How to Bake a Perfect Life - Barbara O'Neal [40]
She slipped off her gloves. “Everything seems to be completely normal, right on schedule. The baby should be born around August twentieth.” She wrote something down, then looked at me. “Why don’t you get dressed and come downstairs and we can talk a little more?”
“About what?”
“I want to find out more about how you’re eating and exercising and your plans for the baby when it’s born. Keep it? Allow it to be adopted? What do you have in mind?”
“Keep it?” The idea sent scattershot shards of shock through my upper back. “I’m only fifteen. I can’t be a mom yet.”
“Okay.” She stood. “I can take you to meet some great people who match babies with good families. We need to do it soon, though, so let’s go down and include your aunt in the discussion, okay?”
My heart felt hollow all of a sudden. I nodded and she left, but then I just lay there, staring at the ceiling, my hands over the baby inside me. Who would be her mother? I tried to imagine and couldn’t.
Within me, the baby somersaulted in a lazy, happy way, turning and turning. Under my palm, some knobby body part—elbow, maybe, or shoulder or heel—moved in a slow, long sweep. For the first time it seemed weirdly incredible that there was a person inside me. A person with eyelashes and lips and fingernails.
To avoid crying, I stood up and put my panties and jeans back on, then went downstairs to talk about my “options.”
All I could think about was getting back into my jeans, going to school in September as myself, forgetting this whole mess.
Nancy and Poppy mostly talked while I listened, discussing things that didn’t even make any sense to me—or maybe I just didn’t want to hear them. After a while I left them at the counter, Nancy joining in with the kneading so Poppy didn’t require my help anymore. I went to the sunroom—which was shady in the afternoon—and stretched out in the hammock to read. If I left my foot out, I could reach the windowsill and keep the hammock rocking back and forth. The air started to smell like bread, all fresh and homey.
I wasn’t concentrating on the book. Outside the window, a plane left a long white trail across the sky, and I wondered what it would be like to go somewhere like Paris and work in a bakery. Or go to India like my aunt. Most of the people I knew were born and raised and died right in the same town, although one of my mom’s friends, a realtor who had divorced her husband and wore too much makeup, sometimes went on cruises.
But Paris sounded so romantic. I had travel posters in my bedroom: of Paris and the Eiffel Tower and a loaf of bread and a bottle of wine; of Venice, which also seemed magical; and of Ireland, because we were Irish, and sometimes, when specials came on TV about the Great Potato Famine, it made me sad to think of my ancestor Bridget boarding that ship with a crock of starter in her hands, sailing away to a faraway land and never seeing her family again. I liked to imagine sailing back and stepping on Irish land. It seemed as if it might make my ancestor happy. It looked beautiful with all those green, green, green hills.
Paris, though. Dreamily, I kept nudging the windowsill with my toe to keep the hammock swaying. The baby was quiet, and I rubbed the top of my stomach as if I was rubbing her back, glad for a rest. For no reason I could pinpoint, I suddenly wondered if she would look like Armando. I knew Armando was the father, but I lied to my parents and everybody else about it, saying it was a boy at a party, nobody I knew. Which might shock you, and it sure shocked them, but I just couldn’t stand to tell them the truth.
Armando came to work in July, the hottest part of the summer. He was slim but wiry, and quiet at first—like a cat, one of the other girls said. Careful and observant. He washed dishes, which is why we started talking, since I was a busgirl. He flirted with