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My auntie Sammy had real red-velvet cake — not that she had the time to make it, bread-winning at Glaxo-Smith-Kline while my uncle Eddy moved slow up the state trooper ranks from officer to corporal with dreams of lieutenant, but she had bought some, good cake too, from the Hill My mom’s side, Italian and white as ricotta, which none of us fucked with, was in love with the Hill   My too long ago ex, Kalli, looked at the cake the way I clocked her body — like she was thirsty and the cake was a tall-boy before close in the kitchen   She and I had been on and off since highschool Kalli’s mom had showed mine how to make stewed ox-tail, even showed her the one grocery store that sold cuts of it for cheap, attached to the only Jamaican restaurant in the city, off Broad street Her mom didn’t talk much   In the ten years since, we’d grown apart — not enough to talk about who we were fucking or loving, or any combination of the two, but enough to not know and not question I shouldn’t have been thinking any of these things because my girlfriend Madie was on a train back from her family’s summer home in Connecticut and I was in love again   ‘Go get a slice,’ I told Lili   ‘She surveyed the patio like there were cake operatives involved It was just my family and she knew them well   ‘We haven’t even had dinner,’ she said   ‘It’s a fucking cookout Not a gala’   She cut her eyes at me but turned back to the cake I imagined my girl, drinking and twirling and helping my aunts with the party, throwing slight shots at me to get on my mom’s good side I hadn’t known Connecticut had country before I met Madie I hadn’t known a lot of things about that side   Some of my boys’ families had left Pawtucket for Hartford, or New Haven, but one moved to