How to Bake a Perfect Life - Barbara O'Neal [56]
“So your gut is saying you want to keep the baby.”
“My heart and my gut and my entire soul.”
He nodded, his eyes very kind. “It sounds to me like you know exactly what to do.”
“How do I convince everybody else?”
“You’ll figure it out.”
The waitress brought our pie. We ate it, talking and not talking, peacefully.
When Jonah drove me home, I sat in the car, gathering my courage for a minute. “Thanks, Jonah.”
He touched my upper arm with one finger. “You’re welcome.”
For a long minute we were facing each other, hidden from view by the rain, and I looked up at him, seeing his mouth, wishing with all my heart that we were not separated by so many years so that I could kiss him. I took a breath, swept by a vision of what that would be like.
“You’re not going to have any trouble finding boyfriends, Ramona. You’re a very pretty girl.”
I almost stopped breathing. “I am?”
“Yes,” he said, and leaned away from me. “Better get inside before they come after you.”
My mother was sitting on the back porch, smoking, sheltered from the rain by the roof. One of Poppy’s big multicolored sweaters was wrapped around her shoulders, and she looked small inside it. Her makeup was worn off, even her lipstick. She blew a lungful of smoke into the air. “Come sit down with me, Ramona.”
I paused at the top of the step. “Please don’t yell at me anymore.”
“No,” she said. “I just want to say a few things. I need you to listen to me.”
With a sigh, I sank onto the chair next to her, my hands going around my tummy like a circle of protection. “What?”
“I’m sorry I got so upset, Ramona. I think what’s getting lost in all of this is the fact that I love you. And whatever anger I’m feeling, it’s not directed at you but at the circumstances. Does that make sense?”
“It feels like you’re mad at me.”
She smoked, stroked my hair. “I know. But what I’m really upset about is the way your life has been turned upside down, in ways you can’t even imagine yet. Whatever you do with the baby, this has ended your childhood.”
“It is changing me.”
“Yes. You’re growing up very fast. I didn’t want that for you—I wanted to give you things I didn’t get to have. Going away to college and maybe traveling and finding work you love.”
“You wanted to go to college?”
“Good God, yes. I was the smartest girl in my school. I wanted to study architecture and become the best designer since Frank Lloyd Wright.” She shrugged. “Honestly, I didn’t know how to make that happen—it wasn’t like people in my family went to college, you know—but if I’d kept working rather than getting married, I might have figured it out.”
Instead, she met my father the summer she was nineteen and they were married the following year, with a baby—me—ripening in her belly. “You could go to school now. I know lots of moms who do that.”
She put her cigarette out in a flowerpot. “Maybe,” she said, but I could tell she didn’t mean it. “I have a lot to do with you children and the business.”
“That’s Dad’s business, though, right?”
“No,” she said, and met my gaze. “It’s ours. We’re a good team and I love him and I’m not sorry I started a family. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have higher aspirations for you. Will you think about that, Ramona? You will be so much freer to make your own choices if you let this baby go to a family that is aching to have it.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said. “But I want you to think about how you would have felt giving me up for adoption. Never seeing me ever again. Not looking at me now, never knowing how things are with me.”
Her eyes grew bright blue with tears, and she squeezed my hand with her own. With a little shake of her head, she