How to Bake a Perfect Life - Barbara O'Neal [31]
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