The Last Best Lemon Cake





My mother called from out of town with a request. Her friend was dying, and she asked for her favorite lemon cake. I agreed to make it and deliver it to her house.I tried not to think of it the whole time I baked — how the cancer started in her bladder and wormed its way into her guts. I tried not to think about hearing the news that she had three months, at most left to live. I tried not to think about death or dying or funeral services or any of the rest of it.While I creamed the butter with the sugar, I thought about the first time I met her years ago. How she and her husband showed me and my husband around their new house. How perfectly green their lawn was that day. They had grass like no other grass I’ve ever seen.I tried not to think about her husband already in his grave, and mine in someone else’s house, fully alive but as good as dead to me.I dropped five eggs one by one, and I tried so hard not to think about how my grandfather suffered when he died of mesothelioma. Not a single cigarette to his lips in 85 years, but lung cancer took his last breath.She’d been smoking all her life, but she had no lung cancer. Instead, it was in her bladder, bowel, and bone.Ten days until it would expire. Would she expire before the milk? I imagined the cake turning to fat on her body and then her body turning back to earth, and I felt nauseous. But you don’t feel as sick as she feels, I told myself. Suck it up and make the cake. Flour, sugar, baking powder, salt. I doubled the lemon flavoring so she could really taste it. Bake at 325 for 75 minutes and cool on a rack. I turned the cake out onto a piece of cardboard covered with aluminum foil. That way her daughter wouldn’t have to go to the trouble of returning my Tupperware after she passed away. I covered it in plastic wrap and made a call to arrange the…