The Four-Tier Problem

December sixteenth. Someone at work ordered a four-tier chocolate cake for a table of twelve people, and I want it on record that I did not question this. Not once. I sat down, I looked at that cake, and I thought: yes. Correct. The right amount of cake.

The year-end party has always been the one I look forward to in a way I don't fully admit to myself until I'm already there and laughing too loudly at something that isn't even that funny. There's a specific kind of looseness that happens when you take people out of the building and put them in a room with Edison bulbs and candles and a meal that somebody else planned, and suddenly everyone is slightly more themselves than they usually manage at nine in the morning. I am not immune to this.

very serious cake deliberations

I took the last slice. I want to be honest about that. There was a moment of hesitation, a brief survey of the table, and then I made a decision and I stand by it. I ate it slowly and I did not share it and I sat there in the winding-down quiet of the evening thinking about how we're almost at the end of another year. There are two Saturdays left in December. One of them already has plans, a specific Saturday, already named, that I have not been able to locate a gap in since Simone said it out loud. But that's a January thought. Tonight was cake and brick walls and the kind of laughing that makes you forget you work somewhere.

the last bite is always the quietest

The year-end party, every year: proof that sometimes someone orders exactly the right amount of cake.