How to Bake a Perfect Life (12 page)

“If she’s so sad, don’t you think she could be nicer? That she would understand that I’m really sorry? That it isn’t helping to send me away from everybody for the whole summer?”

“She’s doing what she thinks is best for you and the family, sweetheart.”

I bowed my head, kicked at a clump of dirt. “Well, I hate it.” Some heated thing blistered through my chest. “Did something like this happen with you and Grandma? Is that why you never talk?”

“No,” she said with emphasis. “It was nothing like this.” She took a breath, looked over the garden. “Let’s just say that your grandma is a different person now than she was when my father was alive. Your grandma is not the same person who was my mother.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t want to get into details, Ramona. You have a good relationship with Adelaide, and she’s good for you. She wasn’t always good for your mom and me.”

“So, what, you never forgave her? My mom gets along with her.”

“Does she?”

At first I thought it was a real question, then I realized the tone of voice said something completely different. I met her eyes, thinking of my mother and her mother in a room together, a wall of icy politeness between them at all times. “Oh.”

“Let’s drop this, Ramona. Let it go.” She waved me out of the garden behind her. “I need to go to town this morning. Let’s have lunch at the B&B Café, shall we?”

“Yes! Can we go to the record store?”

“You can. I’ve got some errands to run.”

I’d been to the B&B with Poppy ten million times. Old men sat at the counter with knobby hands curled around heavy white coffee cups, their cowboy hats and baseball caps and coats still firmly in place. At the tables sat the other customers—church sisters having a sweet roll and a cup of coffee, couples who’d come in to town to go to the grocery store, a sprinkling of men in suits who were the accountants and bankers and lawyers in town. Everybody was always nice. They all gave a nod, and a lot of them recognized me even though I didn’t live there but only came in with Poppy.

What I had never done was go in anywhere pregnant. Until my mom found out, I’d been hiding it pretty well, so nobody suspected. After my mom put her hand on my belly that day, it was like the baby grew triple-time, stretching and unfolding like one of my grandmother’s irises. Almost overnight, I was huge. Truly, honestly, obviously pregnant.

And this was the first time I was in public. This was the first
time I realized that everybody was staring at me, and not in a good way. They looked at my belly, up to my face, and then looked at one another with tight mouths or rolled eyes. I felt as if somebody had written
SLUT SLUT SLUT
right over the middle of my body in Day-Glo orange letters.

“I can’t do this,” I said to Poppy, and turned around to leave. Her hand on my waist pushed me back into the room.

“Yes, you can. Hold your head up,” she said in my ear. “Look right through them and take that seat there.”

Ears and face burning, I plopped down, hearing the hiss of whispers start up around us. My hands fell in my lap, below my big belly, and I jerked them up and put them on the table, scooting as close as I could. I didn’t look at anybody.

“How are you, Poppy?” the waitress said, putting menus down in front of us.

“I’m well, Marie. You remember my niece Ramona, don’t you?”

“I do. How are you, sweetie?”

I kept my head down. “Fine.”

“Bring me some coffee, Marie, and an orange juice for my niece.”

My ears were buzzing. My throat felt like it would close completely, and when I glanced out of the corner of my eye, one of the old men at the counter gave me a sour look. “Aunt Poppy, can we please just go?”

“Absolutely not,” she said in a calm voice. “And after this, we’re going shopping.”

“Please—”

“Look at me, Ramona.”

I raised miserable eyes, hoping she would see that I would die—die—if I didn’t get out of here.

“Where do you think the father of that baby is now?” she asked so quietly no one else could hear.

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe at work, maybe at school? Maybe hanging out with his friends?”

“I guess.”

“Probably nobody is making him feel like you do, even though he did exactly the same thing you did. Right?”

I shrugged. “Right.”

“You are not a bad person. You’re just pregnant. It’s natural. It happens all the time, and you are not going to hang your head, got it?”

A little of the heat drained out of my cheeks. I nodded.

“Sit up straight,” she said. “Head up. Stare back if anybody stares at you. Got it?”

“I’ll try.”

She winked. “Good girl.” She picked up her menu, then peeked around it. “Have I mentioned today that I’m so glad to have you spending the summer with me? I love you.”

I picked up my spine and my chin and my menu. “I love you, too, Aunt Poppy. Really a lot.”

  A
fter lunch, Aunt Poppy had to go to the bank and to see a shut-in. She gave me a twenty-dollar bill from the stash my mother left for me and said, “Walk all over downtown like it belongs to you, and I want you to spend every penny of that money, in three different stores. Got it?”

It made me feel sick to my stomach, but I said, “Okay.”

The café was across the street from the courthouse, which had a domed roof. Some people sat on the benches under big trees, and others hurried as if they had some important reason to go inside, maybe to get somebody out of jail or maybe only to get some new license plates. I liked a drugstore around the corner from the courthouse, because it had a bunch of art supplies and notebooks and lip glosses. That would mean crossing the street in full view of all those people and parading right down the whole block.

Hold your head up
.

I stood on the sidewalk in the shade, eyeing the bright sunshine across the street. Pickup trucks passed by. A young guy leaned out the passenger window of one of them. “Hey, mama!”

I blushed and marched like a nutcracker, all stiff and sober, down the street in the other direction. I didn’t know where I was
going. Off the street, out of sight, at least until I could get my courage up again.

Then I heard Aunt Poppy’s voice in my head.
Walk all over downtown like it belongs to you
. I straightened up and tried to walk naturally—as naturally as a person could, anyway, with that weight right there in the middle of me. I passed by the dry cleaner’s and smelled the starch and scorch of the irons and by the narrow drugstore that always seemed to only stock things for old people—denture creams and elastic bandages and canes. An old man came out of the door as I was going by; he glanced at me but didn’t seem to notice or care about my belly, so I kept walking. At the end of the block, I’d cross the street and go around the courthouse on this side, which wasn’t as busy, then go to Russ’ Drug.

I couldn’t really think of anywhere else to stop before that. I wanted to save something for the record store. So I walked down the sidewalk like I belonged there and then turned to cross the street. Traffic was steady enough that I couldn’t just dash across—you might not think a little town like that could have so many vehicles, but everybody has to drive on the same street—and I was standing in the sun. A trickle of sweat came out from under my hair and ran down the back of my neck. The baby kicked me, as if he was getting cranky in the heat.

A truck slowed down in front of me and stopped right there, in the middle of the street. It was the same guy who’d yelled at me a few minutes ago. He was way older. The truck bed had a lot of construction tools in it, wheelbarrows and shovels and dusty tarps, and the guy looked as if he’d been working hard. He had light-blue eyes and long hair, and I took one step back.

“What’s your name, honey?”

I shook my head, checked to my left as if I was getting ready to cross the street.

“You’re not from around here,” he said. “I’d remember that hair. You’re as pretty as a little angel.”

I turned away, ignoring him, hoping for some help from an adult who would tell him to move along. Nobody was around.

“C’mon, sweetie, I won’t bite,” he said. “My name is Jason. What’s yours?”

Finally somebody behind the truck honked. “See you around,” the guy said, and pulled away. He hung his head out the window like a dog pretending he couldn’t stop staring at me.

The person who’d honked was a woman in a nurse’s uniform. She waved for me to cross the street, and I waved back, thanking her, then hurried across.

I made it to Russ’ Drug without any more trouble. The air-conditioning felt good after the hot sun outside, and I had twenty whole dollars to spend. There were some people in the store, but I pretended I didn’t see any of them, that I was completely invisible, and headed for the stationery aisle.

There were all kinds of things I liked here. Mechanical pencils with their fine, perfect line; labels for jars and file folders; paper for every use—onionskin for typing, Big Chief tablets, spiral notebooks, and, my favorite, sketch pads, which I somehow used only when I was at Aunt Poppy’s house. There was something about the place that made me want to draw. Even now I was thinking about the blue bottles and plants on her kitchen window. It seemed like something that would make me feel better, drawing or maybe painting that. I gathered a sketchbook and mechanical pencil and was dithering between the watercolors or pastel crayons when the pharmacist in his white coat came down the aisle. “Can I help you with something?” he said.

“No, thank you,” I said politely. “I’m just thinking.”

He didn’t go away.

“Is there something wrong?”

“Somebody thought you might be shoplifting.”

My face burned bright red, all the way up past my eyebrows and around the edges of my ears. “Why? Because I’m pregnant and that makes me a criminal?”

“Now, now, there’s no reason to get all excited. Why don’t you show me what’s in your pockets and we’ll be fine.”

For a long, hot second, I stared at him, sure it was a mistake. “I come in here all the time with my aunt Poppy. Don’t you remember me?”

“ ’Fraid not.” He shifted, folded his hands one atop the other like a deacon. Waiting.

Fighting very hard not to cry, I put back the sketch pad and the pencils. Deliberately, I pulled my pockets inside out, displaying the twenty dollars and a tube of Chapstick. Before he could ask, I pulled the lid off to show it was used. “I’ve had this.”

“Okay, then, we’re square. You want to come up to the front, I’ll ring those up for you when you’re ready.”

He walked off calmly. The devil girl inside me shoved everything off the shelf and left it on the floor for him to pick up. I saw it in my mind’s eye over and over, twenty times while I stood there, smarting and stinging, with my pockets hanging out beneath my belly and a twenty-dollar bill in my right hand.

The real me tucked my pockets back in, put away my money, and left the store.
I hate you, I hate you, I hate you
, I chanted in my mind. And I didn’t mean the pharmacist.

I meant Armando, who didn’t even know he’d done this to me. And probably wouldn’t care if he did.

Out on the street, I considered trying to find Poppy and clinging to her until it was time to go home. If I told her what had happened, she would be sympathetic.

But the record store was only two doors down, and I had the whole twenty to spend now that I wouldn’t buy anything from that guy, not even a fire extinguisher to put myself out if I was on fire. I wanted the art supplies, but maybe we could get them somewhere else, or we might go to Cinderella City one of these days. They at least had a Walgreens there.

I walked to Blue Fish Record Store. It had been there since the
hippie days, and looked it, with dusty paisley curtains and a giant jade plant in the window. A yellow cat sunned himself on the windowsill, and I stopped to pet him. He blinked and started purring. “Aren’t you hot, cat?” I asked.

“Cats never get too hot,” a voice said behind me.

Warily, I turned around. The guy behind the counter was maybe college age, with hair that was long and dark brown, pulled back from his face into a ponytail, like an artist or something. He said, “They’re desert animals.”

He had a very calming voice. Or maybe it was the music, which was some kind of flutes and drums or something. The air smelled like cinnamon and coffee. “I didn’t know that,” I said, and then I remembered. “Oh, yeah, like Egypt. They were really a big deal in Egypt.”

His smile was kind. “Right.” He was writing on file cards, drinking out of a big ruby-colored cup. “You looking for something in particular this afternoon or just in to browse?”

I shrugged. “Browse, I guess.”

“I’ll leave you alone, then. If you want some help, I’m here, okay?” His eyes were direct, and for the first time all day, I felt as if somebody saw
me
instead of my belly.

“Thanks.” I wandered around the bins, flipping through the albums for something I recognized. My dad was a big music fan. He collected records from the fifties and sixties, all kinds of rhythm and blues and rock. I saw covers I recognized—Cream and the Rolling Stones and Albert King.