Mrs. Waite's cake
The cake was uneven and slightly tilted to one side, but it was dark chocolate and decorated with four cursive names and had clearly been made with care. Mrs. Waite had spared Gately the humiliation of putting just his name on the cake as if the cake was especially for him. But it was.
Context
The novel's single-entendre gesture par excellence — care, thrift, and tact with no irony in it anywhere. The reclusive, feared Mrs. Waite gives up cigarettes for weeks (the mayonnaise jar of saved quarters) to bake a birthday cake for the neighborhood party, and the perfect earnest touch is the tact: four cursive names, not one, so Gately won't suffer the exposure of a cake obviously just for him — though it was. And the ironic community's reflex meets it exactly as the culture trains: not gratitude but hygienic suspicion, "delicious whispery arguments about what kind of medical waste or roasted-kid renderings were in the cake," and quiet disposal upside-down in the trash. The plain kindness is literally unswallowable to a world that reads an uncool sincerity as a probable poisoning. The sincere gesture and its refusal, staged as a children's-party atrocity.