our mother made a small cake on the last sunday of every month. she made it for so long that none of us knew the recipe — we knew only how it looked, how it sat in the tin, the smell that began at the back of the house and worked forward. when she was asked, she would say: oh, it is nothing, and dust her hands.
after she died we found the card in a drawer of the dresser, in her handwriting. the card had been water-damaged at some earlier point and was partially illegible. we could see the flour and the butter and we could see oven, until, but we could not see the rest. we asked the aunts. none of them had baked it. she had not believed in passing recipes on; she had believed in being the one who knew.
we tried, one afternoon, to reconstruct it. the daughter-in-law had a good memory for taste and the oldest grandson had a careful hand. what we produced was a cake. it was not, however, our mother's cake. we ate it anyway. we did not try again.