How to Bake a Perfect Life (5 page)

Ramona

  W
hen I get back downstairs, my mother is making coffee. “Do you want some, too?” she asks. Like it’s her kitchen.

I nod.

“Have you heard anything from Sofia?”

“Not yet. She has to get to the hospital, get herself settled, all that. We probably won’t hear for another day or two.”

Lily measures coffee into a paper filter. “Poor baby. Who knows what she’ll find. I’m so worried about her. I mean—burns, dear God.” She shakes her head. “I’ve got the prayer team on it.”

I’m worried, too, but it always feels like my mother is making things into some big drama. Even if this might qualify, I don’t want to start hand-wringing. “She’s strong. She knew what she was getting into when she married a career soldier.”

“Well, it’s one thing to know intellectually. Another to have to deal with it emotionally. And she’s pregnant.” Lily clicks her tongue. “Such a handsome man, too. Is his face burned?”

Would it be better if he was ugly? “I don’t know anything, Mom. Nothing.”

She finishes the prep on the coffeemaker, presses the button.
Carefully not looking at me, she says, “Katie makes me think of you that summer you went to Poppy’s farm in Sedalia.”

All I can manage is a nod. That was a painful time for me. Us. I was fifteen and pregnant, exiled to my aunt’s house for the summer. The memory edges along my ribs, joins with the present day. I think of Sofia’s pale face as she blew me a kiss from the circle of soldiers’ wives.

“What was that young man’s name?” Lily asks.

I frown, drawn from my thoughts into what feels like a non sequitur. “Who are you talking about?”

“That summer you spent with Poppy,” she says, again avoiding the obvious way to refer to it. “There was a young man who worked at the record store. You were just smitten.” She laughs. “And it was so strange—he was kind of funny-looking, wasn’t he?”

“Jonah,” I say, buttering bread. “I wasn’t smitten. He was my friend.” I frown, looking at her. “And, as I remember, he was beautiful.”

“You had the worst crush ever,” my mother snorts. “And, no, he was pretty funny-looking.”

There are footsteps in the hallway, and I make a chopping motion across my throat. As Katie comes around the corner, I pick up the handset of the phone and give it to my mother. “Why don’t you see what you can figure out about the dog?”

“I can do that.” She sits down at the table and flips open the little notebook she carries in her purse. Every single one of us has tried to get her to switch to a BlackBerry, but she thinks they’re rude. “Katie, come sit here with me and let’s see what we can find out, shall we?”

“You can probably look things up on the computer faster,” Katie says, pointing to the desktop in a nook in the kitchen, breathing softly beneath the gurgling coffee. “Or doesn’t it work?”

I wink at Katie. “
It
works fine.”

“So does information,” Lily says. “What airline did you fly on, sweetie?”

So it begins. Katie’s life in my house. My life with Katie in it.

In the middle of the night, the phone rings and I scramble in the dark to answer it, knowing who it will be. “Hello?”

“Mom?” Sofia’s voice on the other end of the line is thin. “Did I wake you up? Of course I did. I’m sorry. I just needed to talk to you.”

“It’s fine, baby. I’m here.” I click on the lamp, push hair out of my eyes, and squint at the clock—2:36 a.m. “Have you seen Oscar?”

“Yes.” The word is squeezed flat.

I wait, my lungs thick with a mucus of worry. In the background, I can hear a television or something. “Take your time.”

“It’s bad. Second- and third-degree burns over sixty percent of his body. And he”—she takes a quick gasping breath—“lost most of his right leg, part of his right hand.”

“Oh, honey. I’m so sorry.”

“He’s in a coma, which they say is a blessing.”

“Is there anyone there with you? Do you have a place to stay?”

“Yes, it’s all very well organized. There’s a house nearby that’s run by a private organization, and I have a driver assigned to me.” She strives for good cheer, but I can hear the terror in her voice. “The Soldiers’ Angels gave us a quilt that’s just beautiful, and they have this little backpack they give to soldiers because they might not have their stuff with them, you know?”

“That sounds great.” I would have spared her this.
Don’t love a soldier
, I would have said,
or a policeman, or a smoke jumper
. In this moment, though, I want only to offer her something to buoy her. “He’s lucky to have you there, sweetie.”

“They aren’t going to move him for a few days.” Her breath hitches. “I don’t think they expect him to live, Mom.”

I say the only thing I can. “They don’t know everything. You have to have faith.”

“You’re right.” Her voice takes on some color. “I will.” She clears her throat, dons her armor again. “Did Katie get there safely?”

“She did. She is sound asleep in the orange bedroom. Her dog, however, is not here yet.”

“A dog?”

“She found him on the train tracks the night her mother was arrested. He sounds like a total vagabond. If he were a man, he would be your stepfather—amoral and utterly charming.”

Sofia laughs, that helpless reaction-style giggle. “Oh, Mom! Thank you so much for all of this.” Suddenly there are tears twining through the laughter, and—finally—she lets down her guard and sobs, the sound shattering over the tiny nerves on the bridge of my nose. “I’m so scared. Tell me I can do this.”

“You’re stronger than you know, Sofia. You can do anything. And I’m always right here.”

“Thank you.” She takes in a big breath. “Kiss Katie for me. Tell her I’ll call her tomorrow. But, Mom, don’t tell her too much about Oscar, all right? Downplay it.”

“That’s a mistake.”

“Just do it my way, will you?”

“No, sorry.”
I can’t stand it when people lie
, Katie had said. “I promised her I’d tell her the truth.”

“Then don’t say anything.”

“You’re going to have to trust me to do what’s right.”

“Mom!”

“Sorry. I won’t lie to her. Call her tomorrow—our tomorrow here—all right? And, in the meantime, you need to get some sleep.”

A pause. “You’re right. Okay. I’ll call tomorrow.”

When I hang up, a middle-of-the-night stillness muffles all sound. I lie on my back, phone warm in my hand, and think about her in a hospital halfway around the world, alone with
this. I want the details of the place—are the hallways white or green? Modern or old? What kind of chairs are in the waiting rooms? When she was in college, I had her snap photos of apartments I had not seen so that I could easily visualize her moving around her environment.

She’ll have pulled her hair into a sensible ponytail, and her makeup will have worn off by now, and she’ll be wearing tennis shoes, very white, with jeans. To accommodate her belly, she’s been wearing batik peasant blouses, colored like tapestries, which makes her look like a medieval woman. I imagine her settling a hand on her belly, putting her forehead against the wall, letting go for a minute.

Then I know what she next will do: She will straighten, square those narrow shoulders, and march back to Oscar’s bedside.

Oscar. Burned; an amputee. I think of his beautiful hands, his curly hair.

Their lives will never be the same, in ways she can’t even envision now. My chest feels hollow with grief, with knowing all that she has lost.

Next to me, Milo starts to purr, very quietly. His body is bumped up against mine, and a paw reaches through the darkness to land on my forearm, a tap. Idly, I run my hand over his forehead, down his back, scratching the place beneath his ears that he loves so much. His fur is as silky as mink. A comfort.

Milo is a rescue, an elegant blue-eyed Siamese who showed up on my porch, wet and skinny and starving, only three or four months old. Even then he was one of the most beautiful cats I’d ever seen, with a soft squeak of a meow instead of an obnoxious yowl. He’s aloof and skittish and not terribly friendly with anyone but me. I wonder how he’s going to take the arrival of the dog, who will be here in the morning.

Probably not well.

“I’m sorry we have to bring a dog in, baby,” I say conversationally. “If it were just me, you know I’d never do that to you,
but this little girl needs somebody in her corner, and dogs are good at that kind of thing.” Milo nuzzles into my palm, asking for a face rub, and when I do it, he licks my palm delicately, as if I am his kitten.

It had taken my mother nearly three hours to get the dog’s transportation straightened out. Merlin had no vaccination records. Without them, he would not be allowed to fly. A vet agreed to come to the airport to administer the shots, and an airport employee would give the dog food and water overnight.

In the morning, he will fly in a new soft-sided $200 kennel to Colorado Springs, where my brother will again be pressed into service, since he is the dog person of the family. My credit card was screaming by the end of the arrangements, but what alternative was there?

I took Katie on a walk of the neighborhood earlier tonight, showing her where things are—7-Eleven and the post office and the tourist strip on West Colorado Avenue, cluttered with boutiques and galleries and bars, and the hilly backstreets populated with Victorians and bungalows with grassy yards. “It’s pretty here,” she said in some wonder. “I don’t remember Colorado Springs looking like this.”

“Did you live here?”

“Yeah, I was little. We were at Fort Carson, I think. I don’t remember it all that well.”

When we got home, she asked to get on the Internet, and I set her up at the kitchen nook with her own ID. She chose a picture of a dog as her icon. She already had an email address, of course—that much is easy these days—and wanted to email her best friend about Merlin. I asked if she had emailed her dad. She shook her head, not looking at me. I didn’t push.

Now I can no longer bear to lie here and think of the expenses I can’t afford, the disaster that has befallen my daughter, or the challenges of a girl who is as tense and aloof and as skittish as my cat. Gently nudging Milo aside, I tug on some yoga
pants and a sweater and tie my long hair away from my face with a scrunchie. Milo tucks his long black tail around himself like a fluffy scarf and returns to sleep.

I patter down the back stairs to the bakery kitchen. Moonlight comes in through the windows and glances off the stainless-steel island, and I think of Sofia sitting there less than two days ago.

The overhead fluorescent lights will be too harsh just now. I turn on the small lights—over the range, over the sink, above the counter. Nearby is the bank of side-by-side fridges.

Stored in the fridges are my sourdough starters, of course. The bakery is built on them. At the moment there are three different sponges made with various ingredients—potato starter and rye; a buttermilk-and-wheat-flour starter I’ve been experimenting with; a heavy dark barley mash, which makes a bread so rich and tangy that it impressed an anonymous travel writer enough to write it up in
New York
magazine. That article led to other stealthy tasters and even better coverage.

And an even deeper rift with my family. They expected me to fail, and I have not. Yet.

On the counter is the fourth jar, which I have left out overnight. This is the luminary of my starters, mother dough from my grandmother, which has been in the family for more than a hundred years, ever since Bridget Magill, my grandmother’s grandmother, carried it with her from Ireland, to Buffalo, then to the mining camps in Cripple Creek.

In the silence of the middle of the night, I turn on the classical radio station, very quietly. The sound will not travel as high as Katie’s bedroom, but there is no reason to take chances. The poor girl has such circles under her eyes that she looks haunted. It’s hard to imagine what her life has been like these last couple of years.

From a hook by the door, I take a fresh apron, the white cotton
worn soft from many washings, and tie the long strings around my body once, then again in the front. On the radio is Mozart’s Piano Concerto in C Major, which many consider to be his most elegant piece of work. Humming along under my breath, I take a big aluminum bowl from beneath the counter and carry it to the plastic bins along the wall where we store dry goods—flours, of course, white and rye, whole-grain wheat, and oats; also sugars of various types, brown and white and raw. Stacks of scoops and measuring cups line the shelves above.

The chemistry of bread is not as exact as you might imagine. Everything influences the mix of dry ingredients to wet, particularly with the artisan loaves I am baking tonight. I use the small shovel in the bin to fill my bowl with white flour and take it back to the center island, then gather the rest of my ingredients and tools—some sugar and loose yeast to help the mother dough along, a scraper and plastic wrap, measuring cups and spoons.

As I begin to measure dry ingredients into a fresh bowl, my mind drifts back to Katie. Tomorrow the dog will arrive. Before he gets here, maybe there will be time to get her a haircut, maybe some new clothes. Everything in her suitcase was quite plainly purchased secondhand, and much of it is stained or ragged or too small. Her panties, in particular, pain me. Every single pair has holes. I washed everything and neatly folded it all, then stacked it on a chair just inside her bedroom door. The child slept on, oblivious, her body so thin she barely lifted the covers.

As I measure flour, I imagine her after her mother’s arrest: waking up in an abandoned house, putting on those tattered panties, and trying to comb her crazy hair. I have to lean my hands on the cold steel counter, take a long breath against the blistering heat it rouses in me.

How could she have slipped through so
many
cracks? Oscar
was at war, obviously, and Sofia lived here, but didn’t they talk to her? And what about her teachers? Parents of her friends? Didn’t somebody notice?

Obviously not—Katie had been living with her mother in a house with no running water and no appliances for a couple of months, maybe more. Katie was clearly adept and clever, so she made people believe what they wanted to believe.