That titter changed as they watched Ada cut miniscule slivers and put them on the paper plates with the big blue teddy bear on them.

There you go.

That was Ada.

She told me how many people were coming so I made a fourteen-inch, four-layer cake, plenty for everyone to have a nice thick slice. But Ada was cutting slivers so she could have half a cake as leftovers for her and Vic.

I sighed, wondering what the heck I was doing there at all since three years ago, when Ada met Vic, and because she was thirty-six and her biological clock was ticking so loudly the personnel at NORAD were tracking it, she immediately dedicated herself to the sacred quest of making him her fiancé. Then her husband. Now the man who was the father of her unborn child. Through this, Ada pretty much checked out of my life.

She called me to make the cake for her engagement party then for her bridal shower, her wedding, and now this. Only two of those cakes she paid me for and she asked for (and stupid me, I gave her) a discount on both.

I’d only seen her on those occasions and all of them required me bringing a present.

Other than that, Ada was all about sculpting (with chisel and hammer if she had to) Vic into the perfect suburban husband, through wedding planning, house hunting, house decorating, and baby making. She didn’t have time to be a friend unless it was to call on all of us to buy her presents and celebrate milestones of her life.

I didn’t even think she sent me a Christmas card last year.

And I had my own milestone to think about. I didn’t need to be here.

Okay, maybe it wasn’t a milestone. But whatever it was, it was a big, huge, stinking deal because no way that scene with Brock “Slim” Lucas in my kitchen was not a big, huge stinking deal.

I knew it.

I started thinking about how and when I could get out of there while handing around plates with slivers of cake and baby-blue plastic forks on them.

But when I gave one to the woman sitting beside me, she muttered an annoyed “Muthafucka.”

As it would, this surprised me. So I looked at her, to see her staring down at her nearly transparent slice of cake and I was right. She appeared annoyed.