It was quite magical, even for a cynic like me.
Her twentieth birthday would mark the tenth time we had this little celebration and I’m sure she was excited about it. Maggie was there and she had a special dress too. One made from the same fabric as Indie’s.
But this was a nighttime thing. We didn’t do it in the morning. And Indie never baked anything for her birthday. McKay always bought a cake from a bakery a few towns over. I can’t recall a single time we had cupcakes.
So I should’ve known.
Everything we did for Indie was based on consistency. That was why she had to be home for dinner every night. That was why she had to go to church every Sunday. That was why she had a bedtime and a ritual to go with it.
Same was good. She did well with same. She needed a routine. We made her wake up at the same time every day, even on the weekends. We made her do her lessons at the same time every day. This was how we kept her in check and maintained control.
And everything about her twentieth birthday was… different.
She woke up earlier than usual. And I don’t know why I woke up. Maybe it was the sweet smell of baking cake that drew me up from sleep, or maybe it was Maggie’s laugh drifting up the stairs.
I threw the covers off and got out of bed, not even bothering to put a shirt on. When I opened my door, I saw Donovan sleeping in his room. I don’t know why that guy doesn’t close his bedroom door when he sleeps, but he doesn’t. It’s weird, I think. To sleep with your bedroom door open. But whatever.
I rapped on his door. “Get up. Indie’s already downstairs.” And then I went down the hallway to McKay’s room. His door was closed, but not locked. So I opened it up and paused for a moment.
He was sprawled out diagonally across the mattress with the covers all twisted up in his legs. Face buried in his pillow, hands underneath.
“Get up, McKay. Indie’s downstairs cooking or something. She’s trying to start this day without us.”
He moaned and rolled over. And I waited. Because he wasn’t wearing a shirt either and for a dude, McKay was kinda nice to look at. I have been wishing for that man’s abs for as long as I could remember. He had like a… twenty-four pack. And that fucking asshole didn’t hit the weights half as hard as I did.
But he made me smile. McKay kept everyone happy around here. Not just Indie.
He cracked one eye and looked at me, his face all lopsided from the effort. “What?”
“Get up. She’s downstairs doing something in the kitchen. Can’t you smell it?”
He made a big production of sniffing, then turned back over. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
I was just about to head downstairs when I noticed Indie’s room. She had the smallest bedroom on the second floor. There were lots of other bedrooms in the house. Two on the west side on the first floor. We didn’t really use that wing. And then another one up on the third-floor attic. We didn’t use that space, either. So when Maggie was born she just moved into Indie’s room. We put the crib along the longest wall where there was no window. And she had just recently grown out of that so now she had one of those little toddler beds. I didn’t even know that was a thing until a couple months ago when McKay and Indie came home with it.
She was into Disney princesses back then. So she had princess shit everywhere. Sheets, and pillow cases, and a quilt I had made for her specially by the dressmaker seamstress last Christmas.
But that was when I realized that Indie’s dress wasn’t hanging on her closet door like it should be. That’s where I always put it. Every year I had this dress made. And I would hide it from her until the night before her birthday when I was sure she was asleep. And then I would creep in and hang it up on her closet door so she would see it first thing when she woke up.
The hanger was there, but the dress was not.
So the smell of cake was my first clue, but that empty hanger was the second.
Because she put the dress on before breakfast and that was not how this day was done. This day was done with McKay waking Donovan and me up first, and then Indie, who was a late sleeper.
She even fed Maggie something different that day. Cereal from a box.
McKay did not buy cereal from a box when he went grocery shopping. Cereal to him meant oatmeal. Which we didn’t eat often because… oatmeal.
But when I went downstairs and walked into the kitchen there was a box of Cocoa Puffs on the kitchen counter. It looked so out of place I stopped at the island to just stare at it for a moment.
Then I looked at Maggie. She was sitting in her high chair, one hand rolling Cocoa Puffs around on the tray like they were toys, and the other busily grabbing handfuls of the soggy chocolate balls from a bowl and stuffing them in her mouth.
I did say something. “What the hell is this?” Or maybe, “Why is she eating that crap?” And I noticed that Indie was wearing the dress, but I was so distracted by Maggie’s bowl of cereal that I didn’t have a chance to comment on it.
Then McKay was there, shirtless and his sweatpant shorts showing off the fucking cut muscles of his waist. And he just breezed right past me, picked that bowl up off the high-chair tray, and plopped it in the sink.
I looked at Maggie to see how she was gonna take this new development. Her lips were gettin’ pouty like she was gearing up for a wail. But McKay snatched a spatula out of the canister we kept the kitchen utensils in and pointed it at her. “I don’t want no lip from you, missy. You’re having pancakes.”
I guess Maggie decided that was an offer she could live with, because she didn’t cry.
Then Donovan was there, scowling at everyone. “What the hell is going on here?”
He was shirtless too. And he was a good eight years younger than me, so yeah. He had the body of a twenty-five-year-old. But that dumbass wore real pajama pants to bed and these were light, light blue with tiny pinstripes. And his hair was all standing up on his head, so he was hard to take seriously in the morning and no one bothered to answer.
He took a seat on an island barstool right next to Maggie and started making faces at her.
Indie was watching us with a smile on her face as she frosted cupcakes with a butter knife. I told you she wasn’t a baker. They were pink and had something mixed into the frosting. Little bits of dark red things.
I asked her the same question though. “What the hell are you doing, Indie?”
“You can see with your own eyes that I am baking.” She stopped her frosting and beamed a smile at me.
And I remember thinking, Well, at least she had the good sense to wear an apron so the damn thousand-dollar dress I had made specially for her didn’t get ruined.
But then I said, “Why are you baking?”
McKay was already gathering up ingredients for pancakes, so he wasn’t paying attention. Donovan was busy talking to Mags.
“Because Maggie wanted cupcakes and dewberries for breakfast, so we went out and picked some berries and I made cupcakes.”
“Dewberries?” I was confused. Did we have dewberries on this property? I didn’t think so. But it had been twenty years since I went wandering around anything but the gardens.
But that’s when McKay paused his kitchen duties, finally realizing that things were… off. “We’re not eating cupcakes for breakfast. And your birthday cake is sitting in the freaking fridge. I picked it up yesterday afternoon.”