How to Bake a Perfect Life (44 page)

Ramona

  M
y apprentices and I are awake and working by two this morning, just to have that extra bit of time. It’s such a relief to be back at work, to have some way of forgetting about all the trouble in my daughter’s and Katie’s lives. Bread has always given me this, an escape. This morning, the rye starter is as dark and rich as the heart of a wild animal, and the smell of it is like earth and time and desire.

It is going to be a powerful bread, too powerful to be shaped into big loaves. I’m going to make small loaves studded with blue cheese, an old-world recipe that will please a certain contingent very much.

As I open the shutters and write the specials in neon, and the sun starts to tip above the edge of the earth, I feel a sense of possibility. Katie’s flowers are blooming in profusion—exactly the same flowers, I suddenly realize, that my grandmother Adelaide had in this spot.

How extraordinary!

The sight of them draws me. Attired still in my chef’s coat and tight braid, I walk down the sidewalk to admire the mix of daisies and blue bachelor’s buttons she’s planted along the wrought-iron fence.

“Ramona!”

I turn, thinking that the voice sounds very like my grandmother’s, but no one is there. Looking up to the third-floor windows, I see movement, a head or body moving away. Katie must be up. Cheered, I head inside and up the stairs.

There is no one in the kitchen. Merlin is whining upstairs, and with an overwhelming sense of worry, I run up the last steps, panting by the time I reach the landing. Katie’s door is closed, and for a single, searing second, my hand hovers over the doorknob. I’m afraid of what I might find.

Merlin, hearing me, barks sharply, and I open the door. Katie’s bed is empty. Merlin is shut on the balcony, and I head across the room to let him in. He leaps through, whining anxiously, licking my hand, leaping toward the door. On the bed is a note. “Wait, Merlin.”

He makes a noise of urgency. “Okay, okay.” I snatch the note up as I rush toward the door.

Don’t worry
, it says.
I have something to do, but I will be fine
.

Oh, my God. What does that mean? Where has she gone?

Merlin is already at the foot of the stairs, waiting for me, and instead of going toward the backyard, he is most insistent that we go toward the front. After Katie, I suppose.

“I don’t know where she went, Merlin. Wait.”

He makes a pained, yipping noise and comes to take my hand, putting his teeth around my palm and then leaping backward. What can I do but find a leash and let him lead?

And I do follow, for about two blocks—when it becomes plain he will walk to wherever she is, and that’s not possible. “Wait.” I pull up on the leash, check the time, and tug him back around. He plants his feet and gives me a grave look. Not moving.

I think about all the child pornographers and kidnappers and rapists in the world, the sexual predators who would slurp her up without hesitation. Maybe Merlin knows something I don’t. But when I let him lead again, he drags me toward
Colorado Avenue. There he stops, looking in both directions, a soft pitiful whine in his throat. He looks hard, as if he is listening, takes a step, stops. Looks up at me.

In my clogs and coat, I bend down and hug him. “It’s okay.” I pull back. “I promise we’ll find her. Okay?”

His whiskey-brown eyes are grave. He almost nods.

We return to the bakery, and there are customers going up the walk, coming out. It shocks me a little to see business as usual. Leading Merlin around the side of the house, I let him free in the backyard, where he heads for the bench and sits down, making complaining noises to the invisible air.

Inside, I call Jimmy into my office. “I have a big problem. Katie seems to have run away, and I’m going to have to find her. If we don’t stay open, the bakery will die. Can you cover it?”

“Yeah.” She shrugs, pats a hand over her belly. “If I get in any trouble, I’ll call Cat, right?”

“Actually, no. I’m going to make other arrangements. But thank you. I’ll give you a raise. Someday.”

She gives me a thumbs-up. “Get your girl.”

I have no idea where to start, where she might be. Would she try to run all the way to her father? Go back to El Paso? The first person to call is Sofia, but I’m absolutely loath to add even a single minute of extra worry to her plate. The baby is due any day.

First I’ll try some other things. In Katie’s room, I look for the notebook she keeps, but it’s gone—obviously with her. There’s nothing else, really, except a letter from her friend Madison. It’s written on pink paper and talks about a boy at the mall and getting a bra and nothing else. Still, it has a return address and a name I might be able to reach if I have to.

The next step is to try to open her email. It has a password, of course. I wonder if I can figure it out. The first thing I try is Merlin.

The account opens.

And there are the emails from her mother, manipulative and self-centered and begging Katie to come visit.

El Paso, then.

A half hour later, I’m at Jonah’s door. He answers wearing only jeans, his hair tousled, and I realize it’s not quite seven a.m. “Ramona, what’s wrong?”

“Katie,” I say, and tell him what I know. “I’m going down there to see if I can find her. I just wanted to let you know.”

He runs a hand through his hair. “Give me ten minutes.”

“You don’t have to go.”

He shakes his head, pushes open the screen door. “You aren’t doing this alone. Come in and wait while I brush my teeth.”

Katie

  W
hen the bus stops in Albuquerque, there’s a layover. Katie puts her sweater on her seat and asks if the lady across the aisle will keep an eye on it for her. The woman nods without smiling, and Katie heads for the bathroom to brush her teeth and wash her face.

She got on the bus at one a.m., along with a guy who looked like he might be a soldier, with that shaved-across-the-back-of-the-head look, and two women who spoke only Spanish and carried a baby. The people already on the bus were asleep. She found an empty row and took the window seat.

It had not been that easy to get to the bus station at night, especially because she was worried about spending too much money. Although she wasn’t proud of it, she’d stolen money from the bakery office, right out of the safe that Ramona never locked. She took two hundred dollars in twenties, tucking them into her bra, like her mom showed her, and feeling guilty because she knew very well that the bakery was hurting.

But so was her mother. So was Katie. She would pay it all back.

In the end, she had to walk down Colorado Avenue, which was a kind of busy street, to an all-night 7-Eleven. A guy with a
gold tooth was behind the counter, and he called her a cab without asking any questions. He probably thought she was older.

The cabdriver, though, wanted to ask a million questions and kept looking at her in the rearview mirror, which made her really nervous. Was he gonna call the cops on her? She said finally, “I live in a foster home, and I’m going to see my mom, who is in the hospital in El Paso.”

“Wouldn’t it have been better to do it in the daytime?”

Katie shook her head. “Nobody was gonna let me go.” She looked at him in the mirror. “What would you do if it was your mom?”

He just nodded. When he dropped her off, he said, “Careful now, sweetie. The world isn’t a very nice place.”

“Believe me,” she said. “I know that.”

“Somehow I think you do.”

It was also tricky to get a bus ticket, since the woman behind the counter said she needed an adult to buy it for her. Katie thought of her mom joking with some dealer, and said, “My mom’s a meth addict. I don’t think she cares if I take a bus to see my dad at Fort Bliss.”

Her eyes softened. “He’s a soldier, huh?”

Katie nodded. “He’s been in Iraq, but he’s out now.”

The woman sold her a ticket for sixty-three dollars. When Katie settled into the seat by the window, she felt like crying and didn’t know why. The bus was quiet and the baby fussed a little bit, and it seemed like the loneliest place in the world. If her head had been too noisy before, the silence seemed to echo now, and she didn’t know what to do with it. She wished for Merlin. She wished for the smell of bread.

Get off the bus and go home
, said a voice in her head.

And then she thought of her dad trying to kill himself, leaving her behind like she was some empty cup he was going to throw away, and she stayed where she was. Using her sweater as
a blanket and her backpack as a pillow, she fell asleep and didn’t wake up until they were outside Albuquerque.

In Albuquerque, it’s pretty early and there aren’t that many people around. A homeless guy with about twenty-seven years of grime on his neck and cuticles says, “Hey, girlie, you got some change for an old man?”

She shakes her head and pulls her pack closer to her. He calls out behind her, “Hope you’re never hungry and homeless!” and for some reason it makes her mad. She turns around and glares at him. “I have been, thanks.”

He looks sad, but Katie just stomps into the bathroom. She pees and washes her hands, carefully not touching anything without a paper towel. Looking at herself in the mirror, she sees that her face is greasy and there are bags under her eyes—eyes that look so mad bright that she wonders, with a fluttering in her chest, just what the heck she’s doing here.

It passes. In the station, she finds a fake Egg McMuffin and a glass of orange juice. She buys a bag of Skittles from a machine and tucks those into her pocket, then she heads back to the bus.

It’s still quiet. Other people are eating, too, and she can smell coffee. Unwrapping the sandwich, she stares out the window and waits for the bus to go, willing the seat beside her to stay empty.

In a few hours, she’ll see her mom. Who has now been clean for two months, so she’ll be in good shape. Once she sees her, talks to her, Katie thinks, she’ll know what to do.

Ramona

  E
l Paso is a ten-hour drive, straight down I-25 through New Mexico. Because I’ve been awake since two, I drink coffee and take the first shift. Merlin is in the backseat, his nose lifted to the two-inch crack at the window, but after a while he curls up on the blanket I put down for him and tucks his nose under his tail.

Jonah mans the CD player and eats a bagel and cream cheese we picked up at Starbucks. “Woman runs a bakery and I have to eat store-bought bagels,” he says, lifting his eyebrow.

“I didn’t know—”

“Joke!” he says, holding up a hand. The scent of his chai is exotic and pleasing, and I think that I don’t know him well enough to be in love like this. He’s essentially a stranger, someone I didn’t even know existed a few months ago. It scares me, another layer of terror to add to the rest. I’m struggling to keep all my defenses in place. I’ve had a headache for two days, and that sense of threat that’s been my ever-present companion has intensified times twelve.

If I hadn’t become involved with him, would I have been a better guide to Katie? Would I have noticed more?

I’m grateful that he doesn’t talk a lot. The music he plays is all upbeat and cheery, and I find myself letting go of the furious
worry and anxiousness about everything and begin to see what’s around us. Mountains; a sky so clear and blue it seems impossible that it isn’t solid; fields of pale-green yucca and prickly walking-stick cactus. Jonah points to a herd of antelope, delicate and long-legged, springing across the landscape.

Driving becomes almost a meditation. There’s something relaxing about the straight, clean, sunny highway rolling ahead of the windshield. I find myself letting go of a breath I’ve been holding since I found her note this morning.

“That’s better,” Jonah says.

“I’m still in shock that she did this, honestly. Stole money from me? Ran away in the middle of the night? She’s been thriving here.”

“She hasn’t had an easy life.”

“That’s true. My mistake has been in forgetting that.” I think about last night, standing by her bed, all the things I wanted to say and couldn’t. “If Sofia had done something like this, it would have been dramatically awful. With Katie, I’m less worried because she’s so street-smart, you know?”