How to Bake a Perfect Life - Barbara O'Neal [75]
“You did?” I’m immediately enchanted. “Classical music?”
“Spanish influences, guitar and cello. But mostly I wrote scores.”
“Wrote? You don’t anymore?”
He shakes his head faintly. “Things … got in the way.”
Something in his face makes me ask, “Do you miss it?”
In the house, the music shifts to cello, a slow long bowing of singular beauty. I watch as he turns his glass of wine in a circle on the table. His untouched thumb is long and graceful, and he looks restlessly toward the mountains. “Sometimes. Not very much anymore.”
Rising around him like heat waves, invisible but bending the air, is his sorrow over that choice. Much too large for this moment, so I say, “We go where we should, I suppose.” I lean toward him. “It smells as if you have become a wonderful cook. What have you made?”
Immediately the air shifts. He smiles. “Pasta. With prosciutto and asparagus and fresh peas and sun-dried tomatoes. Are you hungry now? Would you like to eat?”
“Whenever you like.”
As I watch, his body softens and he leans back in the chair, then looks over at me. “Let’s wait a little. Drink this wine and then go inside. I love this time of day.”
“So do I.”
He says, “You were a godsend to me that summer, you know.”
“Was I?” I laugh. “What I remember is chasing you shamelessly.”
“You did,” he agrees, and raises his glass to me. “It was the best thing that had happened to me for a long time. You can’t imagine how healing it was.” He pauses. “Or how difficult.”
The air has gone quiet, falling into the purple hush of dusk as the sun slips suddenly behind Pikes Peak. Something electric buzzes between us—or maybe that’s just me. “I’m sure it was terribly embarrassing.”
“Not at all. It—” He bows his head briefly. “But you were so very young.”
All at once I am standing in my aunt’s garden in the red light of a summer dusk, nearly fainting as he bends over to kiss me. It has been almost twenty-five years, but the moment rushes back to me as perfectly detailed as if it happened ten minutes ago. The heat of it rushes down my spine, and again it is like he is a magnet and my body is made of iron shavings.
I raise my glass. “To your kindness, sir. It was a very hard time for me.”
He touches my glass with his own. “So tell me about your daughter. What is she like?”
“Sofia.” Even her name makes me happy, and the corners of my mouth curve upward as I look out to the ocean of grass surrounding the ship of a house. “She’s very, very, very smart, like my mother, and has a mighty will, like my grandmother. She’s quite beautiful, dark hair, blue eyes. Curvy but in no way fat. She’s a terrific person.”
“So,” he says in his mellow voice, “she’s smart like your mother and stubborn like your grandmother. How is she like you, Ramona?”
“Hmmm.” I think, Only you would ask that question, and ponder it for a moment. At first, all I can come up with are the ways she is not like me. “She’s not a baker, or even really much of a cook thus far. She’s a lot less at the mercy of events than I’ve been in my life, and she’s wary about relationships with men, smart. Not my strong suit.”
“How is she like you?” he repeats.
“She has my sense of wonder,” I say at last. “And a sense of the absurd. And she loves music.”
“Do you still?”
“Absolutely.” I smile. “Maybe I should make you a tape.”
He laughs, eyes crinkling at the corners. “I was sure I could school you in good musical tastes. Arrogant.”
“No, I loved it. I still have that tape, actually. A few years ago I had my brother burn me a CD of the same songs so I could listen to it.” I stick my feet out in front of me and cross them at the ankles. “I could probably recite the whole playlist.”
He relaxes, too, but in the manner of a cat, alert in the dusk. “I remember ‘Malagueña.’ ”
“Yes. And ‘Asturias,’ and Segovia’s Cello in C.” I gesture with my half-empty glass toward the soft strains of guitar coming from within the house. “I’m hearing bits and pieces of it playing now.”
He nods, looking slightly abashed. “All my favorites.