How to Bake a Perfect Life Page 24

  “I know. But I don’t want you to get your hopes up, Katie. Your mom has a long road ahead of her.”

  “I can help her.”

  “That’s not your job, sweetheart. Your job is to devote yourself to your own life. To flowers, and staying healthy, and—”

  She stands up, haughty and still too thin, partly because she’s growing about a half inch a week. “I can do both.” With dignity she says, “Thanks for supper, Jonah. I’m going to walk home now.”

  “Katie! You don’t have to go. I’m—”

  She gives me a cold, hard stare. “This is none of your business. And you can’t be my mother, understand? I don’t need another mother.” She lets the screen door slam behind her.

  For a long moment I stare at the blank place of her leaving, feeling oddly embarrassed. Jonah puts his hand on my shoulder. “Let her go. She’ll be all right.”

  “When I was her age,” I say, “I really loved my mother, but she drove me crazy.”

  “I was a mama’s boy. Not in the sissy way you hear it, but I wanted to please her. When she needed something, it was always me she asked.” He gives a chuckle. “She still does, come to think of it.”

  “So she’s alive.”

  “Yes. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to come back to Colorado. My brother and his wife and all his kids are still up in Castle Rock and my mom lives in Boulder in a really nice apartment house for seniors.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Eighty-three and still out on cruises every winter.”

  I laugh. “That will be my mom.”

  He leaves me alone, heading for the kitchen to collect the dishes. I imagine him as a boy, fetching groceries or pulling weeds to please his mother, and it pierces me in some way I don’t want to examine. I watch him, the singular grace in his long back, the smooth efficiency of his movements in the kitchen. His hair is wavy and has grown too long in the back, capturing light on each bend. It is thick and inviting hair, and I’d like to touch it. Something I’ve been pushing down hard rises to the surface, whispering, insistent.

  He looks up, as if he feels my gaze, and before I can look away, he smiles. “What are you thinking, Ramona?”

  There is something haunting and wistful on the stereo. “What is playing, Jonah?”

  “This one is mine. Do you like it?”

  I touch my chest, close my eyes, feeling that yearning rise higher and higher, pushing through my limbs. “Yes. It’s like you.”

  He closes the door and comes around the counter, draws one of my hands to him, puts it on his shoulder. “How is it like me?”

  “A little haunted. Deep. Gentle.”

  “Is that how you think of me?”

  “That’s some of it.” I close my eyes again, hearing the essence of him. “The picture is your face that day we were in the car on the way home from the truck stop, do you remember?”

  He nods. “It was raining.”

  I look up at him, touch his mouth with my finger. “I was so in love with you. I wanted to kiss you so badly.”

  He recaptures my hand, presses his mouth to the center of my palm. “I remember that your hair was damp, and you were wearing a green shirt.” A smile touches his lips. “I could see your breasts a little through it. You have such extraordinary skin.”

  “Do I?”

  He bends, presses a kiss to my neck. “Yes.” His hands slide around me, over my waist and back, down around the curve of my bottom. “We’re adults now,” he says. “We can do whatever we want.”

  “Yeah?” I look at his mouth, sway against him. “Like?”

  “Depends. Do you trust me?”

  “Yes.”

  “No,” he says, and smiles. “But that’s all right.” Holding my gaze, he slides a hand down my leg and crumples the fabric of my skirt, pulling it upward until my leg is bare and his fingertips are skimming over the skin, up the back of my thigh to my buttock. One finger slides beneath the elastic. It feels decidedly more intimate to have our eyes locked as he does this, and I glance away. He stops.

  I look up. He smiles, bends, and captures my lower lip, suckling it for a moment, and I feel a jolt of heat. I reach for his shoulders, wanting to pull him into me, and he resists. “Fold your hands. And keep your eyes on me,” he murmurs. His hand begins to move again, lightly skimming over the infinitesimal hairs on my body, along the back of my thigh, around my buttocks, beneath my panties.

  It’s hard to keep my eyes locked with his. To keep looking deep into the honeyed irises. I feel revealed. Anxious. I capture his hand, and he smiles.

  “My turn.”

  He stands straight and looks at me. I reach for the buttons of his shirt; he doesn’t move. I unbutton it, then put my hands on his chest, not looking down, just feeling it. Nipples and hair and ribs, belly and belly button, sides. He takes one of my hands and puts it over his erection, holding my gaze, and I take one of his hands and put it on my breast. “Shall we go upstairs?” I ask.

  “Oh, no. Not tonight.” He shrugs out of his shirt. “My turn again.”

  This time he tugs the bottom of my tank top and pulls upward. I lift my arms and he skims it off, tossing it aside, then takes off my bra. Only the tips of his fingers touch me, circling my shoulders, stroking my breasts, curling around to cup them, brushing over my nipples. It’s very difficult to stand there, looking into his eyes, and I see that he’s struggling, too. His nostrils flare.

  “I don’t think I can keep looking only at your eyes,” he says, a dark glitter in his own. “But don’t move, all right?”

  Caught in the dream, I nod ever so slightly as he leans over me, cups my breasts with a sigh, and kisses them, as lightly as he has touched me all over. Every nerve in my body is on alert, and when he grazes my forearm, I shudder.

  He pulls me into a kiss, and our bare skin brushes. His hands run up my back, down. I wrap my arms around him, pull his head into me, feeling as if I might dissolve right here.

  And it’s a thousand times better than I could have imagined. His scent envelopes me and ignites every sensor on every square centimeter of my skin. His hands leave trails of red lava over my back, my shoulders, my neck. When he kisses the bare flesh of my shoulder, moving mouth and tongue over my skin, I pull up his shirt in the back to touch his skin.

  “Jesus,” he whispers, “I love kissing you.” His hand moves on my neck, my shoulder, over the square of skin on my chest. “Touching you.” I even like the hectic way he looks when he says it, color high across his cheekbones.

  He resumes kissing my neck, my throat, which makes my spine soften, and I’m exploring the skin of his back, his sides, his ribs, feeling ripples as my fingers cross the terrain, his thick, cool hair, feeling the shape of his skull as his hands slide lower. He pulls himself up to my mouth and kisses me again. His hands are still, his erection pressed into my thigh.

  He shifts, lifts his head. He’s breathing hard. “That’s as much as I can stand and still stop.”

  I’m flushed from breast to thighs. “We aren’t stopping!”

  “Yes, we are.” He gives me a wicked little wink. “Second base.” He shakes out my tank and bra, gives them to me.

  “Why?”

  “Because I won’t want you to leave, and you will have to get up and go, to Katie.”

  I nod.

  “And because,” he adds, “I want you to see that you can trust me.”

  “Trust you? I do!”

  “You don’t trust anybody,” he says definitely, and smooths his hair away from his forehead. “And with good reason.”

  It strikes me that I am falling, really falling, and that recognition alone is good enough to make me straighten. I sink to the stool. I struggle with what I should say. My hands are shaky, and I’m swollen with the wish to make love.

  He doesn’t fill up the space with anything, only lets me think through what he’s said, what we did. I feel like flash paper, as if I will go up in a single blast at the flame of his hands, and I shift away. “
I don’t know how anymore. To trust anyone.”

  “There is one way to know some things.”

  “How?”

  “Ask yourself what you want. And then go for it.”

  “But that doesn’t always work.”

  “No?” He’s sitting on a stool now, his long body relaxed and sexy, but it is that face I always want to look at—his beautiful, wise eyes. “Give me an example of something you wanted and it didn’t work out.”

  “Oh, thousands of them,” I say, rolling my eyes. “Let’s start with Sofia’s father. I wanted him and I ended up—” I don’t want to say screwing up my life, because there is so much that’s good. “It ended being a very dark time for me. Out of something I thought I wanted.”

  He nods, his finger sliding down my arm. “What did you really want, though? At fifteen, did you want sex? Or did you just want to kiss him and be with him?”

  To my horror, tears spring to my eyes. “I had no idea what I wanted except to be held, to kiss him. I didn’t know all the stuff that we would do.”

  “Right. He wanted sex.” His hand twining around my wrist is so gentle I can’t bear it. “You wanted kisses. Big difference.”

  I feel slightly sick to my stomach and look at the door. “I think I should go.”

  He stands with me, puts his hands on my shoulders. “Don’t panic, Ramona. It’s only talk.”

  “No. It’s you. It’s … me.” I look around the room, at the clean serenity, the undisturbed quiet. “It’s all of this. I have to go now.”

  Jonah captures me from behind as I am running away, his arms coming all the way around my body. He puts his face into my hair. “Don’t run.” His body feels reliable against my back, solid and real, and I find myself leaning into him, letting go of … everything. My head fits into the cradle of his shoulder, and his cheek presses into my ear.

  “This is scaring me, too, Ramona. It feels dangerous and unreliable, as if it could really hurt.”

  I put my palms on the arm that circles my throat. “Yes,” I whisper.

  “But it also feels magical. Like my blood is filled with glitter. Like a spell was finally broken.”

  His voice in my ear has color and texture and richness. I close my eyes and it flows down the side of my neck, into the hollow of my throat. I think, I am in love with him.

  He’s rocking me gently as he says, “Do you know how I see you?”

  “Foolish?”

  “Generous. Independent. Loving.” He kisses my neck. “So loving.”

  I turn in his arms. “What do we do, then, Jonah? I don’t know how to leap without fear of the consequences anymore. I don’t know if I can.”

  “No leaping,” he says, and kisses me. “Just one step at a time.”

  I raise my eyebrow. “Well, I did like second base.”

  He looks at my mouth, presses forward subtly. “Me, too.”

  I leave him, walking home through the dark beneath whispering trees. Once he is out of my sight, the cool night air washes the smell of him from my skin, my nose, and I am left with a hollow terror.

  I have not been in love. Until now I thought my love was channeled in other directions, into my child and my breads and my family. With Dane, I said I was, but it didn’t feel like this—as if all these years I’d been living in moonlight and had no idea there was even a sun. Until Jonah arrived. Jonah feels like sunlight, and my light-starved skin craves him.

  It’s one thing to live in moonlight and never know there is a sun. But once you know, how can you ever be happy with night again?

  In the dark of my neighborhood, I put my hands over my stomach, feeling my heart flutter in panic. He’s too much. It’s too dangerous. There are too many other things I should be thinking about—Katie and Sofia and my bakery.

  And yet, as I am settling into sleep with Milo purring against my side, it isn’t fear in my mouth. It’s longing. It’s love. The color of it is soft purple, woven with the gold of Jonah’s eyes.

  Katie

  For two weeks, Katie has been walking to the 7-Eleven down the street and buying a money order with whatever she has saved. If she doesn’t spend some money, Lily and Ramona will be suspicious, so she buys candy and some scrunchies for her hair and little things like that. Lily bought her a soft knee pad for the garden, and Katie let Ramona think she bought it herself with tips she earns in the bakery. It made her feel bad, but then she thought of her mother alone in the rehab unit, looking for Katie’s mail, and she hardened her heart.

  Everybody here has somebody to depend on—some even have a lot of different people. Katie’s mom has only Katie. When Ramona puts together a care package to send Sofia, Katie asks if they can do the same thing for Lacey. Ramona looks all soft and sad when Katie asks, but then she says, “Sure,” and they fill a box with things a woman might need in jail. (“It isn’t jail,” Katie says. “Okay, a hospital, then,” Ramona replies.) Soap that smells like flowers, small bottles of shampoo, tissues in small packs, gum and candy. When they put the box in the mail, Ramona touches Katie’s shoulders. “You have a good heart, sweetie. And you are a very good daughter.”

  “Why isn’t my dad talking to me, do you think?” Katie asks as they walk back to the bakery. The only free time Ramona ever has is in the late afternoon and evening, so the air smells of roses and supper, and the sun, which sets so much earlier here, is already falling behind the mountains. It’s beautiful, and Katie loves it a lot. Maybe more than any other place she’s ever lived.

  And that makes her feel bad, like a traitor. A ripple of annoyance rushes down her neck, which happens a lot lately. She feels grumpy all of a sudden for no reason, like there’s a band of anger right over the top of her eyebrows. Since there’s no reason for it now, she rubs the place and waits for Ramona to answer.

  “I’m sure he’s just focused on getting well,” she says. “Sometimes when a soldier has been badly injured, it takes time for him to come to terms with it.”

  “A lot of soldiers kill themselves when they get out of the hospital.”

  Ramona looks down at her quickly. “What makes you think that?”

  She shrugs. “They talk about it in schools on the base. Two girls I knew in El Paso had parents who committed suicide when they came back. One of the girls just got out of the hospital.”

  Ramona says nothing for a long while. It’s so quiet Katie can hear their footsteps whispering over the old sidewalk. “Your dad has a lot to live for. You, and Sofia, and the new baby.”

  “Yeah,” Katie answers without much enthusiasm.

  “Are you excited about the baby at all?”

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t seem real.” She kicks a stone in her path. “And it’s not like we’ll all live together, anyway.” Saying it out loud makes her feel that pinch in her chest.

  “You probably could if you wanted to.”

  She nods. “My mom needs me, though.”

  “What about your dad?”

  “He has Sofia and the new baby. My mom doesn’t have anybody.”

  They stop at the gate to the bakery, and there are Katie’s dahlias, growing in happy clumps all along the old wrought-iron fence. They look like women in beautiful blouses, cheering, with hands up high and big smiles on their faces. Katie touches her favorite, a red flower with rolled tubes of petals, called Figaro.

  “Well,” Ramona says. “Nothing has to be decided right now.”

  Katie knows that Ramona wants her to go live with Sofia and her dad and the new baby, which sounds good in a way, but the thought makes her feel so guilty that she rushes away from it and goes inside.

  This morning, Ramona is out doing some shopping and errands. Katie writes her mom a letter on paper, just as she has been doing sometimes to her friend Madison in El Paso, even if Madison hasn’t written back even one time.

  Dear Mom,

  Here is a little more money. Sorry it can’t be more, but I have to be careful or everyone will be suspicious and then they won’t let me talk to you at all. />
  I hope you liked the care package, which you should be getting soon, if you haven’t already. We weren’t sure what you’d like, so I just grabbed things that might make you happy.

  Katie pauses, rubbing her bare foot over Merlin’s soft ribs. He sighs, hard, and falls back to sleep. It’s always so hard to know exactly what to say. She doesn’t want to sound like she’s too happy, so she doesn’t talk about the flowers too much, and she doesn’t want to seem like she likes Ramona more than her own mom, so it’s hard to talk about that. Finally she says,

  I’ve been writing emails to Dad every day. I’m going to take swimming lessons pretty soon, too, and I’ve grown so tall you won’t believe it!

  Love,

  Katie

  She puts the letter in an envelope and leaves it open so she can seal it after she puts the money order in it. This one will be the best so far—almost thirty dollars—and she feels pretty proud of herself. When Ramona takes her nap this afternoon, Katie will mail it.

  Then, since she feels like she should, she gets online to write a cheerful email for Sofia to read to her dad. In these emails, she can sound as happy as she wants, so she tells him about the suppers at Jonah’s house, which she loves, and about how she and Lily are going to a flower show at the City Auditorium in July, which is the biggest flower show for dahlias in almost the whole country. Oh, and about hitting five foot eight.

  And then, because the day is so gorgeous and who wants to be inside in the summertime, she goes out to the backyard garden.

  Ramona

  I’m counting bags of flour when Katie comes into the storeroom and breathes, “Can I talk to you?”

  She looks pinched and scared. All day long, I’ve had a feeling of impending doom. Is this it? “What’s wrong? Did you get bad news about something?”

  “No, um …” She looks over her shoulder, where the apprentices are working. The dishwasher is humming, music is playing—cheery sounds. “I just think I … uh … might have started my period?”

  “Oh!” I’m surprised. She’s young, but Sofia was barely fourteen. Katie is only a few months behind that. None of which is any help to a young girl who probably wishes very badly that her mother was here for this moment. “Okay. Let’s go upstairs and I’ll show you where everything is.”