How to Bake a Perfect Life (41 page)

Merlin follows her up the stairs and then back down, and she has to scatter a bunch of treats all over the floor to get out of the kitchen without him. She slips down the front stairs and out the side door—and then she’s on the sidewalk. Free!

When the bus comes right on time, she’s exhilarated, paying her fare and getting a transfer. “I can get to the Broadmoor on
the southbound bus, right?” she asks the driver, who is an older black woman. She just nods.

There are not many people on the bus, and whatever city Katie goes to, it always seems to be the same ones: poor people who don’t have cars, and teenagers, and disabled people who probably can’t drive. Katie sits in the middle, by the window, and thinks of herself as a brave and interesting girl, off to an adventure. In her backpack is a newspaper with the address and information on the flower show in case she gets lost, and it shows photos of a zillion kinds of flowers. She can’t wait.

At the downtown bus station, there are a lot of homeless men shuffling along, but Katie finds an older woman and sticks close by her, as if the woman is her mother or aunt, a trick her dad taught her. She has also learned that grandma women are the ones to ask for directions, and if a bus is crowded, she can sit beside them. Race doesn’t matter—a white old woman or a black old woman or a Navajo old woman each offers the same protection.

Now she climbs onto the second bus and thinks about Lily, far away in Texas with her dad. It makes her feel a ripple of sadness. Why does everybody get to be with her father except her? She brushes the feeling away and shows the bus driver the ad for the flower show. “Where do I get off for this?”

He’s a middle-aged man with a crew cut, and he’s chewing gum, like a cop. “Sit right behind me and I’ll tell you.”

She rides to a ritzy part of town and admires the mansions on big plots of grass, and then they drive around a big hotel with the mountains very close behind it. The driver says, “This is it, kid. Go right—”

But Katie has spied the signs. “I see it!” She leaps up. “Thank you!”

Adjusting her backpack, she hurries toward the door, and even from twenty feet away she can see flowers through the
door. Her heart begins to sing, and she can’t stop smiling. The woman at the door sells her a ticket and says, “That is one happy face. We don’t usually get a lot of young people on their own.”

Katie can’t stop looking into the room. “I’ve been looking forward to this for weeks,” she says, and takes her ticket, putting it carefully into a pocket of the backpack.

And then it’s as if her heart is filled with helium, because she practically floats around the show. There are little tickets and giant ribbons on the award winners. Typed cards tell the genus and species and—thank heavens—common names. She writes the names of the most beautiful ones in her notebook, which Lily said would help her remember things about gardens from year to year. She falls in love with a rose that looks like a fairy collapsed in a pile of silky red and yellow and silvery skirts, and with a spray of tiny green chrysanthemums, and she loves the orchids, which look like butterflies about to take off and fly around the room.

But it is the dahlias she has come to see, and when she finds the award winner—a pale peach-and-pink beauty that is bigger than her head, she starts to cry. A white-haired lady next to her says, “It’s really something, isn’t it?”

Katie can only nod, riveted. And in that instant she doesn’t care if she gets in gigantic trouble. It’s worth it.

For the rest of the afternoon, she takes notes and makes drawings. She asks questions and discovers that everyone wants to tell her their theories of growing. It’s like a tribe with a special language, and she feels a creeping sense of excitement. Maybe this is where she belongs. Can people have jobs growing flowers?

All the money Ramona paid her for cleaning the bakery—which is sixty dollars, because they were at it for most of the day Friday and Saturday—isn’t a ton of money in a place like this, where she can buy tiny potted plants and special bulbs and even some books. She’s very hungry and has to buy a hot dog and a
Coke, which uses up five dollars. The rest she spends all on dahlias.

And then, because there is no way to get the box of potted plants home on the bus without hurting them, she asks a middle-aged woman close by if she has a cell phone and could dial a number for her.

“You go ahead, sweetie.”

Katie takes a breath and dials the phone. When Ramona picks up, she can tell she’s been hurrying. “Hello?” she says in an anxious voice.

“Hi, Ramona. This is Katie. I came to the flower show and I know you’re really going to be mad at me, but I need a ride home. Can you come get me?”

“You are in so much trouble.”

“I know.”

“I’ll be there in about a half hour. Are you okay? Is everything all right?”

Katie feels like she might cry over that. “Yes.” Then, “Ramona?”

“Yes?”

“I’m really sorry. It was just something I had to do.”

“We’ll talk.”

Ramona

  A
fter the long, sick worry of the day—over Sofia and Oscar, over the whereabouts of Katie, over my chilling calculations of how much cash flow has been lost through this debacle—I find myself in the bakery kitchen at midnight. The hot-water heater was installed but, much to my vexation, the inspector did not make it here, no matter how I begged, meaning yet one more day of lost revenues.

But I have the mother doughs, all breathing and alive, waiting for me. One by one, I take the mothers from the fridge, stir the hooch vigorously back into the sponge, throw away half, and refresh it with whatever materials it demands. The cornerstone, Adelaide’s mix, likes white flour. The one I’ve been experimenting with, a dark rye I want to mix with malt sugar and molasses, likes half white, half rye. The
levains
, those old-world sourdoughs, like a hint of whole wheat mixed with white, to give them some solid food.

In the still kitchen, with darkness lying over the world outside, I stir and smell and taste the mothers, tending to their good health so their offspring will be healthy and strong, so that the sponges can grow vigorously to leaven the breads they season. Adelaide’s sponge is a stringy, powerful girl, and her acidity leaves giant holes in the bread, for that traditional sourdough
look. Meditatively, I pull the elastic strings upward, watching the texture as the bands spring back down, almost like a thick rubber band. The smell is sharp.

I cannot sell bread, but that doesn’t mean I am forbidden from making it. Choosing the Adelaide daughter, I quickly put together a sponge with salt water and white flour and put it in the mixer, with the dough hook turning.

I am not exactly thinking as I work, though I am aware of images skittering by, like goldfish in the depths of a pond—a flash of Sofia, of Oscar, of my mother, who called to let me know she was there and had everything under control.

It’s the picture of Katie, waiting outside the flower show with a box of blooming plants, that surfaces most insistently. When I drove up, I was furious over the worry she caused me, fury that hid the terror over what might have happened to her.

And, in part, some of that terror stemmed from the truth about her father that I am hiding. How will it help her to know her father tried to kill himself?

Except that I promised to tell her the truth, no matter what.

When I pulled up to the building, she was standing against the wall in the sunshine, her skin golden, hair a mass of ringlets in toffee and yellow and gold. She had the flowers in a box in front of her, a parti-color shrub of beautiful blooms, and she was gazing down at them with a pensive expression, part astonishment and part pleasure.

“Get in,” I said, and she hung her head but nestled the flowers carefully in the backseat before she got in the front beside me.

For a long time, neither one of us said anything. Then she said, “Thank you for coming to get me. I would have ridden the bus back, but I didn’t want to hurt the flowers.”

I nodded, mouth set so that I wouldn’t say anything I didn’t mean. Finally I managed, “You know that I worried about you,
don’t you? I couldn’t find you, and I didn’t know where you were, and terrible things went through my mind.”

“Like what?” She made a noise. “It’s not like there’s some big river to drown in or a lot of creepy neighborhoods or gang-bangers around.”

I looked at her, once again realizing what her world had been, what it is now. “It takes only one bad person, Katie.”

“I know.” She slumped.

“Why didn’t you at least leave me a note? You always leave notes.”

“Because I was mad, okay? You all let me down on this flower show, and it was important to me.”

“It’s not always about you, Katie! There’s a lot going on. It was a flower show, not your only chance to go to college.”

She crossed her arms over her chest. “It mattered to me,” she said.

And neither of us said anything the rest of the way. I sent her to her room and made her put the flowers on the back porch in the shade. Her dog licked her face and cheerfully followed her upstairs, though I swear he gave me a conspiratorial look over his shoulder.

When the dough is finished, I put it in an oiled bowl, cover it with a damp flour-sack towel, and make a pot of coffee. My dilemma ping-pongs back and forth across my brain.
Tell her. Don’t tell her. Tell her. Don’t tell her
.

Ticktock, ticktock.

Herself comes down just before five a.m. “Can I help you with anything?” she asks, all meek and mild.

“No, thank you.”

She leans on the counter. “What is that?”

“Oatmeal and whole wheat with sunflower seeds.”

“Oh.” She chews on her inner cheek. “I had a bad dream about my dad.”

A ripple of unease disturbs the calm in the room. “What kind of dream?”

“That he died. That he didn’t want to live.”

Tell her. Don’t tell her
.

I shape the loaves carefully, rolling them into country rounds, my eyes on the flour. “Mmm.”

“I’m kind of scared to see him,” she says. She’s rolling onto the outsides of her feet, then coming back to the soles, back to the outsides. Over and over. One hand is gripped around the other wrist. “I used to be really scared of this guy who was badly burned when I was little.”

“I didn’t know that,” I say. “Tell me about him. How old were you?”

She shrugs. “I dunno. Maybe five or six or something. He came to the grocery store by our house. He had all this pink skin that was like muscles on the outside of his body, you know?”

The visual is acute, and I nod. For a minute I stop shaping the loaves.

“He didn’t have any hair on the top of his head—no eyebrows, nothing—and he wore sunglasses all the time, so I think his eyes must have been bad. But the worst part was that he didn’t have a nose. It was gross.” She pauses. “I thought he was a monster. I cried whenever I saw him. What if my dad looks like that?”

I take a breath and give her the only possible answer. “You’ll know what to do.”

She folds her left hand into her right, and her feet come to the floor. “I’m going to plant my flowers.”

Maybe I’ll tell her over dinner.

Or tomorrow morning.

• • •

At midday, I’m rearranging the walk-ins when Katie bounces into the kitchen. “Your dad is here.”

“My
dad
?”

“Yeah.” She turns and points. “I brought him back.”

I’m up to my elbows in bleach and rubber gloves, and I blow a lock of hair off my face. Sure enough, there’s my father, dressed in his workday uniform of black suit with white shirt. No tie in the heat of the day. He looks good. “Hey,” I say warily. “What’s up?”

“Came by to talk to you. Got a minute?”

“Sure.” I strip off my gloves. “You want something to drink? I can have Katie get us some tea from upstairs.”

“That would be good. Thanks.”

I give Katie a glance. “Will you?”

“ ’Course.”

He looks around. He’s never been here, because he was sulking. “You did all this design?”

“I had help, but mostly it’s my idea, yeah.”

He points to the oven yawning on the wall. “Wood-burning, huh?”

I nod.

“Smart.” He nods, too, looking around, and I can read the approval on his face. “Great kitchen, kid. Looks good.”

“Thanks.” I point to the backyard. “Let’s go outside, huh?”

In the years since my divorce, my father and I haven’t had much reason to have long conversations. I see him at family gatherings—at Christmas and birthdays and that kind of thing—and we exchange the usual pleasantries, but that’s about as far as it ever goes. When I was a child, he was the classic patriarch and not particularly chatty, so this is not a big change.

But it’s weird that he’s here. “So, Dad. What’s up?”

He wiggles his nose, a habit born from allergies as a child. “I’ve got an offer here for you, Ramona.”

“What? An offer for—”

“Let me finish. Ryan told me that you have trouble.”

“Oh, great.” He was the one I thought I could trust. “He had no right to—”

“Ramona. Please.”

I take a breath. Nod.