And I heard myself say, “Fine.”
The second it left my mouth, I regretted it.
Denise grinned.
“I’ll bring it back Saturday.”
“Please clean it before you do.”
“Obviously.”
Saturday morning, I found it on my porch.
Not handed to me.
Not knocked on the door.
Sitting on the boards beside the mat where anyone walking past could have taken it.
I knew something was wrong before I even picked it up.
There was cream dried into the seam where the head meets the body.
Yellow.
Four days old.
Something sticky had dried onto the cord.
The whisk attachment was inside the bowl, still coated with a thin layer of hardened icing.
She hadn’t rinsed anything.
I carried it inside.
Sophie followed.
“She just left it?”
“Apparently.”
“That’s gross.”
“Yes.”
I cleaned the bowl first.
Then the attachment.
Then the body.
It took almost twenty minutes to work the dried cream out of the seam.
Finally, I plugged it in.
The motor made a sound I have never heard it make in 36 years.
A grinding hum.
Then a click.
The head jerked once.
Stopped.
I switched it off.
Waited.
Tried again.
Same sound.
I unplugged it and stood there with my hand still on the switch.
Sophie looked at me.
“Is it broken?”
“I don’t know.”
“Grandma’s mixer?”
That did it.
I walked across the grass and knocked on Denise’s door.
I wasn’t even angry yet.
Honestly, I thought she’d be embarrassed.
I thought that was why she’d left it on the porch and gone.
She opened the door holding a mug of coffee.
“Oh. Yeah.”
No apology.
Nothing.
“The mixer isn’t working.”
Denise rolled her eyes.
“Honestly, you should buy a new one. That thing is ancient.”
I stared at her.
“What happened?”
“It quit halfway through my cream.”
“What do you mean it quit?”
“It started making some awful noise and then stopped turning.”
“Did you turn it off when it started making the noise?”
She took a sip of coffee.
“I was in the middle of making frosting.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
“Well, I had 11 people sitting in my dining room with no cake.”
She shrugged.
“So thanks for that ruined night, I guess.”
I genuinely didn’t know what to say.
She was blaming me.
For the mixer she had borrowed.
Then broken.
Then returned dirty.
“Denise, that mixer worked perfectly when you took it.”
“It was 30-something years old.”
“Thirty-six.”
“Exactly.”
She smiled as though I’d proven her point.
“It was going to die eventually.”
“Did you overload it?”
“No.”
“Did you keep running it after it started struggling?”
