Aunt Vera Came Home After Forty Years — The Cake Was Already Ordered

My mother and her twin sister Vera stopped speaking in 1983. The reason changed depending on who you asked and when you asked them — money, according to my grandmother; a man, according to my uncle; something that happened at a funeral, according to my mother on the one occasion she'd had enough wine to mention it at all. The details never quite matched, but the outcome was consistent: Vera left Harlan County, Kentucky, and did not come back, and my mother did not discuss her.

So when Vera walked into my mother's sixty-eighth birthday dinner in April, the whole table went quiet in the way that only happens when something genuinely unscripted occurs. She looked right. She looked like the photographs — older, obviously, but the photographs from the '70s showed a woman with a particular way of holding her shoulders, slightly forward, like she was always just about to say something, and this woman had that same posture. She hugged my mother and my mother hugged her back and cried, and by the end of the night everyone agreed it was a miracle and a long time coming.

I want to say I felt that too. I mostly did. But I'm my mother's daughter, which means I notice things, and the first thing I noticed was the cake.

My aunt Deanna had ordered it from a bakery in Lexington, a specific bakery my mother likes, three weeks before the dinner. I know this because Deanna mentioned it — she'd put the order in early because they get backed up around Easter. The cake said "Happy Birthday Carol and Vera" on it, in two colors of frosting, with both names in the same looping script. Deanna had specified both names. She'd done this, she said, because she had a feeling Vera might come home, and she wanted to be ready.

When I asked her what she meant by a feeling, she got a little vague. She said Vera had been on her mind. She said sometimes you just know. I let it go because it was a birthday party and my mother was happy.

But I kept thinking about it. Deanna lives in Corbin. She and Vera hadn't spoken any more than the rest of us had. There was no email chain I'd missed, no phone call anyone mentioned. I checked with my cousins. Nobody had heard from Vera in the weeks before the party. Nobody had invited her, as far as anyone could account for. She'd simply appeared, and the cake had been waiting.

The photographs started bothering me a few days later, when my cousin posted the party pictures online and I started looking at the old ones Deanna had dug out for the occasion. There were three photos of my mother and Vera together from the late 1970s. In two of them, Vera is on my mother's left. In the third, she's on her right, and her hair is parted differently, and she's wearing a ring I don't see in the others. That's not unusual. What's unusual is that the third photo is dated, in my grandmother's handwriting on the back, from a summer when, according to the story I'd always been told, Vera was already gone.

I asked my mother about the photo. She looked at it for a long time. She said she didn't remember that day. She said the handwriting was definitely her mother's. She said maybe Grandma had the date wrong, and I said maybe, and we didn't talk about it again.

The thing about Vera — the present-day Vera, the one who came to the party — is that she's warm. She's funny. She asks good questions and remembers the answers. She called me by a nickname that only my mother uses, which she explained by saying she'd heard so much about me over the years. From whom, I didn't ask. I should have asked.

She's been in town for six weeks now, staying with my mother, and my mother is happier than I've seen her in a long time. That's real. That part I don't doubt.

But there are small things. Vera doesn't remember certain events the same way others do — not dramatically, not in ways that would make you call her a liar, but in ways that make conversations occasionally tilt slightly sideways. She'll reference a detail slightly wrong, and when someone gently corrects her, she'll agree immediately, pleasantly, like a person updating a file. She never pushes back. She never says "no, I'm sure it was that way." She just incorporates the correction and moves on.

My uncle, who is not a fanciful man, pulled me aside at Easter and said, quietly, that he'd asked Vera about a specific trip they'd all taken together in 1979, a trip he remembered clearly. He said she'd smiled and said she remembered it too. He said she'd gotten the year right, and the destination right, and the basic shape of the story right. But she'd described the drive through the eyes of someone who'd been in the back seat, and my uncle was certain — he said he was absolutely certain — that Vera had driven that trip herself. That she'd been behind the wheel the whole way.

He didn't know what to do with that. Neither do I.

My mother's birthday was in April. Vera's is in June. Deanna already has a cake on order.

I found out last week that she placed the order in March.

I don't know how she knew to put Vera's name on it. When I asked her, she smiled and said she just had a feeling again, same as before. She said sometimes you just know when someone's coming home.

I've been trying to figure out what question I actually want to ask. I haven't found it yet. But I think it has something to do with where Vera was before she came back, and whether the place she was is the same place she left from, and whether those two places being different would explain anything at all.

My mother is happy. I keep telling myself that's what matters. I keep almost believing it.