“We’re not able to make it to the phone. Please leave your name and telephone number. We’ll get back to you real quick. Have a nice day!” *Beep*

Her father’s voice.

I hung up the receiver without leaving a message. I knew where her mother was. I knew she already knew.

My girlfriend-of-three-months had gone to the store to get cake mix. It was her father’s birthday tomorrow and she wanted to make him a cake. The doctor and nurses warned her that he wouldn’t be able to eat it. “Only fluids,” they repeated.

“He can still blow out the candles,” she replied and left the hospital to get supplies.

“I’ll be back real quick dad.”

It was five days after the surgery and her father was “stable” and “healing nicely.” And then that afternoon there were problems. “Minor complications,” the nurses assured.

A small infection.

“It’s under control.”

“I’m not worried,” she said when she arrived to her dorm room. I’d been there since morning and was lying on her bed waiting. I’d been lying there for five days since morning. “If the doctors aren’t concerned then you shouldn’t be either,” I agreed. But her mother didn’t. She refused to leave his bedside after that – not to eat or drink or even use the bathroom.

But I told my girlfriend-of-three-months everything would be OK; that she shouldn’t feel bad about leaving for a few hours.

“Everything will be OK.”

She told me to wait for her more while she ran to the campus store “real quick” to get supplies to make a cake: mix, frosting, candles. And so I lay some more on the bed staring at a crack in the white plaster ceiling.

When the phone rang, a husky man’s voice asked for her and finally said, “We lost him.”

My first thought was that his bed might have accidentally wheeled down the hall into another room – perhaps the cable was better in room 304. And then the doctor said something that meant the infection had become worse than they originally thought. “It spread too quickly for us to contain.”

Real quick.

Before that call to her parents’ – her childhood – home, I’d never heard my girlfriend-of-three-months’ father’s voice. There were to be family dinners and get-togethers. In the future when we’d dated longer. Like at Christmas and maybe Easter. I think they celebrated both.

When my girlfriend returned from the store she was smiling as if saying, “This will make him smile.” She was holding a white bag with a yellow smiley face and red letters that spelled, “HAVE A NICE DAY!”

It was filled with cake mix and frosting and candles.

She asked me to preheat the oven in the communal kitchen. “180 degrees.”

When I sat up but didn’t stand, “What’s the matter?” was what she said. She stopped smiling then.

“The hospital called,” I said. “They said it was quick.”

She set the smiley face on the bedroom floor and picked up the phone. She called home even though she knew where her mother was.