Miss Havisham is alive and well in the Texas ‘hood.

I’ll be the first one to admit: I have blog envy. I read everyone’s clever, pretty blogs and I wonder: how does that all happen to one person? How can something so funny and original happen to them every day? Am I the only one stuck in a life-rut of routine? Work. Pick up girls from daycare. Eat. (Work out?) Sleep. Rinse, lather, repeat. Why couldn’t interesting stories happen to me?

Do I have a whopper to tell you.

Wednesday night, after I wrote out a blog about what a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week I was having, my Insignificant Other called to break up with me. Consequently, I was a mess on Thursday. I was working on three hours of sleep, I had to take the car to get it fixed, Stressful Things were going on at ThePlaceThatShallNotBeNamed, and one of my friends at the office was retiring. So when my compadre-in-crime, Crisanna, asked me if I wanted to go get the send-off cake, I thought, What the hell? Why not spend another hour doing something other than thinking.

That cake excursion was the best comic relief I could have asked for. First of all, Crisanna made me the navigator. People who know me know that was a big mistake. I talk in left, right – not east, west (or west, east). I’m likely to point and exlaim, “Go there!” instead of providing useful instruction, and I’ll likely find the street to turn onto right as we’re driving by. It was going to be fun. Add to that the fact that we were driving through The ‘Hood, and the fact that Crisanna tried to get my run over by a train. (“How fast do these things even go?” she asked, when the the cross bars hesitated before lowering. Right then, a bullet train sped by. From my side!)

As I was guessing when our street would come up (“Probably the next major intersection; they wouldn’t put a business building on a side street.”) when I found out we were actually venturing to a house. And that she had been warned it was the dingiest house our informant had ever seen.

Dude. No kidding. As we pulled onto our sidestreet, I immediately started having doubts. I mean, I’m from the city and I’ve seen – and been in – lots of dingy and derelict houses before. But I don’t think I’ve ever eaten something that’s come out of them.

We knocked on the door with a little trepidation. (Well, Crisanna did. I made her go first.) As soon as the woman opened the door, the stench hit me. I didn’t think I could go in. Except we had to. I pushed in past the Christmas tree that was still up and fully decorated (!), straight into the kitchen. In my mind, the kitchen had to be cleaner, had to smell better than…this. Already I was having trouble fathoming how she kept a cake business alive if her customers had to witness this squalor.

The kitchen was worse.

Cat bowl after cat bowl. Litter boxes. Dirty dishes. Dirty countertops. Knick knacks and clutter. Twenty burning candles that did little to lessen the stench of cat food and pee. I glanced at Crisanna, but I couldn’t tell if she was mouth-breathing, too. This place was incredible! As in unbelievable. The cat food – dry and wet, both half eaten (!) lurked dangerously close to our cake.

The cake itself was beautiful, I’ll give her that. There was no earthly way I was eating it, but it did look nice. The two of us were sweet as pecan pie and made small talk with the mountainous woman as she boxed up the cake. Even the boxing tape the Crazy Cake Lady used to tape the box closed had something on it – hair? I tried not to look.

We finally made our escape. Cake Lady had followed us, so we couldn’t gulp the clean, beautiful city-smogged air as freely as we would have liked. We dove back into the car as quickly as the poor, lonely woman would allow. Crisanna made a welfare check on her purse (even city-wizened me refused to leave mine locked up in that neighborhood), and we beat our retreat back to work.

“I don’t know if I can eat that cake…” Crisanna began.

“Oh, thank god, it wasn’t just me,” I quickly agreed. “I feel like I just survived Miss Havisham’s!”

And because Crisanna is my long lost sister, she busted out laughing, not needing me to explain the Dickensian connection. Replace the retirement cake with a tiered wedding cake, make the Cake Lady skinny, scrawny, and powerful (keep the bitterness), and add several layers of spiderwebs over the filth…and it would have been Miss Havisham’s room.

The rest of the ride back to work we spent laughing until our cheeks hurt, trying to figure out what we had just experienced, why anyone still bought cakes there, and whether or not we should warn our friends. At one point, I thought I caught a whiff of cat stench lingering on the cake box and I had to try very hard not to toss my cookies.

And that, my friends, is a genuine, one-of-a-kind story. I may or may not have almost caused Crisanna to drive off the road (kidding, C!) when I screamed out loud: “I CAN BLOG ABOUT THIS!” It’s so nice to have a built-in silver lining!

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Tags: baking, blogging, cakes