened to garrote her. No point in going into details. She replied, “I won best pastry chef three years ago when I was at Motor Bistro but decided to go freelance.” She admitted that fulfilling orders alone at three in the morning in an industrial kitchen’s rental space, forming lotus flowers out of fondant and pouring mirror glazes, had lost its charm. “The income is erratic. I’ve walked past here a thousand times, and it looks homey.” This sidestepped why she could not face a high-powered venue and omitted a second-tier reason for being at the Garden Café: Those dark-night-of-the-soul hours in widowhood were hurtling her past simple loneliness toward an annihilating one. 

Cecilia grabbed Ana’s hand and feverishly said, “We all have to pay the rent.”

“And medical bills. There were a lot of them when my husband died. Henry was a successful journalist, but that only goes so far, money-wise.”

“I hear you. I have student loans. Fifty grand.”

Guarding Henry’s dignity meant concealing that his cancer had eaten alive their joke-level individual policies. More haunting were the credit-card bills he had hidden, the only concealment in decades of marriage. Ana was one-hundred grand in arrears. Since it was easier for people to disclose jaw-droppers about sex than money, she hugged the figure to herself. 

“Want to come to my audition at the Met? It’s in two weeks. Cooking and whatever, it’s only to get to my new reality, no offense to your career, Ana. Mr. G. will be there. He’s closing the café that night!”

Ana was ready to levitate with joy. “Won’t we make you nervous?”

Came the melodious lilting of, “My asshole family doesn’t think I have a chance, but you’re different. An artist. Please?”

Ana said she would not miss the audition for the world.

Another onslaught befell them, the apricot-jam brushing of pie, the searing of tuna, the pace broken only by a call from Mr. Garabedian that his wife was weeping. “Everything is under control,” said Ana, scoring squares in the lasagna he had layered together during some spell of solitude.

“One more thing,” came the disembodied voice. “I’ve started to do catering. Someone throwing a housewarming party wants to include an Earth Cake. I’ve never made one. The recipe is on my desk.”

“No problem.” Using round-bottomed pans of different sizes, cakes of various colors got hollowed out and set together nesting-doll-style to form strata, with sugar rocks at the core. Frosting sealed the two halves into a globe, with icing sketching out the continents. She had never constructed one either, but how hard could it be?

“I hate throwing so much at you so soon, Ana,” he said. “I’ll scare you off.”

“Not at all. How’s your wife?”

“She’s asleep but gets up during the night. I’m afraid she’ll wander out.”

“Get some rest. Cecilia and I work so much in sync it’s weird.”

Ana’s double-shifted day swelled with the energy required to serve thirty dinners, in triage mode with Cecilia, plates stacked in the sink, pans with salmon skin stuck on them abandoned on the stovetop. Ana was not sure if money or the tininess of the space was stalling Manny from hiring a dishwasher. At the literal eleventh hour, Cecilia was of a size to sweep Ana into her arms and whisper, “You’re amazing!” and this repaid Ana with an entirety of what she had been lacking: No one had touched her, not with this full-bodied, encompassing embrace, since Henry had died.

After Ana located the Earth Cake recipe on their boss’s desk, tucked inside a cubbyhole in the pantry, and said, “See you for more of the same tomorrow,” instead of replying, Cecilia strolled into the walk-in refrigerator, lifted out a plastic sack of chicken breasts, and secreted it in her oversized handbag. “Shh,” she said. “You didn’t see that.”

Ana blinked. “Does Mr. Garabedian let you take things?”

“Mr. G. totally supports my singing career. He knows the lessons are expensive.”

Ana shifted, as if to equalize an unbearable burden on her frame. “But would he be okay with losing that much?” If Mr. Garabedian allowed a thing or two to evaporate as a fringe benefit, why not say so? A dozen chicken breasts, one bag, cost twenty-two dollars wholesale. Each paillard went for $12.95, a bargain by New York standards.

“When I hit the jackpot, I’ll pay him back and bring friends here.”

Ana held dismay in check with a tight smile. Cecilia theatrically kissed her and declared, “Mumsy, I’ll love working with you a while.”

Ana succeeded in not collapsing during the three subway stops and two-block march back to the apartment where she still expected Henry to greet her even after a year of absence. Instead, in the foyer there was…a pink golfball. Where had it come from? It resembled a dimpled, hard piece biopsied from one of those organs whose function most humans never bother to figure out, pancreas, gallbladder.

She peered into the closet where cartons of Henry’s flotsam were stacked: The scrapbook with his Times series about lobster-fishing that had been a finalist for an honest-to-God Pulitzer; tear-sheets of city stories from the nights of nursing ginger ales at a bar and being the big, soft-spoken guy who got the confession from someone at last call. She checked the boxes for mice, whose gnawing might have let an object loose. Except Henry hadn’t golfed, and who used pink golfballs? And how had these non-existent mice opened the closet door?

He would offer a humorous explanation, and she would confide in him about meeting a future opera singer named Cecilia Weber like an apparition of the offspring they might have had. “Oh, Henry,” she said aloud.

His first words upon approaching her after the concert at Baruch—he was assigned to write about it for the school’s newspaper—were, “Your voice.”

Neither of them harbored a belief that it was destined for more than bringing Ana Ramos and Henry Rodriguez together, and that sufficed to fill a lifetime, or at least until a healthy, non-drinking sixty-year-old somehow got liver cancer, and the ghosting of his writer friends began, with her chef allies already treating her like poison despite the passage of two years since The Incident. Months of medical regimens later, he quietly said one night, “I’d rather die before we go through all our money.” He met her horror with, “That’s a worry in every couple’s thoughts at the end. It’s a terrible buried thing, but it doesn’t mean the two people don’t love each other,” because he was clear and honest. He quit the losing battle of treatments but left her wondering if he had also added willpower toward a swift goodbye as the expenses hit the stratosphere.

She lay sleepless in the expansive, roundish divot in the center of the mattress. From the utterance of “Your voice” to the finish, they had slept entwined, not unaware that long-married couples usually created parallel indentations.

It was a relief to find Cecilia early for the lunch shift, prepping the mise-en-place, as if diligence proved that the theft of chicken breasts was a one-off, no maternal lecture needed. Manny was buoyant from receiving the deposit for the party to be hosted by Becca and Timothy Harris, though there was a twist: They had moved the date to the night of Cecilia’s audition. As Ana and he cracked eggs for a concerted rash of omelet orders, and Cecilia slammed a mallet onto two breasts between plastic wrap for some paillards, he said, “Damn, Ceese, I hate to miss it.”

While adding edible-flower salads to the paillard orders, Cecilia mentioned a get-together afterward at the loft in Soho she was subletting from a friend in a musical-theater company on the road. Mr. Garabedian could come to that if the Harris gala concluded at a decent hour, and Ana could please attend too.

He confirmed that the death-defying crunch of canapé prep needed completion the day before, and Ana could finish any last tasks before the late-afternoon audition, whereupon the pros who worked parties from the temp company would kick into gear.

“My afterparty will be either a wild blowout or a sob-fest,” said Cecilia.

Ana insisted it would be a celebration, and she would gladly be the official Garden Café ambassador. While at the mercy of a demanding lunch hour, Ana’s sole stray thought was that Manny’s Armenian great-grandfather had fled the massacres of World War I, paddling through a corpse-filled river before escaping to New York—her interview had involved two-way confidences—and surely he must marvel at how swiftly in the scheme of things his legacy had gone from near-starvation to baking quiches.

When the afternoon dissolved and Mr. Garabedian departed, Ana and Cecilia deepened the pas-de-deux chores until closing time, when Cecilia slipped a silver ladle into her bag. Ana said, quavering, “What are you doing, my love?”

“About what?”

“What do you mean, ‘about what?’”

Scarcely an hour ago, Cecilia had sung an unearthly passage of “Der Hölle Rache” from the Queen of the Night, arresting spoons midway to customers’ mouths. “My voice coach is coming for supper, and my friend—the one loaning me her loft?—her supplies are a joke.” Cecilia’s face rounded wider with a smile. She was over six feet. “I’ll bring it back, Ana Banana. It’s a loaner.”

At home in her galley kitchen, steeping jasmine tea while agonizing over what she should have done—was it a crime for Cecilia to borrow items from someone who treated her as family?—Ana noticed flat plastic eyes, the type used in crafts projects, on the floor. There had been a phase of her doing shadowbox collages, but she had never used these. Or had she? How had the superhuman, invisible mice dropped them here?

A further wrinkle to the Harris housewarming was that Mr. Garabedian lacked hemisphere pans for the Earth Cake; what he did have was a fierce anti-Amazon stance. The city’s major kitchen-supply emporium had closed its doors, but a friend owned a dangling-by-a-thread party store in Tarrytown. He believed in seizing chances for off-site camaraderie and would pay them both.

On Monday, when the Garden Café was shuttered, Cecilia steered Mr. Garabedian’s dented Ford (Henry once joked that stood for “Found On Road Dead”) in the direction of the 87 North. Though excited for the outing, Ana loathed cars, the Mad-Max awfulness, and when a van swerved toward their flank, she screamed, “Look out!”

Cecilia veered, honked, and laughed. “Ana Banana, relax. I’ve got it.”

Ana pressed “play” on what Henry had called The Rant: How in the world could it be treated with such nonchalance that these lethal machines have inflicted death on more people than the entire national history of war, and yet the artery-clogged freeways prove that everyone thinks this is a dandy way to get from point A to point B? A million dead in conflicts since the American Revolution, but two and a half times that have perished in gnarled wrecks, wrapped around trees or lampposts, concertinaed in pile-ups, spikes of steel through torsos, bodies pulverized into jam, and skeletons smashed after the burning of fossil fuel, this incredibly flammable substance, and zipping along on tubes easily pierced by a nail, another assist to 1.24 million people dying across the globe every single year in cars while war and murder only take out 0.44 million. Operating these guided missiles are inebriated, high, sleepy humans, sixteen to ninety years old, eyesight awry and motor skills less than acute.

Giggling, Cecilia announced, “You’re crazy, Mumsy, I love it,” and grabbed Ana’s hand, and Ana burst with delight; oh, such lightness! She dashed all notions of using the trip to bring up the theft of the chicken and the ladle (not returned as promised). Had the loud fury of The Rant opened a portal toward truth-telling? Cecilia shared tales of her upstate upbringing, the apple farm of German-English (like Henry!) parents with zero interest in her music and two brothers running a decrepit inn. Ana doused an initial thrill at being a substitute parent by reminding herself that she was soon to lose this songbird to grandeur. It must happen like that with a real child, the meeting spliced almost at once onto the letting go.

They hooted about Cecilia’s past affairs, the lawyer who dumped her because she was not impressed by his Spotify selections, the music critic who offered a sexual sizing-up about every woman walking by. Ana said she had been spared such things. “Henry and I were faithful for thirty-six years,” she said.

“As far as you know.”

“No,” said Ana, “that’s the main thing I stayed sure was true, and it was a gift, that kind of faith in someone. I wouldn’t have given up on him if he’d strayed, but neither of us wanted to, we knew that in an unspoken way.”

“Wow, Ramos,” said Cecilia, genuinely confused. “That makes you a woman in a time capsule, or something. How old are you?”

“Fifty-eight.” She did take pride—exceedingly temporary pride—in having an unlined face and slender bearing.

“Here’s what I’m working through,” said Cecilia, glancing in the rearview mirror, speeding up. “You’ve got ripe rage going toward cars and whatever, so why did you take it when Chef Bret did his Bret-thing with you? Everyone knows about his massive ego.”

A breeze laved Ana’s burning skin. Naturally a corner of the internet would render obtainable The Incident. She said, “I didn’t expect a standing ovation at work after the James Beard award, but being savaged, that blindsided me. Suddenly I was visible, and the spotlight went for about five minutes from him to me. He didn’t care about the desserts before then. My crime was scalding some milk.”

Cecilia indicated she was aware of what happened next.

Ana was afraid to ask if Reddit, or Eater, or whatever three-year-old motherlode Cecilia had mined, mentioned Henry going into Motor Bistro and punching Bret’s face, farm-to-table guru Bret, and no charges were pressed, since no one wanted to describe Bret clattering the saucepan of ruined milk onto the floor and ordering her prize-winning Portagee ass to lick it up, and why on earth had she sunk onto all fours as if knocked by a blow? Like a humiliated cat, no one helping her up or objecting as she fell to pieces. She told Cecilia, “I didn’t fully grasp how people need to despise winners. I was old enough to know how the world works, but I turned into tender meat, and Bret and lots of people have fangs. My head never reached the ground, but my knees got wet. I was paralyzed half a minute, and then I stood up and walked out and haven’t worked at a place like that since. Henry said I’d taken care of him, with my steady jobs and health insurance, and we’d manage, and we did patch things together, but then he got sick.”

Ana had not divulged the contours of The Incident to anyone in ages. Cecilia squeezed her hand and avoided the usual tiresome blather about Ana needing to get back up on the horse, scale again to the James-Beard heights—wherever and whatever those were—as if acquitting herself of a desire to make haute pastries for the top layer of society squandered talents that improved the planet.

In the parking lot of the Tarrytown Let’s Party Shoppe, Cecilia Weber slung her arm around Ana, and they entered a candyland of items for every calendar-marking holiday or occasion, Easter, weddings, St. Patrick’s, Chinese New Year. Neon shades, whirligigs, and mobiles, aisle upon aisle of treasure! Cecilia bolted around, exclaiming over the noisemakers that blasted out serpent’s tongues. Since it was October, Halloween’s décor was on replete display, and among the costumes and plastic skeletons, and wax ghosts whose heads you bit off to drink honey-water, and black cats with backs arched and mouths arrested in a shriek, a cardboard owl perched.

I’ve never seen a live owl, said Henry one day after chemo.

Ana took him to Central Park, because a little owl had been spotted, unusually friendly, out in daylight, unafraid of its growing legion of fans.

Henry and she went often, and waited, and they never saw it. Then she read that a park-service vehicle had killed the owl as it swooped down for a meal, and Ana sobbed and did not tell him, but he was a reporter, he knew the owl died, and he said, Don’t cry, Ana, I had all those wonderful nights with you in the park, with the stars.

When Ana lifted her head, Cecilia was missing. Ana dashed under the piñatas, a mama who had glanced away and fallen into the worst nightmare.

She called out Cecilia’s name and found her wearing a tiara while searching through the cake pans. Cookie Monster molds, Bundt shapes, a pan to form a house with a chimney. When Ana said, “Thought I’d lost you,” Cecilia held out hemisphere pans and a sack of multi-colored sugar rocks. Done! Blink of an eye!

Ana turned happy—so very happy. That line from Tolstoy about happy families being dully alike, with the unhappy as varied and interesting? It was unhappiness that was monochrome and uninventive, and joy was as radiant as a young woman with a cheap tiara and crystalline bits of the core of the earth.

But the mood plummeted in the car. Cecilia seemed unfocused and faraway and got vexed when Ana bellowed, “Watch out!” as the Ford almost plowed into a semi belching exhaust. Anxious to recapture the confidences that led them to consoling one another, Ana remarked, “Strange things have happened since I showed up at the café, to work with you. I found a pink golfball in my foyer, and a few plastic eyes on my floor, out of nowhere. Do you think the universe is saying something?”

That was oddball enough; it was too large a revelation about Cecilia resembling Ana’s idea of a lost child, waiting in the wings but never born.

Cecilia was kind enough to play along. “Does your building have a super? Maybe he did a chore and things fell out of his pockets.”

“I don’t think so. My Portuguese grandma would say Henry is sending me a message, or pieces of himself. The only reason that might not be totally crazy—”

“It’s a little crazy.”

“It is. But the day I lost him, I left our house to buy bottled water, I was drinking oceans of it, and a blob of white light traveled on the sidewalk toward me, not from any visible source. When it stopped and held me, I wasn’t scared, and that’s how I knew it was from him, because time was near the end and he needed to call me back.”

“So he was a miracle-worker in addition to being the only faithful man in history,” said Cecilia, not entirely pleasantly. They passed the source of the slowdown—an “injury accident” with ambulances and flares, and two crumpled autos with pieces like epaulets on the concrete shoulder. Someone, or some-ones, had died. The rest of the way, their chat was modulated, surface-y, and Cecilia added, sounding conciliatory, “I can’t explain the golfball and eyes on the floor, but you’re a lucky person, Ana, lucky in love, and James-Beard lucky, that’s for sure.”

A short hour earlier, Ana might have shared how quiet—settled into herself—the award had made her, nothing to trumpet about; a roster of people was applauded each year, every year. She had reveled in the award even as sharpened her awareness of how everyone and everything went to dust. Knowing this felt like a gateway to generosity and generosity felt like an admittance to peace.

Ana opened her door with hesitation. Once inside, she relaxed into the blessing of nothing untoward and slid an enchilada into the microwave. While removing a hanger in the bedroom for her coat, she glanced at the Mexican chest with painted oranges.

Lying on the chest was a child’s lace glove. It did not belong to her, though it conjured what she had worn for her First Communion in Queens. She flung it onto a shelf, onto the box with the canary-laden hat that she had worn exactly once, to a garden party at the Conservatory after the little owl had been crushed beneath wheels and Henry, though ailing, insisted they should forgive the park.

The next day at the Garden Café, Ana stopped Cecilia from stealing an expensive block of Cotswold cheddar and insisted that the ladle find its way home, please.

“You’re right, Mumsy,” said Cecilia, returning the cheese to the pantry. “I’ll bring the ladle back after the party where we mourn my doom.”

While beginning the Earth Cake the evening before the Harris gala that coincided with the audition, Ana felt overworked but satisfied. She and Cecilia had served lunches and finished the catering prep, with Manny and Ana insisting Cecilia go home and rest. The refrigerator was crammed with hors d’oeuvres and cheeses and fruit.

Producing the cake would be time-consuming but manageable: two hemispheres dyed yellow, two smaller red ones to tuck into cavities excavated in the yellow ones, creating a concentricity. A cavity needed to be dug in each red to hold the glittering sugar pieces that turned the center into a geode.

But what happened; what was happening? She had felt entirely confident and could not fathom why the recipe swam on the page, why she was plunged back to the terrors of dropping to her knees while a chef bellowed that they gave awards to incompetent losers. She forgot to set the timer and scorched the red layers, requiring her to scrape the mess into the garbage and soak the pans to begin again.

While speeding out dinner orders and mixing a new red-velvet batch, Ana knocked the sugar rocks to the floor and spent vital seconds brushing them clean, fearing stray hairs. It was stupid to stir the minestrone while carving into a yellow half; the gouge was uneven and suddenly too large and got splashed with soup. She could plaster cake shards back in a repair-job mess. Or should she start over?

Manny was dealing with the Harris party’s logistics, fixing mistakes on the order of linens and utensils. Slamming through drawers, he shouted, panicky, “Ana! Where’s my mother’s silver ladle?”

She promised to search for it.

She set a roasted-pepper sandwich in front of a woman radiating an executive sense of being perpetually hassled, who said, “If I’m doing gluten, I’d like it perfect, or is that too much to ask?” she pointed at a blackened, kidney-shaped patch.

“Some cheese fell on the griddle,” said Ana. Aside from the black kidney, the toasting was even. She picked up the woman’s knife, scraped off the blemish—while commenting that some people like burnt parts best—and put it down.

The woman’s features gathered mass and force. “But now you’ve touched it.”

“I touched it when I made it too.” Loud sizzling meant Mr. Garabedian, while absorbing an eyeful of her mauling of the yellow layer, was sautéing chicken fillets.

“I expect a panini at a place known for them to be flawless.”

Ana floated above, looking down upon herself as she said, “Panini is the plural. You mean ‘panino.’” Since she was still hovering—like a balloon confined only because there was a ceiling—it was with curious detachment that she heard the woman pronounce her a bitch, heard Mr. Garabedian soothe the customer and offer a free dinner of her choice. Voice low, in private, he asked Ana what on earth had gotten into her.

Scalding tears were shed by her in a moment alone, dappling the blue frosting she mixed. Mr. Garabedian edged in and said, “Ana, I didn’t mean to snap. Your work is outstanding. You’re a magnificent chef.”

“You didn’t snap, Mr. Garabedian. I’m sorry. That sort of back-talking won’t happen again. I’m incredibly grateful for this job.”

Staring at the wall behind her, he said, “My rent here just tripled. My wife fell and needed stitches. I won’t say what that cost. The customer you served was angry about nothing, because everyone seems angry all the time, especially the ones with everything.” The man whose great-grandfather swam past bullet-riddled bodies told her to finish the cake and call it a night, adding, “I’m heartbroken that I can’t go to Cecilia’s audition.”

“I’ll represent us, Mr. Garabedian. I know you’ll miss her when she moves on.”

After he and the dinner-dawdlers left and the café closed, her attempt to frost the earth devolved into fiasco. Bleary with exhaustion, she forgot to brush off surface crumbs, and the vast seas filled with sand. She scraped the frosting off and remade it. What was magical about cake? Butter, sugar, and flour that converted to glucose in the blood. Calories that the human body might once have stored up for times of hunger. With a spatula, she tufted new ocean waves. One last step—green icing in a piping bag to contour the landmasses. Except her phone was dead, and she could not find Manny’s charger to Google a map, and she had no notion how to slop on even a charmingly bad attempt. She would leave that for the morning.

At her apartment, she searched but found no inexplicable little object, nothing to haunt and unsettle, and she experienced a frisson of grief.

The awaited day arrived supremely cold. The café remained closed to diners, with Cecilia presumably practicing. Ana’s plying of the icing made the squiggly landmasses look like Rorschach stains, but she finished the cake. To her it resembled a sad entry at a science fair, but Mr. Garabedian admired it, though in a distracted way. The temp-agency servers swarmed in, toting goods in a put-upon manner to a double-parked van, and Manny swept off to the housewarming party to begin the setting up. Flummoxes were conveyed by text: Six dozen puff-paste cups had been ordered, not five; also, a stoned server had dropped the shrimp-stuffed endive, and Ana needed to produce new ones.

She was startled by Cecilia entering the Garden Café at noon, five hours before her audition, and beelining into the pantry, where she tucked four bottles of Barolo into a carry-all. Half the wine for the Harris affair had been left behind, and someone was due to collect it along with the new endive tray. Ana said, “Manny needs those, Cecilia.”

Cecilia smiled with beneficent forgiveness for Ana’s do-gooder flaws. “No one will count them, Ana Banana,” she said with that honeyed voice.

Ana could picture the crumb-sand of the wrecked oceans, the palsied lines containing where humanity dwelled. “You should be resting. And yes, he or Becca Harris might count the bottles. You’re stealing one-hundred dollars retail.”

A cold front passed over Cecilia’s countenance as she set two bottles down. “I thought you were on my side.”

Wretchedly, then: “I am.” Ana held out a hand, as if to grip Cecilia’s arm, but dropped it into the void.               

“When I’m in the opera company, I’ll pay him back.”

“All right.” Ana feared causing an upset that would harm Cecilia’s singing.

“You’re still coming? To my audition and the party at the loft?”

Ana frowned. “Why wouldn’t I be? You go on and win.”

Two bottles of red Barolo under her arm, Cecilia bestowed a kiss.

By the time Ana dropped into her seat at the Howard Gilman Theater, her flesh was quivering from getting every single last thing out the door before receiving the all-clear from Mr. Garabedian that they had done their level best, and fate would take over. Twelve singers were vying for two spots to cross a bridge into the heights. Attendance was sparse, and that was not unfitting, since a longing to be recognized was everywhere, and constant, and rewards came in gradations, a runner-up to a Pulitzer, a pastry-chef prize, a fifth-place finish in a spelling-bee, or whatever the verdict would be tonight. Ana had learned not to trust anyone who could not allow others to bask in a ray of sun, because always such moments were bright but brief. It was the yearning that mattered.

Cecilia had mentioned a stage-actor friend named Lorelei who would co-host the gathering at the loft but might also attend the audition, and Ana guessed that Lorelei was the stately redhead a few rows behind. Ana failed to catch her eye. The Exit signs glowed emerald. Ana was in what Henry called her French sailor’s outfit, a black-and-white-striped blouse, black trousers, and ballet flats. By now his innate reporting skills would have discovered the highlights of Lorelei’s history. Had Ana forgotten how to make friends? Maybe the googly eyes and body pieces were not to signal remnants of the dead, fragments of a husband and dreams-gone-by, but to urge her to let in traces of someone else. The lace glove might be defining that as not necessarily a daughter but a young woman in the arts, like Ana, like Cecilia.

Darkness descended, with a rustling of the souls in their padded seats, while she drifted into wondering how many guests at the Harris home were mocking the Earth Cake. The impresario emerged to a smattering of applause. After welcoming one and all, he wished the finalists luck.

The first candidate poured out an aria that Ana could not name, having failed to nab a program. The range was astonishing, but one false note sounded. Was that enough to disqualify her, or would she get points for trying something difficult? Her projection was astonishing, and the clapping was sustained. The next soprano offered “Casta Diva” from Norma—Ana recognized it—and she was glamorous and a more nuanced actor.

Did that add up to two winners? One was daring and outsized, and the other was skilled too but more crowd-pleasing.

Singers strolled one at a time to the footlights, each positioning herself and imbuing her lungs with oxygen. Every woman was world-class, having qualified for this final cut, and it was impossible to gauge differences at this rarefied level. One imbedded a screech in “O mio babbino caro.” A shame. Except Cecilia Weber’s happiness depended on the unhappiness of ten others. As the seventh aspirant took her bow, Ana’s phone vibrated in her handbag, and she snuck a look at a text: IF AUD DONE LET ME KNOW RESULT & CLD U PLS HELP @ PARTY? 2 SERVERS LEFT ILL!, MR. G.

Cecilia, with a rope of pearls and black gown, ambled to the lights. Ana sat up, as if the top of her head could better deliver a muddled prayer. Your parents and brothers don’t appreciate who you are, but I do. I’ll take whatever this is, a friendship, a transient blessing. I’ll go backstage one day, old, and you’ll say I was at your truest birth.

Cecilia collected herself and opened her arms. She offered “Vissi d’arte” from Tosca—also popular enough for Ana to know it—and she was inspired.

She was rapturous, and glorious, and melted into the song.

She was also, without a shred of doubt, the weakest so far. Despite her sturdiness, she lacked the sinew to reach farther than mid-theater, and she was impatient with grace notes. Ana willed herself not to wriggle in place, as if that would urge Cecilia to animate herself, show better that she could act.

There was applause, polite, as Cecilia walked off; was there rage in that stride? Because Cecilia knew. Everyone except Ana, and maybe Lorelei, was ticking Cecilia off the list and glad to do it. The last singers made their appearances, outstanding in an indistinguishable way, and whatever the verdict, one clear thing was that Cecilia Weber was unlikely to join the Metropolitan Opera, at least not for the foreseeable future. The impresario announced the decisions for the two spots would be forthcoming in a few days. The finalists bowed together and sought family and friends.

Cecilia took what seemed a deliberately long while to spot Ana as she waved in an aisle. When Cecilia sauntered over, she announced, “I’ll have to kill you now, for witnessing that.” She was fiddling with her pearls so strenuously that Ana feared the strand would break.

“Your voice is astonishing,” said Ana. “I’ve never heard anything like it from anyone I know.” It was hard to tread a pathway between insulting her with placating lies and conveying that she was a stunner—because that was ringingly true as well.

“Because you don’t know many musicians.”

Ana reminded herself it was not possible, even in a peculiar spot of the internet, to unearth her ancient triumphs in a minor choir. “Right,” she said. “But I know—”

“No, you don’t.”

“I’ll just say I’m glad you invited me. I love ‘Vissi d’arte.’ You were amazing.”

“You love the song when other women sing it, you mean.”

Ana glanced over her shoulder. The maybe-Lorelei person had disappeared. “Look, I don’t know why, it’s a guess”—Ana witnessed Cecilia barely taming a sigh—“but was that redhead your acting friend Lorelei?”

“What’s an ‘acting friend,’ someone who pretends to like me? Look, I sucked. I didn’t think it would be obvious. Lorelei was here but probably doesn’t know what to say. I’m glad Mr. G. was spared this. I can’t believe I’ll be stuck in that hellhole café.”

“I’ll bet she’s hurried off to get your party ready. It’ll be fun.” Ana had not expected Cecilia’s falling short to be so obvious either.

“Fun, fun. Let’s have funny fun.”

“It’s not every day that someone tries out for one of the best opera companies anywhere, Cecilia.” It would never be a good time to hint at the existence of better chances in lesser places, but Ana forgave herself for stumbling.

“Thanks, Mom.”

“We picked hard lives.”

“Coal mining is hard. Working in a slaughterhouse is hard.”

“True.”

“You don’t have to come to my afterparty, Ramos. My aftershave, my after-funeral. What would be the point?”

“You. You’re the point.” Then she was angry at this…childishness. One setback—on a pinnacle—and you default to cruelty? Chef Bret had picked that route when Ana succeeded, and Cecilia was fording it on account of Ana witnessing her failure, because humanity needs to express some version of hate toward anyone who might have touched a heavenly elevation before consignment to six feet underground in the destiny awaiting everyone.

The auditorium was emptying. Cecilia went on with, “You won’t know anyone there. I’m setting you free, Ana. Lorelei is a terrible host. And God, she overacts. Not sure how she talked a company into letting her perform.”

“It’s nice of her to help throw you a party. Is this how you talk behind her back?”

“I appreciate you showing up. I do. At least they didn’t make me lick the stage.”

A coating of air compressed itself around Ana, where it gelled, and before it could harden, she stirred to make it dissolve. “I wouldn’t know about that, since I’ve never put my tongue on any floor. If you’re referring to my crack-up, I fell apart for less than a minute and couldn’t stand up straight. And then I did.”

“But you never tried again. You gave up, when you could have gone anywhere big and famous.”

Everyone called it a weakness to prefer affection and a full-stop sense of plenty. She fumbled for her phone and displayed Manny’s text. “All right,” she said. “I’ll skip your get-together.” Cecilia would regroup and apologize, and Ana would consider forgiving her out of a marrow-deep recollection that it hurt to be youthful and promising and to get an arrow shot through into one’s middle. “Garden Catering put out an all-points bulletin. I’ll tell Mr. Garabedian you did great, but the results aren’t in.”

Cecilia’s departing words were: You had to show me the screen? Like I wouldn’t just believe you.

Timothy and Becca Harris’s flat had an abundance of lemon light from chandeliers that billowed around guests. Music issued from an unseen source, streaming below rather than on top of conversations. Lights dotted the night—a piecemeal tiara—visible through the wraparound windows. The women seemed in no pain in their red-soled Louboutin shoes, and their dresses could be described as draped, the stuff of goddesses. Ana had been braced for disarray, but there was tranquility. Why had Manny summoned her? Servers with trays wound through packs of people with skill, nodding when guests seemed delighted by what they ate. The buffet table was nicely stocked but, in that uncanny way of memorable parties, seemed to suggest that it had been refilled often. She sidled up to the remaining shrimp-stuffed endive—she was suddenly starving—and said to a woman, “Was there a cake too? Shaped like a globe?”

“My word, it was the hit of the evening.” She introduced herself as Lidia.

“I made it, that cake,” said Ana. “I was wondering.”

“How did you keep the sugar rocks from melting?” Lidia laughed. “People fought over those.” She remarked that Ana should open a patisserie. Their chat wound with ease through topics Ana would not recall: Oh let the full world and every stratification appear to me, let me call it all my own. When a friend waved Lidia toward a group, Lidia bid Ana farewell, and Ana thanked her for her kindness and searched for Manny.

He was in a kitchen four times bigger than the café’s and appeared pushed to within an inch of his life but pleased. She said, “You sent a text that you were in dire straits, Mr. G., but everything looks fine. A roaring success, in fact.”

He smacked his forehead with the heel of a hand. “Forgive me? Two servers didn’t show up. I couldn’t get replacements. I called you. Then the company sent some subs. I got busy and forgot to text you again. Wait, tell me, how did our girl do?”

“She was spectacular. The results won’t be in for a while.”

“Is she a wreck at having to wait? I hope not.”

“She’ll be okay.”

“God, you should be at her party, Ana. My brain is on overload. Listen, all those young people, I think I’ll pass. Think she’ll understand?”

“Of course. And I’m not so young either.”

“We’ve landed three new gigs already. Your cake, the earth thing, unbelievable. These people were like children seeing the ninth wonder of the world. Then they demolished it.”

Becca Harris edged into the kitchen, and Manny insisted upon introducing her to Ana. Becca had a cascade of silver hair and wore little makeup, and her hug almost made Ana weep with thanks for a reminder that it did mean something, it had meant something, for her artistry to make people happy. “How did you manage,” asked Becca, “to bake separate rings, those colors, without them running together?”

It was touching how complicated it seemed to Becca; the need for separate steps taking hours was unfathomable. Ana divulged all secrets. Manny looked so glad. Energetic servers danced to and from the prep stations. “I wished you’d seen our faces!” said Becca. From a refrigerator camouflaged with the cabinetry she produced a slice on a paper plate, wrapped in saran. An ice-blue rock, a parallelogram of red, a bit of sea. “I wrested the last of the molten core from my nephew, Miss Ramos. You should taste your triumph. Everyone adores cake, but it vanishes in one evening, all that work, all those beautiful details, does it not.”

Later—for years—Ana would watch herself as if she were the star of a film in old New York, traipsing the cobblestone streets of Soho with her souvenir remnant of cake. At the building where Cecilia Weber’s party was underway, she gained admittance when someone was exiting, not needing to ring the bell and ask to be buzzed inside. The elevator was a slow-moving cage with an accordion gate. All is well, all would be well—the goodwill of friends had likely buoyed Cecilia toward her fine future options. Buoyed by her own triumph, Ana was eager to commence forgiveness, to consign the post-audition exchange to youth, to the temporary souring that disappointment often breeds.

She would, in those pauses in her future, zero in on her hand being frozen on the doorknob. Each floor had two lofts, and one door was left ajar. Laughter signaled the point in a festivity when guests are boisterous but still pleasant. Into the film of this night, she would edit in Henry whispering, “Go home, Annie, my love. Now.”

The dining table in the loft was unseen but sounded close by, a sharp righthand turn through a minimal foyer. Cecilia’s fluid voice was asserting—Ana heard the wine coursing below it—“No, I’m not kidding. She was shrieking about cars and driving, or whatever, and said her dead husband sent her a glob of light like a message or something.” Gales of amusement got followed by mutterings that Ana couldn’t hear.

Ana rested her head against the open jamb. Come away, dear, Henry insisted, and she genuinely felt a tug on her jacket. Further fragments rose up from Cecilia, followed by, “…a golfball in her apartment she claims he put there. That’s the sort of bananas old loser I’ll be stuck with. At least I didn’t have a nervous breakdown like she—”

Ana hoped no one would find her in the hallway as she begged the clanky elevator to hurry, hurry.

She downed the mashed cake at her kitchen sink. On the bathroom floor, she spotted what looked like the longest comb imaginable, its teeth the color and consistency of fish bones and the whole object twisted, like a tiny spine with scoliosis. Before sticking it into the medicine chest, she stared at it, not even sure what it was or might have been. When she turned over in bed, it seemed stretched out next to her, grown into a backbone like Henry’s, which she used to clutch like a child groping in the dark, lost in the woods but comforted by the solidity of branches.

The Garden Café opened late. Cecilia was not due until mid-afternoon. Ana found Manny setting out eggs, and he said, “Becca Harris never stopped raving about your work, Ana.” He was running on empty, on kidney-inflaming adrenaline. He stopped, regarded her, and said, “Hey, you all right? I’ve been working you too hard. I’m sorry. If you need to go home, I can handle things.”

Ana removed her scarf and hung her jacket on the peg near the world’s smallest, best kitchen. The vases like Siamese cats were in their row, awaiting their transport to the sills. She said, “Cecilia stole your mother’s silver ladle. She took a bag of chicken, and wine, and she helps herself to something almost every day.”

To his face as the blood drained from it, she said, “It isn’t likely she’ll be with the Met’s company. She referred to the Garden Café as a hellhole.”

Manny undertook the delaying tactic of picking up an iron pan and staring into it, as if it were a mirror. He put it down. “I was about to start leaving traps, to catch her,” he said. “I knew it wasn’t you. I like to think trust isn’t completely out of fashion.”

He drew his phone out of his shirt pocket, and within twenty seconds he had fired Cecilia Weber, and then he wished her good luck with the pending result from her audition for the Metropolitan Opera or wherever she cared to go. He gave the reason for the dismissal. After an aching pause, he said, “No, this is final. What? She didn’t say a word. I noticed it, because I’m not blind. I’ll send your last check with a month of severance, which you deserve after a year here. You—” More listening. “No, sorry,” he said, and with a click, Cecilia vanished forever into thin air.

Business at the Garden Café surged, and catering orders flooded in. Temporary cooks helped Ana in her managerial role. Three months after Cecilia’s firing, Manny asked her one night after closing to sit, please sit. A wreckage of paella existed on the table she chose, but a lowering of peace after commotion settled upon them. One of Manny’s sneakers had split, and he had let the sole flap like a mouth before repairing it with a rubber band. “Ana,” he said, “listen.” In four weeks, he would close the café.

Paper napkins were bunched like white crabs on the floor. “But the place is packed, Manny,” she said. “Day and night. Your catering is up and running.”

Even this much success would not meet the tripled rent, the cost of groceries, his wife’s medical needs. Their daughter was moving upstate and had researched home care for Mom until she would need to live in a nearby care facility. He could remodel the barn, first for his bride and him, then for himself alone not far from their daughter and her fiancé. There might be grandchildren. “I can’t do it here anymore, Ana. I’ll finish the parties we’ve contracted. I’m so sorry. You would not believe the size of my debts.”

Ana put a palm on the clenched fist he formed with both his hands. “Don’t be sorry,” she said. “This place is a good life’s good work, Manny. I’ll stay until the doors close.” She wanted to add that he had saved her life, but that sounded ridiculously exaggerated, though it wasn’t at all.

“Your voice.”

Those had been the first words that Henry Rodriguez uttered to her. He echoed them now, a phrase arriving like a falcon called back by the falconer. An affable cook near the end of the existence of the Garden Café insisted that Ana, with her surprisingly husky intonations, would be perfect for voice-overs, and this new profession not only keep her solvent, she enjoyed it. She picked up the pieces of herself and put them together and funneled them into projections.

One fall afternoon, Ana Ramos had a job in Boston, and after six hours in a sound booth, she went to the Public Gardens to ride a swan boat. Most of those in line had children, but she was directed solo into her own swan, where she leaned back in the expiring sunlight as an athletic teenaged girl pedaled toward a bridge. They drifted through mist settling in sizable white patches: like soft clouds made from the white globe when Henry had come to her, saying, I’m still alive, I am real for another hour, come to me, darling, look at the shape I made myself into, to find you.

A radiant girl leaned forward at the keystone of the bridge, watching the swans slowly bearing everyone downriver. Laughing wildly, she dumped a pillowcase of feathers over Ana’s head. What is sweet, and what is savage? Who comes to teach us the dimensions of Everything, and why does it coincide with spotting our beloved phantoms waving us onward? Was it meant as a practical joke, something wicked, the beautiful girl who ends up feathering you because she lacks tar, or is it a child snapping you to attention, christening you out of nowhere with pieces of a wing?

Katherine Vaz is an award-winning author, a Briggs-Copeland Fellow in Fiction at Harvard University (2003-09), and a Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute (2006-7). Her novels include Saudade, (St. Martin’s Press), considered the first novel about Portuguese-Americans from a major New York publisher. It was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and Marlee Matlin (Solo One Productions) optioned it. Publisher’s Weekly wrote: “The audience that appreciated Like Water for Chocolate should find this novel equally appealing.”

Her novel Mariana has been printed in six languages (English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Greek) and is currently optioned by Anne Harrison, with screenwriter Sandy Welch (Jane Eyre, Emma/BBC etc.) attached. Rizzoli Publishers picked it as one of their top three books of 1998, and the U.S. Library of Congress chose it as one of the Top Thirty International Books of 1998. The story of a famous nun who wrote love letters considered some of the most passionate documents in existence, the novel received excellent reviews, such as Il Giornale’s (Italy’s) comment that “Seldom does one read pages of such intense beauty and intelligence about the female heart like those written by Vaz.”

A fifteen-year-novel-in-the-making, Above the Salt, is forthcoming from Flatiron Books/Macmillan in November, 2023, and LeYa in Portugal (2024). Pitched as Cold Mountain meets Love in the Time of Cholera, the book is based on the true story of Madeiran immigrants to Illinois at the time of Lincoln, with film/TV rights represented by Rich Green of The Gotham Group.

Her collection Fado & Other Stories won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, and two of the stories won her a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Our Lady of the Artichokes won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize, and the title story was the springboard for a one-page film idea that was one of eight national winners in the 2014 “Write Start” contest co-sponsored by the New York Film Academy. Her short fiction has appeared in dozens of magazines, including the Harvard Review, BOMB, Tin House, Glimmer Train, etc., and her children’s stories have been included in anthologies by Simon & Schuster, Viking, and Penguin. She was a fiction editor for the Harvard Review and has lectured extensively on magical realism.

Katherine Vaz is the first Portuguese-American to have her work recorded for the archives of the Library of Congress, Hispanic Division, and she was on the six-person U.S. Presidential Delegation to open the American Pavilion at the World’s Fair/Expo 98 in Lisbon. She teaches the “Writing the Luso Experience” workshop in the Disquiet International Literary program in Lisbon.

A California native, she lives in New York City with her husband, Christopher Cerf, who hails from a publishing family (his father co-founded Random House) and has played creative and executive roles in children’s television, most notably Sesame Street and Between the Lions.