Free Eat Cake: A Novel by Jeanne Ray

toward the big suitcase. “Look in there, all the way in the bottom. The flat thing. There you’ve got it.”
    I pulled out a brown leather folder that turned out to be a frame when you opened it. On one side there was a picture of me. It was a studio picture. I am possibly four years old and I’m sittingon a little stool holding a white rabbit on my lap, looking dreamy and well behaved. I remember the day it was taken. I had misunderstood the arrangement and had cried for an hour after they took the rabbit away. On the other side there was a picture of my mother and father standing close together, both of them very dressed up. My father is holding a big white bundle of a baby in his arms and my mother is smiling hugely for the camera. He is twenty-three years old and my mother is twenty-one. Around the edges there are smaller pictures, a snapshot of my wedding, Wyatt and Camille as babies, two women I did not recognize, one of whom was in a bathing suit and waving.
    “I put that on the nightstand wherever I am. It’s the first thing out of the case and the last thing to go in, and I’ve never left it behind anywhere, not even once. That’s all you need to make a place seem like home. You just need your family. I’ve got you all there.”
    I nodded my head, my eyes glued down to the very thin record of our lives. It seemed to be so little and yet I could see how it could be enough. “I’ll put this up,” I said weakly, and set the frame on top of the dresser.
    “Put it up there, that’s fine,” my father said. “But I don’t need it now. If I want to see my family, all I have to do is walk through the door.”
    I emptied out his cases. Five pairs of pants, two sweaters, some knit gloves, three pairs of shoes, nail clippers, a black suit, a tuxedo, a paperback mystery novel from the seventies, the smallest odds and ends of life. I planned to go to out immediately and buy him some new clothes. It was fine if he wanted to leave them behind eventually, but while he was here my father was going to have some extra things.
    “It’s great to be home, Ruthie,” he said, giving me his best smile.
    “It’s great to have you,” I said. At the time that I said it, I’ll tell you, I meant it absolutely.

    Having my father move in would have been a lot to adjust to, but he was not the only new resident in the house. Sam was sitting in the kitchen for hours every morning reading the paper long past the time he should have gone to work. Plus, he and my father had discovered some mysterious cable channel that showed nothing but sports programming twenty-four hours a day. They watched the entire 1985 Lakers–Celtics playoffs in one gulp. The ambient noise of the house was now the low fuzz of roaring crowds, whistles and buzzers, the fast squeak of sneakers on a polished court, not to mention the constant commentary of Sam and my father, who were given to yelling helpful directions at the television set even though the game had been recorded the year Camille was born.
    “Look at their shorts!” Sam kept saying. “Look how tiny Larry Bird’s shorts are!”
    “Stop focusing on that,” my father told him. “It’s a perversion.”
    “It would have been a perversion if I’d noticed it at the time. Back in the eighties their shorts never occurred to me.”
    “Don’t you think they could have better music with the basketball games? All of that dum-dum-dum-dum, dum-dum-dum-dum, it gets on my nerves. Basketball is an elegant sport. Couldn’t you see it with some light piano jazz in the background? A little Beegie Adair?”
    “Do you think it would be unreasonable to have a beer with lunch?” Sam asked my father. “If I had a beer would that make me some unemployed guy drinking in the afternoon?”
    “Technically, yes, it does, but I don’t see that it makes any difference, as long as it’s just the two of us who know about it. One beer does not exactly mark the exit ramp onto the road of steep