How to Bake a Perfect Life - Barbara O'Neal [35]
“What’s your name, honey?”
I shook my head, checked to my left as if I was getting ready to cross the street.
“You’re not from around here,” he said. “I’d remember that hair. You’re as pretty as a little angel.”
I turned away, ignoring him, hoping for some help from an adult who would tell him to move along. Nobody was around.
“C’mon, sweetie, I won’t bite,” he said. “My name is Jason. What’s yours?”
Finally somebody behind the truck honked. “See you around,” the guy said, and pulled away. He hung his head out the window like a dog pretending he couldn’t stop staring at me.
The person who’d honked was a woman in a nurse’s uniform. She waved for me to cross the street, and I waved back, thanking her, then hurried across.
I made it to Russ’ Drug without any more trouble. The air-conditioning felt good after the hot sun outside, and I had twenty whole dollars to spend. There were some people in the store, but I pretended I didn’t see any of them, that I was completely invisible, and headed for the stationery aisle.
There were all kinds of things I liked here. Mechanical pencils with their fine, perfect line; labels for jars and file folders; paper for every use—onionskin for typing, Big Chief tablets, spiral notebooks, and, my favorite, sketch pads, which I somehow used only when I was at Aunt Poppy’s house. There was something about the place that made me want to draw. Even now I was thinking about the blue bottles and plants on her kitchen window. It seemed like something that would make me feel better, drawing or maybe painting that. I gathered a sketchbook and mechanical pencil and was dithering between the watercolors or pastel crayons when the pharmacist in his white coat came down the aisle. “Can I help you with something?” he said.
“No, thank you,” I said politely. “I’m just thinking.”
He didn’t go away.
“Is there something wrong?”
“Somebody thought you might be shoplifting.”
My face burned bright red, all the way up past my eyebrows and around the edges of my ears. “Why? Because I’m pregnant and that makes me a criminal?”
“Now, now, there’s no reason to get all excited. Why don’t you show me what’s in your pockets and we’ll be fine.”
For a long, hot second, I stared at him, sure it was a mistake. “I come in here all the time with my aunt Poppy. Don’t you remember me?”
“ ’Fraid not.” He shifted, folded his hands one atop the other like a deacon. Waiting.
Fighting very hard not to cry, I put back the sketch pad and the pencils. Deliberately, I pulled my pockets inside out, displaying the twenty dollars and a tube of Chapstick. Before he could ask, I pulled the lid off to show it was used. “I’ve had this.”
“Okay, then, we’re square. You want to come up to the front, I’ll ring those up for you when you’re ready.”
He walked off calmly. The devil girl inside me shoved everything off the shelf and left it on the floor for him to pick up. I saw it in my mind’s eye over and over, twenty times while I stood there, smarting and stinging, with my pockets hanging out beneath my belly and a twenty-dollar bill in my right hand.
The real me tucked my pockets back in, put away my money, and left the store. I hate you, I hate you, I hate you, I chanted in my mind. And I didn’t mean the pharmacist.
I meant Armando, who didn’t even know he’d done this to me. And probably wouldn’t care if he did.
Out on the street, I considered trying to find Poppy and clinging to her until it was time to go home. If I told her what had happened, she would be sympathetic.
But the record store was only two doors down, and I had the whole twenty to spend now that I wouldn’t buy anything from that guy, not even a fire extinguisher to put myself out if I was on fire. I wanted the art supplies, but maybe we could get them somewhere else, or we might go to Cinderella City one of these days. They at least had a Walgreens there.
I walked to Blue Fish Record Store. It had been there since the hippie days, and looked it, with dusty paisley curtains and a giant jade plant in the window. A yellow cat sunned himself on the windowsill,