The Cake House Read Online Free PDF Page B

notebook in her other hand. I’d seen it before, in our apartment. On evenings when my father was late coming home, she used to sit in the kitchen with it and a pack of cigarettes. She liked to draw and write, stick pictures in it, but she never let me see, hiding it underneath newspapers or in a kitchen drawer or somewhere in her room, where my father would find it and laugh at her for always wanting to keep some old school notebook that was falling apart. When I was twelve, my mother caught me sneaking a look at the notebook and snatched it from my hands, hiding it someplace I could not find. It came from a time when my father had been alive and we had lived as a family.
    She saw me notice it, and her hand gripped it tighter. “Don’t go far,” she said.
    I STOLE HER NOTEBOOK .
    It was the first time I had gone to the third floor, its bedroom larger than any other room in the house. There was a giant bed against the back wall, disordered with mounds of pillows and a fluffy comforter. I hated to think that she slept here with Claude.
    The notebook was left open on the bed, half-buried under the comforter. As I stood in the center of the room, Icould hear the shower going. She must have been looking at the notebook before deciding to take a shower.
    The ghost had said, “We were happy once.” Maybe the notebook would show me a glimpse of that happiness. I picked it up and ran from the room.
    In the kitchen closet, behind the ironing board and the vacuum cleaner, I found a flashlight and then went out into the garden. The heat of the summer had browned it around the edges like an old photograph, and crickets sang beneath the buzz of cars from the nearby freeway.
    I sought the large row of bushes that marked the border between the garden and the wilderness of the hill that rose behind it. They were overgrown and prickly, creating a haven with a roof of twisted branches and patches of sky. On my knees, I crawled to a space where the ground was dry.
    It was the type of notebook you bought for ninety-nine cents at a drugstore: college ruled, one hundred sheets of paper. She had written her name in childish curlicued cursive:
Dahlia,
with a star over the
i.
I traced the indentation of the ballpoint pen, then looked inside.
    She had cut out the bulldog logo from her high school yearbook and glued it to the first page, but it had come unstuck and the edges were bent and ragged. A spiky collar bulged around the bulldog’s neck, with the words “Home of the Bulldogs” written in block letters underneath its toothy grin. The pages that followed were filled with more cutouts of strangers, posing or in candid shots, with old-fashioned hairstyles and clothing. These must have been her friends from long ago, although my mother never talked about having friends, never had them over for dinner or spoke to them on the phone. With an indrawn breath, I recognizedmy father: young, foolish, laughing. There were pages full of him, each revealing a secret: He wore bell-bottom jeans; he had a mustache; he was on the track team. Pictures of him running or standing with his teammates, and captions that read:
Robert Douglas hurdles toward another win.
He tended to have a permanent look of surprise, as if he was always caught off guard. I stared at one shot of him in mid-leap over a hurdle, graceful, determined, all his limbs working together in harmony. I wanted that picture to continue, to become unstuck in time and roll forward so I could see him land, run, and leap again.
    She had made her own yearbook with just those pictures she wanted, manipulating the images to tell different stories from the ones in the real yearbook. In and around each picture cut and taped into the notebook, my mother had drawn illustrations, portraits of the photographed subjects. Sometimes there were words:
wednesday, february, history class. It’s raining today. Water soaked my bed. I sleep on the floor again. Mama cries in her bed no longer rising she’s going to