A birthday cake marks a milestone in a child’s life, as well as the passage of time, so Scotty’s birthday cake initially symbolizes Howard and Ann’s certainty that he will have a future. At the beginning of the story, Ann orders the cake for Scotty’s birthday party. At this point in the story, Ann and Howard have lived a fairly privileged, happy life devoid of major tragedies. So as she orders the cake, Ann feels certain that Scotty’s birthday party will take place and doesn’t doubt that she will continue to live her happy life as a mother. In other words, Ann buys the cake believing that her son has endless birthdays stretching before him in his childhood.
But after Scotty is hit by a car on his birthday, Ann quickly forgets about the cake, which comes to symbolize the frivolity of the family’s old, easy life, and how the things they used to care about are no longer important—or even accessible—to them. Over the course of the three days that Scotty is in the hospital, Ann doesn’t think about the cake at all, and even the incessant phone calls she and Howard receive (from the baker, unbeknownst to the couple) don’t jog her memory. Now that she’s experienced such profound tragedy, Ann isn’t worried about making her son’s birthday special anymore; instead, she’s worried about whether or not he’ll live through his birthday.
Near the end of the story, Ann and Howard go to the bakery to confront the baker about the phone calls. There, they find Scotty’s cake sitting out, now stale after three days on the counter. It’s old and useless, and the baker offers to give it to the couple for half price. That the cake is old and unappetizing mirrors how the family’s previous sweet, idyllic life is now irreversibly a thing of the past, and the things they once cared about—like space ship-themed birthday cakes—are unimportant and inaccessible to them now that Scotty has died.
Birthday Cake Quotes in A Small, Good Thing
She was a mother and thirty-three years old, and it seemed to her that everyone, especially someone the baker’s age—a man old enough to be her father—must have children who’d gone through this special time of cakes and birthday parties. There must be that between them, she thought. But he was abrupt with her—not rude, just abrupt. She gave up trying to make friends with him.
Then he began to talk. They listened carefully. Although they were tired and in anguish, they listened to what the baker had to say. They nodded when the baker began to speak of loneliness, and of the sense of doubt and limitation that had come to him in his middle years. He told them what it was like to be childless all these years. To repeat the days with the ovens endlessly full and endlessly empty. The party food, the celebrations he’d worked over. Icing knuckle-deep. The tiny wedding couples stuck into cakes. Hundreds of them, no, thousands by now. Birthdays. Just imagine all those candles burning.
Birthday Cake Symbol Timeline in A Small, Good Thing
