How to Bake a Perfect Life - Barbara O'Neal [17]
She puts the brush away carefully and leaves the bathroom, looking for a trash can for her apple core. A hollowness goes with her. She’s bored now. There’s nothing to do. She’s already read her book six times and she doesn’t like computer games, and she can’t think about her dad until ten o’clock.
She might as well go outside with Ramona.
Ramona
I’m out in my garden by five a.m., the loaves baked and cooling on the counter. The air is quite sharp so early, and I wear jeans and a sweater, my hair woven into a tight braid, hands in gloves to keep the grit out from under my nails. Sometimes I still have to scrub them like a surgeon when I come inside.
The garden is at the rear of the backyard, filling the space that used to be an old garage. It was falling down when I moved in here eight years ago to live with my grandmother after my divorce. I had someone pull the brick walls down on two sides, leaving one wall with an empty window and another on the north end against the alley. He found some magic way to brace the walls so they are sound, and it looks beautiful like that, as if the earth is taking over, vines growing up the walls, roses twining around the window frame. The floor was dirt to start with, so that meant only digging it out, hauling in a load of topsoil, and then planting. A big project, but I needed something to keep me busy when I wasn’t baking.
I’m kneeling in the dirt, carefully thinning nasturtiums, when Katie materializes at the edge of the plot. She’s wearing jeans that are too short and a ratty-looking brown sweater that’s much too big. Sunlight coaxes golden lights from the bends of her crazy ringlets.
“Good morning,” I say.
She yawns. “Hi.”
“If you’re hungry, there’s cereal in the cupboard, or toast, of course.”
“I had an apple.”
In my peripheral vision I spy the bright blue eyes of Milo, who is stalking me. I grin and point at his tail swishing out of the shadows. I wiggle my fingers on the ground, and he rockets out of the plants, spats my hand with both paws like a boxer, and zooms away, diving into a honeysuckle bush. A squirrel leaps out of it and races down the fence line, chattering in alarm, and as if that is exactly the result he had intended, Milo saunters out and sits regally on the grass, all Siamese elegance, very black points and long nose and long limbs. The king of everything.
“He’s really pretty,” Katie says. “I’ve never had a cat before.”
“Have you had dogs?”
“Only Merlin. How do you think Merlin and Milo will get along?”
“No idea. We’ll just have to wait and see.” I am worried, but she doesn’t need to know that. I’ll enlist my brother’s help introducing the two animals. He’s done it often enough.
“Do you want to help?” I ask. “I’m just pulling weeds.”
“I guess.”
The plants are still small and there isn’t much to do, but I wander through the rows plucking weeds, thinning the flowers and herbs, picking up sticks and scraps of paper the wind has blown in. An elm tree, ancient and enormous, shades the house and sheds twigs the way a woman sheds hair. Katie follows me, but I can see her heart isn’t in it.
I want to talk to her about her dad. I look at the sky, gauging the time to be nearly six. “Let’s go out to breakfast. What do you say?”
Her face flares with hope, then she tugs on her jeans. “Er, I don’t really have anything to dress up in.”
“It’s casual, but that’s part of the plan. Sofia left me money to buy you clothes. It