How to Bake a Perfect Life (17 page)

It was like running into a wall of rain. Drops splattered all over me, on my nose and head, my arms and belly. Even running, I couldn’t avoid getting soaked or stung by the hail. By the
time I flung myself into the record store, my hair was dripping and my arms were dotted with red marks from the hail. The entryway bell rang and I slammed the door closed again. The hail roared out of the west with a sound like a thousand baseballs falling from the sky, slamming the roof and hitting the sidewalk so hard they bounced as high as my waist. “Wow.” I wiped water off my face and turned around.

Jonah was coming out of the back, a stack of records in his hands. He stopped dead still and looked at me with a little frown. I wanted to sink right through the floor.

“Hello there,” he said finally, and put the records down on the counter. “You look wet.”

I held out my dripping dress. “Kinda.”

“Let me find you a towel. Stay right there.” He disappeared into the back and returned with a big blue towel. “Might not be elegant, but it should do the trick.”

I was starting to shiver as I took the towel and rubbed my face, then dried my neck and arms. Jonah only stood there. “Are you okay?”

My teeth chattered. “Just cold.”

He gestured for me to follow him. Overhead, the hail pounded as if there was a war, and I sloshed forward, my feet squishing in my sandals. The books in my bag were heavy, and I suddenly worried that they might be damaged. “Yikes, these are library books!” I peered in to see if they were okay, holding the towel around my shoulders. Jonah disappeared again and came back with a heavy sweater in browns and blues. “Slip this on.”

“I don’t want to mess it up.”

“Don’t be silly.” He held it patiently. “It’s warm.”

Taking the towel off my shoulders, I pulled the sweater over my head. I had to tug it down over my belly, but that didn’t stretch it out. A heady scent came out of the wool—cloves and oranges and something that made those prickles along my back
stand up again. I got goose bumps all over, and without thinking I lifted it to my nose to sniff it more deeply. It was then that I realized it was his smell, and he was watching me with a funny expression.

He balled the towel up in his hands, tossed it back and forth like a basketball. Looked over his shoulder. “Quite a storm.”

“Yeah, it is.” I felt weirdly dizzy. We were kind of close. A lock of his hair had fallen out of the ponytail, and I suddenly wondered what it would look like if it was loose, falling over his shoulders. I wondered how it would feel, that shiny thick brown hair. Even though a rubber band held it back, I could tell it was slightly wavy.

I couldn’t think of anything to say, and I sat down on the stool by the counter, pulling the sleeves down over my hands a little bit. After a minute, he put the towel down. “Want a cup of tea?”

“Yeah! Can you make it here?”

“Sure can. Be back in a sec. I’ll just start the kettle boiling.”

When he was gone, I lifted my sweater-covered hands to my nose and inhaled deeply again, filling my lungs, my body, with his smell. It gave me the oddest feeling—swaying, unsteady, like being in a boat when a water-skier went by.

The music had been rock and roll–ish and now it changed to classical. “Do you know what this is?” he asked when he returned, carrying two mugs of tea. It smelled of oranges and spice, and my stomach growled slightly.

“Guitar?” I guessed.

“Right. Very good. It is a man named Andrés Segovia. He’s a Spanish guitarist. It’s very rich music. I think you might like it.” He picked up a small suitcase from the counter behind him, which was scattered with papers and an adding machine and pens and rubber bands and notes. “Do you play backgammon?”

I had never heard of it. Anxiously, I shook my head.

“It’s easy. I’ll teach you.” He glanced toward the weather. “These storms never last that long, but while it’s going, we’re stuck.”

“Okay.” It made me feel grown up, a taste of what adults did to pass the time. He opened the suitcase to show a dark felt board with alternating white and brown leather arrows sewn onto it. The pieces were white and brown, too, smooth cold disks he showed me how to lay out around the board. The guitar music danced around us, lilting and then solid, quiet and lacy, thoughtful then passionate. I cocked my head, listening, and suddenly the baby started to move. “I think she’s dancing!” I said with a laugh.

“She?”

I shrugged. “It sounds better than ‘it.’ ” She was swirling, doing somersaults. It made me feel slightly off-kilter, and I began to hum with the music, rubbing the elbows and knees and body parts inside my belly. For a minute I was lost in it, thinking of the elbow, her hands, the swirl and sway, as if she really could hear the music.

“That must be pretty amazing,” Jonah said. “To have a person inside you.”

“It’s kind of weird.” I looked up. “And interesting. I think she does like the music.”

“How about you? Do you like it?”

“Yeah. It’s not what I usually listen to, but it’s nice.”

He nodded and began to tell me how to play the game. I didn’t get it at first, mainly because my brain was roaring with a thousand things—like the way he kept his bad hand tucked in his lap and played with his left, and the look of his long throat in the quiet light, and how close our knees were.

Finally, though, because I didn’t want to look like an airhead—which I wasn’t at all—I concentrated and played for real. Although I didn’t win the first round, I got close.

We played again. And as we played, our eyes on the pieces, we
talked. About when my baby was due and how long he’d been living back in Castle Rock. I told him I liked watching MTV, and he said he did, too—but only sometimes. Sometimes, he said, the values were too materialistic.

“That’s what Poppy says.” And a sudden wrenching sense of guilt twisted my tummy. I looked outside and the sun was beginning to peek through. “I guess I need to go find her pretty soon. She’ll be worried.”

“She’ll understand about the rain.”

I nodded, not at all sure that was true.

“Sorry you got in trouble last time,” he said, and his voice seemed deeper, richer.

“My mom was being weird,” I said, unable to look at him.

“Parents only want to take care of their kids, Ramona.”

To my horror, a welter of tears built in my throat. “I don’t know how long she’s going to stay mad at me about this. It’s terrible how she looks at me now.”

“She loves you. I could see that.”

I pressed the tops of my fists together. Nodded.

Poppy came in then, the bell over the door banging loudly. “I thought I might find you here.”

She didn’t sound mad, but I stood up anyway. “It was raining really hard. I didn’t know what to do.”

Hiking her bag over her shoulder, she came up to the counter and leaned her elbows on it. “Backgammon! I haven’t played that in a long time.”

“It’s fun. Do you have a board at home?”

“I could probably get one next time we go to Denver.” She inclined her head. “You like board games, don’t you?”

“My family plays them a lot.”

Jonah collected the disks and settled them a few at a time into their places. He did it without much thought, but I saw the moment when he made to use his missing finger and three of them fell out of the space where the finger should have been. They
clattered onto the counter, and one rolled away and fell on the floor, and I leapt up to grab it, chasing it under the lip of the counter before capturing it. “Got it!”

His cheekbones were red when he held out his hand, palm up. “Thanks.”

“We’d better get our errands done, Ramona,” Poppy said. “Will we see you tonight at the fireworks, Jonah?”

“I’m not sure. Some family friends are coming in today, and I’ve been summoned to my mother’s house for dinner.” He gave her a wry smile. “You know my mother.”

“I do, son, I do. Enjoy.”

I started to take off the sweater, but Jonah stilled my hand. “It’s chilly out there. You can bring it to me when you go to the farmers’ market next week.”

“Okay, thanks.” I didn’t look back as we headed out, but I felt twenty feet tall, cloaked in Jonah’s sweater, and I kept wondering as we walked through town if anyone would realize it was his, that he’d loaned it to me.

Poppy had to run a million errands before the fireworks. When she stopped at a friend’s house to take her some bread, I was too tired to go inside with her, and I begged off and curled up in the backseat for a nap. Jonah’s sweater was almost too warm, but I kept it on, letting the scent of it fill my head as I drifted off. Beneath my hands on my belly, the baby was quiet, as if she was sleeping, too.

Suddenly I thought of her as whole. A person who was going to grow up and have favorite foods and hate to wear certain things and love to dance. I thought of her at three, with chubby feet and hands, and a pain like twelve knives went through my heart. I would never see her at three, or twelve—or at sixteen, like me. Opening my hands, I pressed palms and fingers in a net over my belly, feeling her. As if in response, a knob moved
against my palm. From the corners of my eyes, tears leaked in a slow river into my hair.

What if I didn’t want to give her away?

The thought stayed with me, beating like a heart, through our picnic in the park, where we ate cheese sandwiches and sliced tomatoes from our garden. Little kids spun around in circles and screeched for the fireworks to start and held sparklers far away from their bodies.

Poppy asked, “Are you all right, sweetie? You’re awfully quiet.”

“I’m just thinking,” I said.

She looked at me for a long moment. “If you ever want to talk, let me know. I’ll listen, I promise.”

“Thanks.”

It wasn’t until dusk started filling the air that I saw Jonah, loping toward us across the grass. He was as graceful as an antelope, with that same long-legged thinness, and his hair was loose for the first time. It made my stomach hurt the way it caught the last bits of sunlight, going golden and soft. He looked exactly like the prince in a fairy tale to me, even dressed in jeans and a button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up on his forearms. He carried something. It seemed as if he was looking right at me, and I pulled the sweater sleeves down over my hands, wishing I didn’t have to give it back.

“Hi, Poppy,” he said. “Ramona.”

“Hey,” I said, and stood up to pull the sweater over my head.

“No, no. Don’t worry.” He smiled. “You can wear it awhile longer. Looks better on you than on me, anyway.”

I hugged my arms around my body. “I like it. It’s warm.”

He held out a cassette tape. “I made you a tape of the classical guitarist you were listening to this afternoon.”

“Oh!” I felt dizzy, taking it. Like maybe he really did like me or something. “Thank you.”

He glanced at Poppy, gave her a wink. “Rare that a teenager likes classical music, right?”

She nodded. “Thanks, Jonah. That was thoughtful. Give your mother my regards.”

“Will do.” He saluted us both and sauntered off.

Poppy put her hand on my upper back and rubbed a warm little circle. “Too bad he’s way too old for you. He’s a good man, I think.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Too bad.”

  O
ne afternoon at the end of July, I walked down the road in Sedalia with a pink umbrella over my head in case it rained. Which it seemed like it would, any second. Dark purple clouds covered the sky about twelve feet over my head.

Back in Poppy’s kitchen was a war party made up of my mother, my grandmother, Poppy, and Nancy. A war party determined to convince me how stupid I was for wanting to keep my baby. I’d asked them to come so we could talk about the whole thing, hoping they would listen to me, but all they had done was bring lists of all the reasons I should give the baby up.

As if I didn’t know all those reasons. As if I didn’t get it.

From the day in the record store when the baby started dancing to classical guitar, I knew I didn’t want to give her up. We went to Denver that week to meet with the adoption people, and on the way there I told Poppy and Nancy the truth about the baby’s heritage. They said they didn’t think it would matter, that I should keep the information to myself.

So I did, but it made me feel icky.

Then I had a nightmare that I was walking around a park with a baby in my arms—my baby—and she was laughing. A woman came up to me and yanked her out of my arms and walked away really fast. Somebody said, “You will never see her again.”

When I told Poppy about it while we were weeding the garden the next morning, she said, “It’s normal that you should have conflicting emotions, sweetie. It’s a big thing.”

I said, “But what if I don’t want to give her up?”

She looked at me. Pinched off a handful of squash blossoms, and inclined her head. “Is that what you’re thinking?”

I took a breath and nodded. “My mom is going to be so mad at me.”

“She won’t be happy, that’s for sure, but this is not her decision to make. We can help guide you, but ultimately you have to make the choice yourself.”

“Will you help me talk to my mom and my grandma?”

“Can we think about it for another week or so? Let’s me and you and Nancy talk about it before we bring the others into it.”