the offering received as poison and thrown away unseen — "the sober Mom had taken the…"
the sober Mom had taken the cake into the kitchen when she thought nobody was watching and threw it out in the wastebasket.
Context
Mrs. Waite gives up cigarettes and saves quarters for weeks to bake the neighborhood kids a birthday cake — an unmistakable reach for contact — and it is received as a threat: refused at the door, kept from every child, decided to be poisoned, and thrown out upside-down in the trash while she is safely back inside, unable to see it discarded. It is the Loach touch-me mechanism at its cruelest, an offering of connection so foreign that the only slot the receivers have for it is danger. That she couldn't have seen it thrown away is the mercy the scene grants and the isolation it seals; she hangs herself not long after.