Black Cake

In the weeks following Marble’s abrupt return to London, Benny and Byron struggle with the implications of their mother’s revelations. Benny, partly inspired by her chat with her new half-sister, recommits to finding a bank loan to help open a café with a bakery that specializes in foods that cross ethnic boundaries, foods that testify to the “immigration of culture” (321). This time she takes to the bank a black cake she makes to impress the loan officer. While she awaits word of the bank’s decision, she returns to her dreary job—dressing up in a meerkat costume and walking a parking lot promoting an electronics store.

When Marble returns to Southern California some weeks later, Benny quickly flies to LA, and the three offspring of Eleanor/Covey finally sit down and together share the black cake, stored in their mother’s freezer, that she made for them shortly before her death. The time, at last, is right. When they cut into the cake, they find a cache of precious trinkets baked into the cake by their mother: a photograph of Covey and Bunny (now Etta Pringle), seashells, and antique jewelry that Byron immediately sees is valuable. Indeed, it was part of a vast pirate treasure left on the island three centuries earlier when a hurricane marooned a band of pirates.

The novel backtracks to the months shortly after Eleanor died. Byron attends the motivational conference hosted by Etta Pringle, whom his mother identifies as her childhood friend Bunny. Byron, with his longstanding interest in leading a team to map the treacherous and uncertain bottom of the deepest parts of the ocean, synchs with Etta’s professed commitment to “doing her part to remind people that Earth was not so much land, as water, that this planet was a living thing to be cared for and protected and used with care” (337). The minute Etta sees Byron, she recognizes her long-lost friend in his face and in his eyes. The two agree to work together to at last locate Eleanor/Covey’s long-lost daughter.

The novel turns briefly to the story of Eleanor’s father, the gambler Lin, who originally negotiated his daughter into the loveless marriage with the crime boss to whom he owed money. He has, since his wife and daughter both disappeared, relocated to the ethnic neighborhoods of Miami.

Through the law offices of Charles Mitch, the three siblings agree to meet with their estranged grandfather. He needs to know the story of his daughter—that she did not kill her new husband, that she did not die trying to escape the island, and that Lin is a grandfather. The meeting does not go well—Byron sees only the clutter of his grandfather’s apartment and cannot entirely let go of his anger over his grandfather’s part in his mother’s disappearance and in his mother’s disastrous (albeit brief) marriage to Little Man. Byron finally cannot control his anger and lets his grandfather know exactly his responsibility and his guilt. The three storm out, and Lin just hours later suffers a debilitating stroke. He dies soon after.

Byron is ready now to move forward. He receives a call from Lynette’s family: She is in labor. Byron flies to get to the airport and heads to the hospital. For the briefest moment, Byron makes eye contact with the squirming little baby, and he feels a conviction of the rightness of his identity now as a father: “Baby By follows his voice with his head, eyes scrunched shut, and a tiny, lopsided mouth, the sight of which causes Byron to catch his breath” (364). Seeing the futility of a lawsuit he filed charging the institute with deceptive promotion practices (Byron regarded race as the reason he was denied promotion), Byron arranges quietly to change jobs, accepting a position as executive researcher for a major consulting firm.

Benny is turned down again for the loan, but she has begun to gather a following for her recipe videos on social media: “Nothing is going quite the way she expected. But she doesn’t mind much at all” (365). More intriguing, while she is in the parking lot doing her meerkat gig, a man with a child in tow expresses an interest in her, despite the silly and bulky costuming.

The novel closes returning to that wedding day back in 1965. The faithful Lyncook maid, Pearl, thought about poisoning the cake but could not bring herself to do it. That leaves three suspects: Lin, Covey, and her best friend, swimming partner, and maid of honor, Bunny (now Etta Pringle). After all, they all had access to the poison, sufficient motive, and a vested interest in Little Man’s death. In the closing pages, the novel reveals that it was in fact Bunny who staged a stumble as she moved past the front table at the wedding and poisoned Little Man’s champagne glass. She is never caught, and she never tells anyone what she has done, save reassuring Benny and Byron that so many people wanted Little Man dead that it was unlikely Covey had anything to do with it. She has spent her life using her gifts as a swimmer to tirelessly preach the importance of tending to the planet and “the health of the oceans” (371). Survival, she tells her audiences, “has never been enough” (371).

The novel closes one year after Eleanor/Covey’s death, with her three siblings taking Lin’s ashes (they had his body exhumed and cremated) and their mother’s ashes far out into the Pacific and scattering them into the sea, and then trailing crumbled bits of Eleanor’s last-baked black cake in the ocean.