THE HEART-SHAPED CAKE PANS

“The cake she made was red velvet, of course. I don’t remember baking it with her….”

My mother hated baking and didn’t eat sweets. Why she bought heart-shaped cake pans is a mystery. I know she thought of cake—cupcakes, pancakes, birthday cakes—as children’s food; since I was her only child, maybe she was trying to delight me. Her mother was a 1950s mom who’d whip up a banana cream pie for the hell of it, cookies after school just because. My mother, an interior designer with her own custom-drapery workroom, was a workaholic newly divorced 1980s mom with barely enough time to toss a chicken in the slow cooker in the morning, let alone sift, measure, stir, bake, cool and frost a cake she wouldn’t even eat.

I imagine she’d seen something in Woman’s Day at the dentist’s office—“Sweet Treats for Your Family!”—and couldn’t resist the optimistic novelty of a heart-shaped cake. Maybe she felt guilty about not being the apron-tied-in-a-bow kind of mom she’d had. But why? I admired my fabulous mom’s business success and loved spending time fan-folding pleated drapes with her or coloring on the giant cutting table while she talked yardage with fabric suppliers. The best moments of my childhood were our late weeknight dinners of flaming cheese in Greek diners when she was too exhausted to cook. Life with my mother was never a bore.

The cake she made was red velvet, of course. I don’t remember baking it with her—only the warm heart displayed on a stand, my mother plunging the knife through its white cream-cheese frosting, my layered triangle crumbling under my fork, bloody and beetroot red. It tasted like baking soda, sugar and dirt. She took one bite and spat it into a napkin, mortified. She wasn’t used to failing—especially so spectacularly, especially at something so mundane. “Happy Valentine’s Day, Mom!” I threw my arms around her. We happily pushed the cake off its pedestal and let it thud to the bottom of the kitchen trash.

When I went home to Chicago to clean out her house after she died, I found the pans nestled among her well-used baking trays. I had forgotten all about them, but for some reason she’d held onto them for almost 40 years. She must have bumped into them every time she opened the bottom kitchen drawer.

Now each year on her birthday, I drink red wine and bake a heart-shaped cake in her pans. It’s a dumb life-affirming ritual that keeps my hands busy and my mind off grief. Like mother like daughter, I’m also an abysmal baker. This year I used a new recipe and started at 8 p.m., a rookie mistake. I filled the pans to the brim, and although they warmed to a golden brown, the centers remained liquid, raw and possibly deadly to eat.

Slightly drunk but thinking on my feet, I gently removed the layers from their pans and microwaved them minute by minute until they firmed up, then used a “Quick Fudge Frosting” to spackle the whole thing into shape. It looked like an award winner, the thick chocolate icing marcelled into deep glistening swoops. But slicing into it revealed its hard, desiccated inner core, the harvest gold color of a rotten kitchen sponge.

I drank more wine. I sliced more cake. Wedge after wedge, her teenaged grandsons and I devoured it from white plates with dessert forks after midnight, until it was all gone and nothing remained but the thought that she'd left the pans for me to find, a wink and a hug, a crazy valentine to the wild time when we were each other’s world.

—Arlaina Tibensky  

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Arlaina Tibensky’s fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions; published in One Story, Smokelong, Stanchion, The Razor and elsewhere; and anthologized in New Stories from the Midwest. Her young-adult novel, And Then Things Fall Apart, was a Junior Library Guild selection. She’s working on a new novel.