How to Bake a Perfect Life - Barbara O'Neal [55]
He turned the music up.
“Do you like it, too?” I asked in surprise.
“It’s wistful,” he said. “You like emotional music. Music that tells a story.”
“I guess I do.”
“Let me ask you: When you hear a song, do you see pictures, or do you feel it in your chest, or none of the above?”
For a minute I curled a long strand of hair around my finger, thinking. “Pictures. I see like a little movie. And when it’s sad, I feel it in my heart. Also when it’s happy, I guess.” I wondered if that was the right answer. “How about you?”
“I see it in colors. This song is silvery, and green in this part. It’s reddish brown in the drums.”
“Oh, my gosh! I can see that! The flutey sound is silver, right?”
He looked at me, a genuine smile opening his serious face. “Yes. Exactly.”
We pulled up in front of the truck stop. There weren’t many other cars, and the rain was pouring down. “Ready to make a break for it?”
I grinned. “I am if you are.”
“Ready, set, run!”
We bolted out of the car, dashing toward the door with our hands over our heads. Jonah got there first and pushed the door open to usher me inside. We found a booth in the nonsmoking section, and when our waitress, a tall curvy woman with a lot of long blond hair, came over, Jonah said, “I’ll just have a coffee. How about you, Ramona?”
“Hot chocolate, please.”
“Tell me what’s happening,” he said when she left.
I looked out the window at the smeary view. “My mother is so mad at me, I think she’d like to shake me. She wants me to give the baby away. So does everybody else.”
He folded his hands in front of him on the table, the right over the left, hiding the ruined fingers. “I take it that you might not want to?”
I leaned forward, my own hands in front of me. “You know that day you played the classical guitar music in the shop? I could feel the baby dancing. I don’t think it was real to me before then that there is a person inside me.”
His eyes stayed on my face. He nodded.
“I’m confused,” I said. “Maybe they’re right. They love me. I know they love me, right?”
“They do. They care about you more than anything else.”
“But I think I”—I touched my fingers to my mouth—“care about this baby more than anything else. It’s like the way it happened doesn’t even matter. The baby is mine. It’s like she’s here for a reason or something.”
The waitress brought our drinks in heavy ceramic cups with a pitcher of cream. “You want something to eat with that, sweetie? I used to get such an acid stomach from chocolate when I was pregnant.”
I looked up. It was the first time anyone had treated me like a member of a club, a club of women who were pregnant or had been. “I think I would, actually. Pie? Do you have apple pie?” I looked at Jonah. “If that’s okay. I don’t have any money with me.”
“Oh, he’s rich, sweetheart,” she said, and winked at Jonah. “He can handle it.”
Jonah flushed, just as he had the day he dropped the backgammon piece. “I’m pretty sure I can manage a piece of pie. As a matter of fact, bring me one, too. With ice cream. You want ice cream, Ramona?”
“Yes!”
“Be right back.”
I stirred my hot chocolate. “Have you ever had to make a really big decision? How do you do it?”
He took a breath. “Well, you have to weigh the alternatives and consider what will make you happy. And what will make you miserable. Then trust your gut. Make a choice and be real with it, no matter what happens. Once you choose, don’t second-guess yourself.”
“I kept thinking that I was just going to go back to school and be the same old person I was, but everything is changed now. I think what I have to do is imagine who I’ll be ten years from now and think about what I will want then.”
“Good plan. You can talk it out with me if you want. See how it plays.”
I took a breath and shook my hair out of my face. “Okay, this might be stupid, but this is what I think. I think if I let her go, I’m going to wonder every single day what she’s doing and what she looks like and if her parents are being good to her.
“I think if I don