How to Bake a Perfect Life (11 page)

“I’m so glad to see you,” Poppy said, looking right at me, smiling. She came down the steps and put her arms around me, kissed my cheek. I allowed it, but her breasts squished into my chest, and it was embarrassing. She quickly moved away, only patting my arm.

My mother hugged her with more exuberance, and they rocked back and forth, both of them with closed eyes, as if they were absorbing some magic thing from each other. They were sisters and often seemed at odds to me. Everything about them was different—my mother in her slacks and short hair streaked elegantly, so that it seemed to match the liquid gold jewelry she was so fond of. Unlike Poppy, Lily was always tanned and slim and put on her makeup.

Poppy had run off to India after college in the sixties and spent six years traveling in Europe and even Africa, working when she needed to. She had cooked a thousand kinds of food all around the world, which gave her kitchen an exotic smell.

“How about a grilled cheese sandwich?” Poppy asked when my mother drove away. “I’ve got to get moving on my sourdough or put it back in the fridge.”

“I guess.”

She drew me into her kitchen, a room with big windows pouring sunlight into the sink and splashing it onto the table. A collection of blue bottles, large and small, was lined up on the windowsill. Sandwiched between them were small clay pots filled with herbs. When the sun was on them, like now, they made the air smell like root beer and Thanksgiving morning. A rotary fan sat atop the fridge, moving the air around over our heads. Poppy poured me a glass of sweet iced tea with pieces of mint from her garden floating in it.

“You can help me make the bread.” She took a jar filled with a noxious-looking substance off the counter. The lower half was a thick gray pillow, looking like some fungus you’d find on Mars. Poppy shook it up cheerfully, then opened it. A strong earthy smell exploded into the air.

I wasn’t sure if I liked it or not and put my hand up to my nose, just in case my stomach decided it was time to throw up. But my stomach stayed stable, and I leaned closer. “What is that?”

Poppy held it up to the light. “Magic.”

“What kind of magic?”

“It’s my own sourdough starter. I’ve been working on it for months, and I think it’s finally getting where I want it to be.”

“Grandma has a sourdough starter. She makes biscuits with it.”

“Yes, that’s from the Callahan side of the family. It’s got quite a history.” Her mouth went into a straight line. “This one is my own.”

“Oh.” I sank down at the table, feeling as if my legs had turned into rubber bands. “I’m really hungry.”

“Sorry, baby. Let me get you some lunch.”

By the time we ate sandwiches and oranges, I was nodding off at the table, and Poppy sent me upstairs to what would be my bedroom for the duration. Her room occupied the front half of the second floor, a wide-open space with a balcony overlooking the train tracks and pale grassy fields rolling toward the burly mountains. My room was in the back, tucked under the eaves, but there was a circular staircase that led to the widow’s walk on the roof. One wall of my room was lined with bookcases packed with books, all kinds of books, standing straight up and stuffed in sideways and piled in stacks on the floor. I ran my fingers over them. At least I would have time to read.

The room was stuffy, so I opened the window and the old-fashioned metal blinds, then curled up on the bed. A breeze moved into the room, carrying a faint perfume of roses. I closed my eyes, like Dorothy from
The Wizard of Oz
, and tried to wish myself home.

But I didn’t have any ruby slippers, and I couldn’t go to sleep, either. Instead, I lay there with my heart feeling like a boulder, wishing I could go back in time, back to last summer when my dad finally let me be a busgirl at the Erin Steakhouse, our main restaurant. It was so much fun. I loved wearing my uniform of black pants and white shirt and little emerald bow tie. It was an ugly uniform, not like the waitress dresses, which were classy but definitely low cut. Not as if I had anything much to put in a neckline like that—I hadn’t even had my period for very long, only since May, though it was regular right away.

Too bad.

The baby shoved my lungs up into my throat, and I had to turn over on my other side so I could breathe. Thinking about last summer, so different from this one, made me want to cry again. That was all I wanted, to go back to work at the steakhouse. Or maybe this summer I would have worked at the café out near the Pikes Peak highway, where they sold saltwater taffy
in rainbow colors and chicken-fried steaks and zillions of root beer floats to tourists who were going and coming from the top of America’s Mountain.

I liked the steakhouse better. One of my jobs was to get the dining room ready, shaking out fresh green table covers over the snowy-white base layer we left on all the time. There were single carnations with their ruffled edges and sharp peppermint scent in crystal vases, so I had to go around and check them, replacing the ones that were getting spotty or brown or droopy. I made sure the table settings were perfect, with pointy napkins sitting in the middle of each place, along with two forks, a steak knife and a butter knife, one spoon to the right of the place, one at the top. The last thing we would do was light all the candles and turn the lamps in the dining room down low.

It was luxe, as my dad always said. He was famous around town for his genius with his restaurant, for his big gestures, his elegant suits that my mom picked out when they went up to Denver twice a year, and his thick, wavy black hair. Everyone liked coming to the Erin Steakhouse, especially for celebrations. We got super-busy on prom nights, when the girls came in with long dresses and corsages, and when parents came in for the graduation at the Air Force Academy, but it was always bustling.

And I loved being in the middle of it. Pouring glasses of water, taking out the giant bowls of shrimp on ice that was the appetizer of choice that summer, making sure the tables were cleared, then reset perfectly. I made tips to supplement the low hourly pay, and together they were enough that I could start putting a little away in a savings account every week.

Now my sister Steph had my job, and I was stuck up in Sedalia with nothing to do but read and wait until I turned into a watermelon.

Curled into a comma on my aunt Poppy’s guest bed, I squeezed my eyes tight and put myself back there, last summer.

When I was happy.

Before.

Poppy woke me after dark. “C’mon, sweetie, it’s time to get up and have some supper. It’s past seven.”

Yanked from the faraway world of Nod, I blinked. “I’m not hungry.”

“You need to eat.” Poppy patted my thigh and stood. “The baby needs to eat.”

I closed my eyes, lured back into thick darkness. “Okay. In a minute.”

Sometime later she returned. “Ramona, you need to get up now.”

I waved her away, tucked myself deeper into the covers. In the depths of my brain, this time didn’t exist. My dreams were about school, about my friends, about learning the restaurant business.

After a minute Poppy went away.

In the middle of the night, I got up to pee for about seven years. My mouth was dry, and I bent over the sink to drink from the faucet; then, keeping my eyes half closed so I wouldn’t wake up too much, I went back to bed.

That time it was harder, but I got back to sleep.

Until Poppy came in again. I felt her sink down on the side of the bed. “It’s morning. You have to get up.”

“Leave me alone.” I pulled the pillow over my head. Deep in my belly, a gurgle sounded.

Poppy took the pillow from my face. “Now.”

I rolled over, belly mounding higher than my breasts, and stared at her. Her hair fell down her back untidily, and she wore an old sweatshirt and jeans. She still didn’t have a bra on, and everything about her seemed like a warning—her eccentricities, her husbandlessness, her offbeat everything.

I missed my mother, with her delicate jewelry and crisply ironed slacks. Acutely. “I want to go home.”

“I know. But you can’t.” She held out her hand. “Sit up.”

I flung my feet over the edge of the bed and creaked upright. Poppy put her hand on my shoulder. “Every now and then, life throws you something you’d never have chosen in a million years. I know that’s how you feel right now.”

Bowing my head, I dug my nails into my palms. I would not cry again. Not again.

“You don’t have to be happy, Ramona. You just have to live through it. I promise that you are not going to be pregnant and fifteen forever.”

“It seems like it.”

Her hand moved in that comforting circle around my upper back. “I know. One day at a time, all right?”

A breath moved against my heart at that. I raised my head. Nodded. “I guess I am hungry.”

“I imagine you are.” She pushed me upright. “Let’s go get you and that baby some food, then, shall we?”

The days fell into a pattern very quickly. Poppy had a business out of her home, part farm stand, part bakery. In the mornings she worked in the garden, and she insisted I help, pointing out that staying busy would make time go faster.

She awakened me at five every morning. We ate breakfast together—some herbal tea and toast, or fruit and cereal—while she made up her lists for the day. Then we headed outside in the still-cool air to weed the half-acre plot, accompanied by a couple of her menagerie of pets, all rescues of one sort or another. There was a three-legged German shepherd, a fat gray tabby with eyes like green marbles, an absolutely ancient weepy-eyed little mutt we speculated must be part poodle and maybe shih
tzu or Lhasa apso or something. An aloof husky sometimes graced us with her attention, and a handful of barn cats warily approached only if we had something particularly interesting, though they did like to leave dead rodents on the back porch.

“Knock wood, this is going to be a great year for corn,” Poppy said one morning not long after I arrived. The little plants were nearly a foot high, and Poppy carefully tugged bindweed from between them.

I knelt beside the squashes, pinching out a dark-leaved succulent that seemed to have roots all the way to the molten center of the earth. “How do you know?”

“Experience, I guess. Hot days, cool nights—that’s what corn likes. And peaches, too.” She pointed with a spade to a tree draped with netting. “I’ll make peach butter this year, and you can take some home to eat all winter.”

I grunted. Winter seemed like another world, a lifetime I’d never see. Finishing with the squash, I stood up. “Do you want me to weed between the tomatoes?”

“In a minute. First I want to show you how to tie them up.”

She came down the row to me. After the first day, she always wore a bra, though I’m not sure how she knew it bugged me when she didn’t. Right now her hair and clothes seemed to make sense—jeans and a sweatshirt, her hair pulled back in a braid to keep it out of her way. Over everything, she wore a colorful bibbed apron with a bunch of pockets, and out of one she took a bundle of long twist ties. She handed them to me and pulled off her gloves.

“Tomatoes like three things,” she said, picking up a branch covered with flowers that was trailing toward the earth. “Sunshine, plenty of water, and lots of support.” There was a metal-gridwork thing around each plant. Poppy used twist ties to attach the branches to the cage. “You try,” she said, pointing to the next one. Like it was some super-hard thing to do.

I followed her example, gently tugging a branch over the top of one square of the cage to let the bar support it, then loosely twisting a tie around it to hold it in place.

“Good.”

“It’s not rocket science.”

She grinned. “True. But it matters to do it right.” She took the new branch in her hand. “The next thing we do with tomatoes is pinch off some of the blossoms, to get better size on the tomatoes that do grow. Just let one on each cluster stay.”

Now, this appealed to me. I walked along the row, looking for flower clusters, and I thought of my grandmother Adelaide, Poppy’s mother. “Did Grandma teach you to garden?”

Poppy didn’t answer for a minute. “Grandma grows flowers,” she said, in a tone of voice that said it was something shameful. “I like to grow things that matter.”

“Flowers matter.” I thought of my grandmother’s irises, which had been blooming a couple of weeks before. Big ruffled flowers on tall stems in colors that reminded me of old-fashioned long dresses—salmon and purple and velvety brown and pale pink. “Her garden makes me think of a ball, with all the princesses dancing.”

Poppy stood and raised her eyebrows. “Great imagery, kid.”

“Thanks.” I moved to the next plant in the group. Two small green knobs of tomato were growing side by side. “What do you do when there are already tomatoes instead of flowers?”

“Pinch one off.”

I gave her an exaggerated frown. “But they’re so cute!”

“Neither will get enough of what it needs if you leave them both.”

With a pang, I chopped one away, let it fall on the ground. “Why don’t you talk to Grandma?”

The war had been going on as long as I could remember. Poppy came to our house, and we came here, but Adelaide never
showed up at Poppy’s, and Poppy never came to celebrations at my grandmother’s house. On Christmas Eve, she came to our house to exchange presents and eat fondue, but Christmas Day was always at my grandmother’s big Victorian on the Westside of Colorado Springs, and Poppy never came there. Not once in all my life could I remember them being in the same room.

Poppy brushed her palms together. “Sometimes even when someone is your family, you don’t get along.”

“I get along with everybody.”

“Yeah. I hope you always do.”

I realized my statement was a lie. “I guess I don’t get along with everyone right now, though, do I? My mom is mad at me.
Really
mad at me. She hardly talked to me at all for the last three weeks and didn’t say a single thing to me on the way here.”

“Oh, honey.” Poppy moved toward me as if she would hug me, and I stepped back, putting up a hand to keep her away. She stopped. “Your mom is just sad for you. Someday you’ll understand.”