How to Bake a Perfect Life - Barbara O'Neal [44]
“You look like you’re having a rough day,” he said, putting a light hand on the place between my shoulder blades. It was brotherly, friendly, I knew that, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t send a big shiver right down to my hips. Which didn’t do as much as you might think to loosen up the thick knot of disaster stuck in my throat. “You want a Dr Pepper?”
I nodded. “Thanks.”
There was no one else in the store this time, and we sat on stools by the counter. Jonah gave me a can of soda and opened one for himself. Before he sat down, he changed the music to something somber and moody, and immediately my emotions crowded right up through my throat into my sinuses and eyes. “I think this music is too sad!” I said, and tears spilled over my face. Embarrassed, I stood up, hiding behind my hair. “Sorry. I’m just in a mood.”
He reached out and put a hand on my shoulder. “Why don’t you sit down and drink your pop? I don’t care if you cry. Seems to me a girl like you has a lot of things to work out.”
I looked at him. “Why are you so nice to me?”
He didn’t look away. His gaze was as calm as morning, direct. “Because you seem like you could use a friend or two.”
I bowed my head. “Oh.” I had hoped for a better answer, but that was silly. “I guess I do. Need a friend, that is. None of my friends at home are talking to me right now. I don’t know if they’ll talk to me when I get back, either.” The sadness that hit me out on the street returned. “And I feel so mixed up.”
“I bet,” he said. “Sometimes I am, too.”
“What are you mixed up about?”
That sorrowful smile again. “You first.”
I turned my can around and around in my hands. The smell of prunes came out of it. “I guess I kept thinking that I could just have the baby and then go back to my life and it would all be the same.” I waited a minute for the tears to go away, then said, “But I don’t think that’s what’s going to happen. At all. Like, I’m not going to be the same person I was.”
He nodded.
“I messed things up so much, you know? And now I don’t know how to fix them.”
“Maybe that’s the wrong approach.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, what if it isn’t a big mistake? What if this is only something that happened, something that’s different from the things most of your friends are doing but not bad. Maybe it’s extraordinary, to help you become an extraordinary person.”
A flare of hope burned through my mind. “I never thought of that.”
He half smiled. “Does it feel better to think that way?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’d say go with it.”
For a long minute I just looked at him, very aware of his hair shining in the light coming through the window, and the hollow of his throat, and his hands lying on his thighs. “Your turn,” I said.
“I’m sorry?”
“You said you feel mixed up sometimes. Or did you say that to make me feel better?”
“No, it’s true,” he said, and picked up his can. He lifted his left hand to display the mangled fingers. “Last summer I lost these fingers in an accident. It was the most ordinary accident, an ordinary summer day. We tried to keep them, you know. Everybody put the pieces on ice, but we were way up in the mountains, and—” He shook his head, put his hand down. “It didn’t work out.”
I nodded. “And that makes you feel mixed up?”
“No.” He inclined his head, as if he was weighing how much to say. “The only thing I ever wanted in my whole life, from the time I was five years old, was to play guitar. I love music like a crazy man, and if I can’t play my guitar, I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself.”
My heart ached for him. “Wow, that’s really hard. At least I’m pregnant for only nine months.”
He chuckled, and there was such resonance in the sound that I found myself sitting straighter. “But like you said, it changes everything.”
“Did you play guitar in a band or something?”
“I just finished Berklee two years ago.”
“That’s a good school?”
His smile was soft. “Yeah. One of the best guitar schools in the country. Spent