How to Bake a Perfect Life

by Barbara O'Neal

  “You can help me make the bread.” She took a jar filled with a noxious-looking substance off the counter. The lower half was a thick gray pillow, looking like some fungus you’d find on Mars. Poppy shook it up cheerfully, then opened it. A strong earthy smell exploded into the air.

  I wasn’t sure if I liked it or not and put my hand up to my nose, just in case my stomach decided it was time to throw up. But my stomach stayed stable, and I leaned closer. “What is that?”

  Poppy held it up to the light. “Magic.”

  “What kind of magic?”

  “It’s my own sourdough starter. I’ve been working on it for months, and I think it’s finally getting where I want it to be.”

  “Grandma has a sourdough starter. She makes biscuits with it.”

  “Yes, that’s from the Callahan side of the family. It’s got quite a history.” Her mouth went into a straight line. “This one is my own.”

  “Oh.” I sank down at the table, feeling as if my legs had turned into rubber bands. “I’m really hungry.”

  “Sorry, baby. Let me get you some lunch.”

  By the time we ate sandwiches and oranges, I was nodding off at the table, and Poppy sent me upstairs to what would be my bedroom for the duration. Her room occupied the front half of the second floor, a wide-open space with a balcony overlooking the train tracks and pale grassy fields rolling toward the burly mountains. My room was in the back, tucked under the eaves, but there was a circular staircase that led to the widow’s walk on the roof. One wall of my room was lined with bookcases packed with books, all kinds of books, standing straight up and stuffed in sideways and piled in stacks on the floor. I ran my fingers over them. At least I would have time to read.

  The room was stuffy, so I opened the window and the old-fashioned metal blinds, then curled up on the bed. A breeze moved into the room, carrying a faint perfume of roses. I closed my eyes, like Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, and tried to wish myself home.

  But I didn’t have any ruby slippers, and I couldn’t go to sleep, either. Instead, I lay there with my heart feeling like a boulder, wishing I could go back in time, back to last summer when my dad finally let me be a busgirl at the Erin Steakhouse, our main restaurant. It was so much fun. I loved wearing my uniform of black pants and white shirt and little emerald bow tie. It was an ugly uniform, not like the waitress dresses, which were classy but definitely low cut. Not as if I had anything much to put in a neckline like that—I hadn’t even had my period for very long, only since May, though it was regular right away.

  Too bad.

  The baby shoved my lungs up into my throat, and I had to turn over on my other side so I could breathe. Thinking about last summer, so different from this one, made me want to cry again. That was all I wanted, to go back to work at the steakhouse. Or maybe this summer I would have worked at the café out near the Pikes Peak highway, where they sold saltwater taffy in rainbow colors and chicken-fried steaks and zillions of root beer floats to tourists who were going and coming from the top of America’s Mountain.

  I liked the steakhouse better. One of my jobs was to get the dining room ready, shaking out fresh green table covers over the snowy-white base layer we left on all the time. There were single carnations with their ruffled edges and sharp peppermint scent in crystal vases, so I had to go around and check them, replacing the ones that were getting spotty or brown or droopy. I made sure the table settings were perfect, with pointy napkins sitting in the middle of each place, along with two forks, a steak knife and a butter knife, one spoon to the right of the place, one at the top. The last thing we would do was light all the candles and turn the lamps in the dining room down low.

  It was luxe, as my dad always said. He was famous around town for his genius with his restaurant, for his big gestures, his elegant suits that my mom picked out when they went up to Denver twice a year, and his thick, wavy black hair. Everyone liked coming to the Erin Steakhouse, especially for celebrations. We got super-busy on prom nights, when the girls came in with long dresses and corsages, and when parents came in for the graduation at the Air Force Academy, but it was always bustling.

  And I loved being in the middle of it. Pouring glasses of water, taking out the giant bowls of shrimp on ice that was the appetizer of choice that summer, making sure the tables were cleared, then reset perfectly. I made tips to supplement the low hourly pay, and together they were enough that I could start putting a little away in a savings account every week.

  Now my sister Steph had my job, and I was stuck up in Sedalia with nothing to do but read and wait until I turned into a watermelon.

  Curled into a comma on my aunt Poppy’s guest bed, I squeezed my eyes tight and put myself back there, last summer.

  When I was happy.

  Before.

  Poppy woke me after dark. “C’mon, sweetie, it’s time to get up and have some supper. It’s past seven.”

  Yanked from the faraway world of Nod, I blinked. “I’m not hungry.”

  “You need to eat.” Poppy patted my thigh and stood. “The baby needs to eat.”

  I closed my eyes, lured back into thick darkness. “Okay. In a minute.”

  Sometime later she returned. “Ramona, you need to get up now.”

  I waved her away, tucked myself deeper into the covers. In the depths of my brain, this time didn’t exist. My dreams were about school, about my friends, about learning the restaurant business.

  After a minute Poppy went away.

  In the middle of the night, I got up to pee for about seven years. My mouth was dry, and I bent over the sink to drink from the faucet; then, keeping my eyes half closed so I wouldn’t wake up too much, I went back to bed.

  That time it was harder, but I got back to sleep.

  Until Poppy came in again. I felt her sink down on the side of the bed. “It’s morning. You have to get up.”

  “Leave me alone.” I pulled the pillow over my head. Deep in my belly, a gurgle sounded.

  Poppy took the pillow from my face. “Now.”

  I rolled over, belly mounding higher than my breasts, and stared at her. Her hair fell down her back untidily, and she wore an old sweatshirt and jeans. She still didn’t have a bra on, and everything about her seemed like a warning—her eccentricities, her husbandlessness, her offbeat everything.

  I missed my mother, with her delicate jewelry and crisply ironed slacks. Acutely. “I want to go home.”

  “I know. But you can’t.” She held out her hand. “Sit up.”

  I flung my feet over the edge of the bed and creaked upright. Poppy put her hand on my shoulder. “Every now and then, life throws you something you’d never have chosen in a million years. I know that’s how you feel right now.”

  Bowing my head, I dug my nails into my palms. I would not cry again. Not again.

  “You don’t have to be happy, Ramona. You just have to live through it. I promise that you are not going to be pregnant and fifteen forever.”

  “It seems like it.”

  Her hand moved in that comforting circle around my upper back. “I know. One day at a time, all right?”

  A breath moved against my heart at that. I raised my head. Nodded. “I guess I am hungry.”

  “I imagine you are.” She pushed me upright. “Let’s go get you and that baby some food, then, shall we?”

  The days fell into a pattern very quickly. Poppy had a business out of her home, part farm stand, part bakery. In the mornings she worked in the garden, and she insisted I help, pointing out that staying busy would make time go faster.

  She awakened me at five every morning. We ate breakfast together—some herbal tea and toast, or fruit and cereal—while she made up her lists for the day. Then we headed outside in the still-cool air to weed the half-acre plot, accompanied by a couple of her menagerie of pets, all rescues of one sort or another. There was a three-legged German shepherd, a fat gray tabby with eyes like green marbles, an absolutely ancient weepy-eyed little mutt we speculated must be par
t poodle and maybe shih tzu or Lhasa apso or something. An aloof husky sometimes graced us with her attention, and a handful of barn cats warily approached only if we had something particularly interesting, though they did like to leave dead rodents on the back porch.

  “Knock wood, this is going to be a great year for corn,” Poppy said one morning not long after I arrived. The little plants were nearly a foot high, and Poppy carefully tugged bindweed from between them.

  I knelt beside the squashes, pinching out a dark-leaved succulent that seemed to have roots all the way to the molten center of the earth. “How do you know?”

  “Experience, I guess. Hot days, cool nights—that’s what corn likes. And peaches, too.” She pointed with a spade to a tree draped with netting. “I’ll make peach butter this year, and you can take some home to eat all winter.”

  I grunted. Winter seemed like another world, a lifetime I’d never see. Finishing with the squash, I stood up. “Do you want me to weed between the tomatoes?”

  “In a minute. First I want to show you how to tie them up.”

  She came down the row to me. After the first day, she always wore a bra, though I’m not sure how she knew it bugged me when she didn’t. Right now her hair and clothes seemed to make sense—jeans and a sweatshirt, her hair pulled back in a braid to keep it out of her way. Over everything, she wore a colorful bibbed apron with a bunch of pockets, and out of one she took a bundle of long twist ties. She handed them to me and pulled off her gloves.

  “Tomatoes like three things,” she said, picking up a branch covered with flowers that was trailing toward the earth. “Sunshine, plenty of water, and lots of support.” There was a metal-gridwork thing around each plant. Poppy used twist ties to attach the branches to the cage. “You try,” she said, pointing to the next one. Like it was some super-hard thing to do.

  I followed her example, gently tugging a branch over the top of one square of the cage to let the bar support it, then loosely twisting a tie around it to hold it in place.

  “Good.”

  “It’s not rocket science.”

  She grinned. “True. But it matters to do it right.” She took the new branch in her hand. “The next thing we do with tomatoes is pinch off some of the blossoms, to get better size on the tomatoes that do grow. Just let one on each cluster stay.”

  Now, this appealed to me. I walked along the row, looking for flower clusters, and I thought of my grandmother Adelaide, Poppy’s mother. “Did Grandma teach you to garden?”

  Poppy didn’t answer for a minute. “Grandma grows flowers,” she said, in a tone of voice that said it was something shameful. “I like to grow things that matter.”

  “Flowers matter.” I thought of my grandmother’s irises, which had been blooming a couple of weeks before. Big ruffled flowers on tall stems in colors that reminded me of old-fashioned long dresses—salmon and purple and velvety brown and pale pink. “Her garden makes me think of a ball, with all the princesses dancing.”

  Poppy stood and raised her eyebrows. “Great imagery, kid.”

  “Thanks.” I moved to the next plant in the group. Two small green knobs of tomato were growing side by side. “What do you do when there are already tomatoes instead of flowers?”

  “Pinch one off.”

  I gave her an exaggerated frown. “But they’re so cute!”

  “Neither will get enough of what it needs if you leave them both.”

  With a pang, I chopped one away, let it fall on the ground. “Why don’t you talk to Grandma?”

  The war had been going on as long as I could remember. Poppy came to our house, and we came here, but Adelaide never showed up at Poppy’s, and Poppy never came to celebrations at my grandmother’s house. On Christmas Eve, she came to our house to exchange presents and eat fondue, but Christmas Day was always at my grandmother’s big Victorian on the Westside of Colorado Springs, and Poppy never came there. Not once in all my life could I remember them being in the same room.

  Poppy brushed her palms together. “Sometimes even when someone is your family, you don’t get along.”

  “I get along with everybody.”

  “Yeah. I hope you always do.”

  I realized my statement was a lie. “I guess I don’t get along with everyone right now, though, do I? My mom is mad at me. Really mad at me. She hardly talked to me at all for the last three weeks and didn’t say a single thing to me on the way here.”

  “Oh, honey.” Poppy moved toward me as if she would hug me, and I stepped back, putting up a hand to keep her away. She stopped. “Your mom is just sad for you. Someday you’ll understand.”

  “If she’s so sad, don’t you think she could be nicer? That she would understand that I’m really sorry? That it isn’t helping to send me away from everybody for the whole summer?”

  “She’s doing what she thinks is best for you and the family, sweetheart.”

  I bowed my head, kicked at a clump of dirt. “Well, I hate it.” Some heated thing blistered through my chest. “Did something like this happen with you and Grandma? Is that why you never talk?”

  “No,” she said with emphasis. “It was nothing like this.” She took a breath, looked over the garden. “Let’s just say that your grandma is a different person now than she was when my father was alive. Your grandma is not the same person who was my mother.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t want to get into details, Ramona. You have a good relationship with Adelaide, and she’s good for you. She wasn’t always good for your mom and me.”

  “So, what, you never forgave her? My mom gets along with her.”

  “Does she?”

  At first I thought it was a real question, then I realized the tone of voice said something completely different. I met her eyes, thinking of my mother and her mother in a room together, a wall of icy politeness between them at all times. “Oh.”

  “Let’s drop this, Ramona. Let it go.” She waved me out of the garden behind her. “I need to go to town this morning. Let’s have lunch at the B&B Café, shall we?”

  “Yes! Can we go to the record store?”

  “You can. I’ve got some errands to run.”

  I’d been to the B&B with Poppy ten million times. Old men sat at the counter with knobby hands curled around heavy white coffee cups, their cowboy hats and baseball caps and coats still firmly in place. At the tables sat the other customers—church sisters having a sweet roll and a cup of coffee, couples who’d come in to town to go to the grocery store, a sprinkling of men in suits who were the accountants and bankers and lawyers in town. Everybody was always nice. They all gave a nod, and a lot of them recognized me even though I didn’t live there but only came in with Poppy.

  What I had never done was go in anywhere pregnant. Until my mom found out, I’d been hiding it pretty well, so nobody suspected. After my mom put her hand on my belly that day, it was like the baby grew triple-time, stretching and unfolding like one of my grandmother’s irises. Almost overnight, I was huge. Truly, honestly, obviously pregnant.

  And this was the first time I was in public. This was the first time I realized that everybody was staring at me, and not in a good way. They looked at my belly, up to my face, and then looked at one another with tight mouths or rolled eyes. I felt as if somebody had written SLUT SLUT SLUT right over the middle of my body in Day-Glo orange letters.

  “I can’t do this,” I said to Poppy, and turned around to leave. Her hand on my waist pushed me back into the room.

  “Yes, you can. Hold your head up,” she said in my ear. “Look right through them and take that seat there.”

  Ears and face burning, I plopped down, hearing the hiss of whispers start up around us. My hands fell in my lap, below my big belly, and I jerked them up and put them on the table, scooting as close as I could. I didn’t look at anybody.

  “How are you, Poppy?” the waitress said, putting menus down in front of us.

  “I’m well, Marie. You remember my niece Ramon
a, don’t you?”

  “I do. How are you, sweetie?”

  I kept my head down. “Fine.”

  “Bring me some coffee, Marie, and an orange juice for my niece.”

  My ears were buzzing. My throat felt like it would close completely, and when I glanced out of the corner of my eye, one of the old men at the counter gave me a sour look. “Aunt Poppy, can we please just go?”

  “Absolutely not,” she said in a calm voice. “And after this, we’re going shopping.”

  “Please—”

  “Look at me, Ramona.”

  I raised miserable eyes, hoping she would see that I would die—die—if I didn’t get out of here.

  “Where do you think the father of that baby is now?” she asked so quietly no one else could hear.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe at work, maybe at school? Maybe hanging out with his friends?”

  “I guess.”

  “Probably nobody is making him feel like you do, even though he did exactly the same thing you did. Right?”

  I shrugged. “Right.”

  “You are not a bad person. You’re just pregnant. It’s natural. It happens all the time, and you are not going to hang your head, got it?”

  A little of the heat drained out of my cheeks. I nodded.

  “Sit up straight,” she said. “Head up. Stare back if anybody stares at you. Got it?”

  “I’ll try.”

  She winked. “Good girl.” She picked up her menu, then peeked around it. “Have I mentioned today that I’m so glad to have you spending the summer with me? I love you.”

  I picked up my spine and my chin and my menu. “I love you, too, Aunt Poppy. Really a lot.”

  After lunch, Aunt Poppy had to go to the bank and to see a shut-in. She gave me a twenty-dollar bill from the stash my mother left for me and said, “Walk all over downtown like it belongs to you, and I want you to spend every penny of that money, in three different stores. Got it?”