How to Bake a Perfect Life - Barbara O'Neal [123]
“Lily is always trying to make up for being mean to Ramona when she was pregnant.”
“Really?” Katie straightens, holding her dirt-speckled hands at her sides. “How was she mean?”
“She sent her away to her aunt’s house for the summer, let Ramona’s dad give her sister the job Ramona loved, and then they fought over whether Ramona should give up Sofia for adoption.” The old woman slaps her gloves together, sending a puff of dust into the air. “Between you and me, I think she feels guilty that she was so mad at Ramona for not giving her up.”
“Because she loves Sofia so much now.”
“Relationships are complicated. Lily was mean because her mother was mean to her.”
“Really?”
“Beat the holy hell out of her when she was fifteen. She has scars from it still. She never got over it, and never forgave her mother, either.”
“That’s sad.” Katie thinks of her own mother. “I have forgiven my mother. But she never beat me, even when she was high.”
“Remember, though, that sometimes you can love and forgive somebody, but you might still want to keep your distance.”
“What do you know about it? You don’t even know my mother!”
The old woman nods. “That’s true. I wasn’t speaking in particular, just in general. Maybe Lily was right not to forgive her mother, even if her mother wanted her to.”
Katie feels that tangle of anxiety and sorrow and relief that always comes up when she thinks about her mother. Looking at a rosebush, she frowns and suddenly remembers the flower show. Maybe she’ll go on her own. She’s thirteen! She can ride the bus. Nobody cares where she is, anyway.
“I have to go,” she says to the old lady. “See ya.”
Ramona is still in the kitchen, talking to the workmen as they bang around inside the utility closet. Katie dashes up the back stairs quietly and fires up the computer. She’ll check Google maps to see where it is, then take a bus, which she used to do in El Paso all the time. It comes only a block away. Her dad used to always say what a great sense of direction she has, and it’s true. It’s like a map lives in her brain and she moves around it without ever losing her place.
She collects the information she needs: the bus schedule and the address of the flower show. She can look at all the flowers and come home. For a minute she wonders if she ought to tell Ramona that’s what she wants to do, get her permission, but Ramona doesn’t care how Katie feels, so why should Katie care how Ramona feels?
There’s an email in her inbox from her mom, but Katie leaves it for later. She feels a little guilty, but she has a plan and not much time to catch that bus. She runs upstairs, changes into a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, then gathers all the money she’s saved and sticks it into her pocket.
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