Dark Chocolate Cheesecake by Rachele Salvini

            Maggie Not Margaret CC


​Dark Chocolate Cheesecake

        My mother baked me a dark chocolate cheesecake before slitting her wrists.
       She left it on my kitchen table while I was at work. She knew Emily and I had just split, so she came to have a look at my place on Friday afternoon. She ironed my laundry and folded my underwear, and then she washed the pile of dishes I had left in the sink. When I got home, I saw that she had put a small, light green card next to the cheesecake, where she wrote that she hoped I had a great day.
        I didn’t call her to thank her. I was tired. She would ask me questions.
        The cheesecake stood there, but I didn’t really look at it. I didn’t see the fine layer of hazelnut she had put between the dark cheesecake and the darker chocolate frosting. I didn’t see how carefully she had tried to level and smooth the surface of the cake to make it look perfect. She said chefs always got angry when food and plates bore the fingerprints of the person who had cooked the dish, but she couldn’t help leaving them. Still, I didn’t see her fingerprints on the porcelain plate decorated with bunnies, the one she had been using for years.
       Instead, I shoved half of the cake on a plastic plate and turned on the TV. I spent the night watching a documentary on the life of Amanda Knox. Then I went to the balcony and smoked a couple of cigarettes, singing some song by Lou Reed between gritted teeth. I went back inside, took three shots of Fireball, a sleeping pill and browsed Emily’s Instagram profile until I fell asleep, at five in the morning.
           The next day the phone was so loud that I screamed. When I answered, though, I shut the fuck up.
           My father told me mom had committed suicide.
           My father lived with his ex student in Pasadena, yet he knew about it before me.
           When I hung up, I crawled out of bed and went to the kitchen to pour me a glass of water. The sleeping pill had made me groggy.
           I saw the other half of the cheesecake on the table.

          My father had left my mother when I was twenty and I was too busy spending my nights in college, drinking shots of tequila from the bellies of blonde sorority girls.
           Emily was one of the blondes I met in my final year and we thought the fun times were over. We decided to move in together in Long Island once we graduated and both found a job for the same media company. Rent was expensive, and we thought moving in together was sort of okay. She left me a couple of years after. She went back with her high school sweetheart, who had just come back to New York from the military. I even saw him once, in front of our apartment, when he came to our place to help her move out. I called him dickhead and he shrugged, so I went back inside.
           My father had left my mother for one of his students, a blonde sorority girl too, and they moved to Pasadena when he got a better position there. They had a kid now. They went to church every Sunday, they said.
             My mother still lived in Yonkers. She hadn’t met anyone else. I had no idea how she spent her days and I honestly tried my best not to picture her in her house by herself, dusting the furniture or something.
          To come to my place, she had to spend at least twenty bucks for the Metro North. Then she had to hop on the subway at Grand Central Station and come all the way to Long Island.
               I told her not to do that. I could have driven her home, but she didn’t want to bother me.

             When I used to go to her place to have lunch, everything was about me. She didn’t tell me about her life. I think I asked, most of the time, but maybe I didn’t really listen.
               How is work.
               How is Emily.
               Can I meet her.
               What happened to that friend of yours with the mole on his lip.
               Is he in accounting.
               I went shopping and bought a new type of pasta for you,
               Do you like this new lasagna.
               It’s a new recipe I saw on Masterchef.
              I answered her questions calmly, waiting for the lunch to be over. As I drank the last sip of coffee she had made for me, I used to get up and go out, ready to keep on living my life.
               I thought she would clean the dishes, place them slowly in the cupboards, the cups, the plates, the forks, the spoons and the knives. I could imagine her drying them carefully with a cloth. I could never imagine her slitting her wrists.

           At the funeral, I saw Emily. She didn’t bring Dickhead. She kissed me on the cheek and I started crying. She was breathing and touching me and smiling. She was not still, framed in a picture on Instagram. I wanted to hug her. I didn’t, but she did.
                 She told me that if I needed to talk, we could go somewhere before the reception started.
                 I said I was good.
                 So I smiled at my mother’s
                 relatives
                 friends
                 colleagues
                 and people I didn’t fucking know.
                 No one asked why my mother committed suicide. I couldn’t have given them an answer anyway.
              I greeted my father and his new wife, shook her hand and she smiled politely. They bought all the food for the reception. Shrimp, crab cakes, even lobster.
                  I didn’t eat much, though.
                  All I could think of was the half-eaten dark chocolate cheesecake, sitting alone on my kitchen table.

Bio: Rachele Salvini is an Italian student of Creative Writing and a first-year PhD candidate at Oklahoma State University.  She writes both in Italian and in English, and her work has been published in several magazines such as Takahe Magazine, The Fem Literary Magazine, The Machinery, and others. She is an Editorial Assistant for Cimarron Review and she has been an editor and translator for The Wells Street Journal.

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