Page 84 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

“Do not start.”

“You have egg on your sling.”

“I said do not start.”

She took over the parts that required two hands. Mixing. Pouring. Greasing the pan. I handled what I could, measuring ingredients with the same precision I used for lumber, because if there was one thing I understood it was that the right measurements made the difference between something that held and something that collapsed.

The cake went into the oven. We stood in the kitchen and stared at the oven door like it was going to betray us.

“Did you get the decorations?” I asked.

“Streamers. Balloons. A banner that says Happy Birthday in pink letters because that was the only one the store had.”

“Pink.”

“Pink, Sawyer. It is a color. It will not hurt you.”

Josh arrived at five-thirty. He brought plates, a party hat that Dollie immediately put on his head over his protests, and the quiet competence that made him the kind of man you wanted in a crisis or a birthday surprise, which were apparently similar operations.

Emma woke up at six. She appeared in the kitchen in her pajamas with Sir Chomps-a-Lot under her arm and her hair standing in every direction, and she looked at the three adults surrounded by balloons and streamers and said, “What are we doing?”

“It is Mama’s birthday,” I said.

Her face lit up like someone had plugged her into the sun.

“I want to help.”

“You can frost the cake.”

This was a strategic error. Emma frosted the cake with the enthusiasm of a child who had been given unsupervised access to a frosting tube, which meant the coverage was wildly uneven, thick in places and bare in others, with a green dinosaur in the center that she insisted was Sir Chomps-a-Lot and that I had to admit did bear a passing resemblance. She wrote HAPY BRTHDAY MAMA across the top in blue frosting, missing several letters, and stepped back to admire her work with the satisfaction of an artist who had just completed a masterpiece.

“It is perfect,” she declared.

It was not perfect. It was lopsided and chaotic and missing half the letters in birthday. It was the best cake I had ever seen.

We hung the banner. This was where things went wrong. Dollie stood on a chair holding one end while Josh held the other and Emma supervised from below, offering directions that contradicted each other every ten seconds. The result was a banner that leaned distinctly to the left.

“It is crooked,” I said.

“The banner is fine,” Dollie said.

“It is leaning to the left.”

“It has character.”

“It looks like it was hung by someone who was blindfolded.”

“I was standing on a chair with one hand while Josh held the other end and Emma supervised. You are lucky it is on the wall at all.”

“Let me fix it.”

“You have one working arm, Sawyer. Sit down.”

“I can fix a banner with one arm.”

“Sit. Down.”

I did not sit down. But I stopped arguing, which for me was the same thing.