How to Bake a Perfect Life - Barbara O'Neal [34]
“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?”
It made me feel sick to my stomach, but I said, “Okay.”
The café was across the street from the courthouse, which had a domed roof. Some people sat on the benches under big trees, and others hurried as if they had some important reason to go inside, maybe to get somebody out of jail or maybe only to get some new license plates. I liked a drugstore around the corner from the courthouse, because it had a bunch of art supplies and notebooks and lip glosses. That would mean crossing the street in full view of all those people and parading right down the whole block.
Hold your head up.
I stood on the sidewalk in the shade, eyeing the bright sunshine across the street. Pickup trucks passed by. A young guy leaned out the passenger window of one of them. “Hey, mama!”
I blushed and marched like a nutcracker, all stiff and sober, down the street in the other direction. I didn’t know where I was going. Off the street, out of sight, at least until I could get my courage up again.
Then I heard Aunt Poppy’s voice in my head. Walk all over downtown like it belongs to you. I straightened up and tried to walk naturally—as naturally as a person could, anyway, with that weight right there in the middle of me. I passed by the dry cleaner’s and smelled the starch and scorch of the irons and by the narrow drugstore that always seemed to only stock things for old people—denture creams and elastic bandages and canes. An old man came out of the door as I was going by; he glanced at me but didn’t seem to notice or care about my belly, so I kept walking. At the end of the block, I’d cross the street and go around the courthouse on this side, which wasn’t as busy, then go to Russ’ Drug.
I couldn’t really think of anywhere else to stop before that. I wanted to save something for the record store. So I walked down the sidewalk like I belonged there and then turned to cross the street. Traffic was steady enough that I couldn’t just dash across—you might not think a little town like that could have so many vehicles, but everybody has to drive on the same street—and I was standing in the sun. A trickle of sweat came out from under my hair and ran down the back of my neck. The baby kicked me, as if he was getting cranky in the heat.
A truck slowed down in front of me and stopped right there, in the middle of the street. It was the same guy who’d yelled at me a few minutes ago. He was way older. The truck bed had a lot of construction tools in it, wheelbarrows and shovels and dusty tarps, and the guy looked as if he’d been working hard. He had light-blue eyes and long hair, and I took one step