How to Bake a Perfect Life (19 page)

For a long minute we were facing each other, hidden from view by the rain, and I looked up at him, seeing his mouth, wishing with all my heart that we were not separated by so many years so that I could kiss him. I took a breath, swept by a vision of what that would be like.

“You’re not going to have any trouble finding boyfriends, Ramona. You’re a very pretty girl.”

I almost stopped breathing. “I am?”

“Yes,” he said, and leaned away from me. “Better get inside before they come after you.”

My mother was sitting on the back porch, smoking, sheltered from the rain by the roof. One of Poppy’s big multicolored
sweaters was wrapped around her shoulders, and she looked small inside it. Her makeup was worn off, even her lipstick. She blew a lungful of smoke into the air. “Come sit down with me, Ramona.”

I paused at the top of the step. “Please don’t yell at me anymore.”

“No,” she said. “I just want to say a few things. I need you to listen to me.”

With a sigh, I sank onto the chair next to her, my hands going around my tummy like a circle of protection. “What?”

“I’m sorry I got so upset, Ramona. I think what’s getting lost in all of this is the fact that I love you. And whatever anger I’m feeling, it’s not directed at you but at the circumstances. Does that make sense?”

“It feels like you’re mad at me.”

She smoked, stroked my hair. “I know. But what I’m really upset about is the way your life has been turned upside down, in ways you can’t even imagine yet. Whatever you do with the baby, this has ended your childhood.”

“It is changing me.”

“Yes. You’re growing up very fast. I didn’t want that for you—I wanted to give you things I didn’t get to have. Going away to college and maybe traveling and finding work you love.”

“You wanted to go to college?”

“Good God, yes. I was the smartest girl in my school. I wanted to study architecture and become the best designer since Frank Lloyd Wright.” She shrugged. “Honestly, I didn’t know how to make that happen—it wasn’t like people in my family went to college, you know—but if I’d kept working rather than getting married, I might have figured it out.”

Instead, she met my father the summer she was nineteen and they were married the following year, with a baby—me—ripening in her belly. “You could go to school now. I know lots of moms who do that.”

She put her cigarette out in a flowerpot. “Maybe,” she said, but I could tell she didn’t mean it. “I have a lot to do with you children and the business.”

“That’s Dad’s business, though, right?”

“No,” she said, and met my gaze. “It’s ours. We’re a good team and I love him and I’m not sorry I started a family. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have higher aspirations for you. Will you think about that, Ramona? You will be so much freer to make your own choices if you let this baby go to a family that is aching to have it.”

“I’ll think about it,” I said. “But I want you to think about how you would have felt giving me up for adoption. Never seeing me ever again. Not looking at me now, never knowing how things are with me.”

Her eyes grew bright blue with tears, and she squeezed my hand with her own. With a little shake of her head, she pressed the fingers of her free hand to her lips.

“I’m going to keep her, Mom,” I said. “Will you help me?”

She gave the saddest sigh in the world.

And then she nodded.

  O
ne mid-August afternoon, I was as restless as a cat, unable to sit down for more than six seconds anywhere at all. Poppy watched me carefully and asked if I felt anything that might be labor or if I had a backache.

I snapped that I did not, and she put me to work in the kitchen, baking a loaf of straightforward sourdough from my grandmother’s starter. The smell of it eased me, and as I was kneading the dough, I did start to feel the oddest sensation, like a ripple moving from the outside of my belly inward. It didn’t hurt, but when I put a floury hand against my apron, my stomach was as hard as a boulder. The sensation went away after a minute, and I finished the kneading. Just as I put the loaves on the rimless baking sheet we used for baguettes, I felt it again—a long, slow ripple, like a gathering. I said, “Poppy?”

She came into the kitchen. “Feeling something now?”

“Maybe. But I don’t want to leave the bread.”

“Babies don’t care about bread. We’ll put it in the fridge to proof and bake it tomorrow.” She laughed and hugged me close. “I’m so proud of all the things you’ve learned this summer, sweetheart. Do you have any idea how much I love you?”

A big tight fist grabbed my belly and squeezed hard. “Ow! I think this might be the real thing. Feel it.”

She put her palm on the rigid rise. “Yep. We’d better get moving.”

“This is too early, though! Will the baby be okay?”

“Honey, she’s due in eleven days. This is not all that early for a first-time mother.”

Sofia Adelaide Gallagher was born in the hospital birthing room at six minutes before midnight. My labor was as ordinary as they come—progressing through each step as if to illustrate a textbook. Because Nancy was such an experienced midwife, I didn’t have any stitches or tearing, and I had not wanted any drugs, so I was exhausted but clearheaded when Nancy put Sofia’s slick body on my belly while she cut the cord. I put my hands on her back and said, “Welcome.” Maybe it was just the angle in which she was lying, but I swear she smiled up into my eyes and made a soft noise of happiness.

Later, when both of us were cleaned up, I was finally alone with my daughter. She was a solid seven pounds, with little folds of skin on her arms and feet, and plenty of meat on her calves and tummy. I touched her tiny shoulders and toes and nose and ears. She had a lot of dark hair, which was all soft and crazy, but it made her seem much bigger than a newborn. Her eyes were enormous and blue, and as she nursed—taking to it like an old hand, Nancy said—she gazed up at me with curiosity.

“I know,” I said. “I’m amazed, too. It’s kind of crazy that we haven’t seen each other ’til now, isn’t it?”

She paused in her gulping, and we locked eyes, and I felt everything in me shift, turn upside down.

Forever.

I stayed with Poppy for two weeks, learning all the stuff a mother has to do, while my parents got things ready for my return home. Until they saw her, two days after she was born,
everybody was still disappointed that I’d kept her, but now they were all as much in love with her as I was.

Not that she was a good baby, necessarily. She fussed when her clothes irritated her, and she didn’t like the heat, so she preferred to be carried outside at night. She nursed so much that I thought I was doing something wrong, but Nancy said that was just how babies ate.

One early evening, Sofia had fallen asleep and I was out in the garden collecting squashes and tomatoes and corn into a basket. My breasts were so big they were in the way, but I secretly liked the full milky enormity of them. My stomach was still a little poochy, but I could get into my old clothes, and the happy thing was, by nursing I could eat a lot and all the pregnancy pounds melted off right before my eyes.

I hadn’t been alone much since Sofia arrived, and it felt great to just be in my own head for a little while. The garden smelled of damp earth and tomato leaves; overhead, the sky grew streaky red and pale gold as the sun headed toward the mountains. Crickets whistled, and somewhere in the corn was a cat rustling through the stalks. I plucked a big red tomato and admired it. In that moment, thinking of my daughter and all that had happened this summer, I was happy.

Car tires crunched on the gravel drive. I walked to the edge of the corn rows to see who it was, expecting Nancy, who had become one of Poppy’s best friends.

It wasn’t Nancy. It was Jonah, in his old Mercedes. He got out, his hair falling free over his shoulders. Everything in me went still, as if every cell was holding its breath. I hadn’t seen him at all since the day we ate pie together, and I knew that was by design.

“Hello,” he said, tucking his shirt into the back of his jeans as he came toward me.

“Hi.”

“I hear you had a baby girl.”

“She’s so beautiful. You should come in and see her.”

“I came to see you,” he said, and gestured toward the path between the corn and tomatoes. “Can we walk a little?”

“Yeah. Yes.” I felt dizzy with the smell of him, the nearness. We had not walked side by side like this before, and I was aware of his legs, and the swing of his arm so close to mine, and the sound of his low whistle.

Midway into the garden, he stopped and turned to look at me. “I came to tell you that I’m going back east. It’s time to stop wallowing and get on with things; I found a teacher I think can help me.”

A sharpness of tears pricked my eyelids and I forced myself to say, “Oh! Um, when do you leave?”

“Now,” he said, and smiled down at me kindly. “I’m on my way out of town, and I couldn’t leave without telling you how much—” He stopped and looked off into the sunset-mottled sky. His hair caught that red light, and I ached to touch it. He put his hands on his waist, looked back to me. “How much you helped me.”

“I did?” On one hip I held the basket of vegetables, and the free hand fluttered up to my throat. “Me?”

He glanced over his shoulder toward the house, which was hidden from me by the corn, and took a step closer. “You.” He took my hand and lifted it to his chest, pressing my palm into his breast. “Meeting you changed my life, Ramona. I thought you should know that.”

“How?” I whispered, but I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to hear him, my heart was pounding so loud.

“A hundred ways,” he said, “but mainly by showing up.”

“You helped me,” I said. “I think you are—”

He shook his head and lifted his other hand to my face. “I’m too old for you.”

His palm was warm, and I could smell his skin, which made
all the words fly out of my head. I could only stand there, looking up at him. Waiting.

“I wish I wasn’t,” he said, then he put a thumb under my chin, lifted my face, bent down. His full lips touched mine, just lightly. It was almost reverent, the way he kissed me, and I felt it right in my heart. My eyes filled with tears as I kissed him back.

After a moment, he turned his head a little and kissed me more deeply. I could feel his fingers against the lobe of my left ear, and his lips were full and soft, and his tongue was hot and close. Beneath my hand, his heart was pounding as hard as mine was. It went on and on in the sunset-washed light, in that time between day and evening.

At last he raised his head. His hand stayed where it was, and he looked right into my deepest soul with those gold eyes. “Take care, Ramona.”

“Can’t you write to me or something?” I said, my heart suddenly torn in two pieces. “I’ll miss you!”

“It wouldn’t be a good idea,” he said, and I could feel his genuine regret.

His hand slipped from my face, and he lifted my hand from his chest, putting it on my own chest. “So long, Ramona.”

“So long,” I said, dizzy with all of it. I stood there until he climbed into the car, until I could no longer see the taillights in the dusk.

STEP THREE

“Breadmaking is one of those almost hypnotic businesses, like a dance from some ancient ceremony. It leaves you filled with one of the world’s sweetest smells … there is no chiropractic treatment … no hour of meditation in a music-throbbing chapel that will leave you emptier of bad thoughts than this homely ceremony of making bread.”

—M. F. K. F
ISHER
,
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ATING