How to Bake a Perfect Life - Barbara O'Neal [83]
MOM
Katie stares at the email for a long minute, feeling strange. Kind of dizzy and a little bit sick to her stomach. Looking over her shoulder, she hits the print button, then closes her email and takes the printed page upstairs. She sticks it inside her notebook and then puts it out of her mind. Tonight she wants to be happy. She wants to celebrate her dad waking up and the aunties she’s heard so much about coming down to dinner.
But even as she puts on the green halter dress Lily bought for her, she can feel the cold tentacles of Lacey sliding around her ankles.
Ramona
I awaken from my nap by a quarter to four, take a shower to get a fresh start on the evening, then head into the house kitchen to start a simple supper of veggie tacos and strawberry shortcake for dessert. Poppy and Nancy are vegetarians, and I take pride in trying to find excellent recipes for them. This recipe is from the Green Gate Organic Farms cookbook; it uses grilled sweet and hot peppers, onions, broccoli, and squash, with goat cheese. I wonder if Katie will eat them and check to make sure there’s something else for her to eat just in case. Earlier, I made a tomatillo salsa and left it to brew in the fridge.
My mother is the first to arrive, bringing fresh tomatoes from the store and a bunch of cilantro clipped from her garden. She’s wearing crisp capri slacks in lemon yellow with an orange and yellow striped tank. Her earrings are whimsical lemons and oranges that match her bracelet. I wish I had inherited this dressing gene, but I did not. I think of Steph in her turquoise tank and jeans and sandals, her hair cut in a mod, angular style. She’s the one who got it. When we were teens, she was the plump one, always draped in oversize T-shirts and jeans. I can’t remember now when she started looking so together all the time; it’s been long enough that I can’t remember much about her adult self other than this one.
Maybe I am as self-centered as she says I am if I can’t call up her transformation period.
“Cute jewelry,” I say to my mother, hoping to start the visit on a high note. We haven’t really talked since the day she found me in the kitchen with Cat, and I’m irked at her for telling Stephanie, but tonight is not the time to bring that out into the open. I’m jumpy, thinking of Sofia and Oscar and what her news might be, and between those emotions are the juicy plum edgings of Jonah’s arrival in my world.
Which I am keeping to myself.
“Where’s Katie?” my mother says, putting her bags on the counter.
“Upstairs.”
“Good. I’ve been wanting to talk to you.”
“Mom. This is not the time.”
She puts a hand on her hip. “Haven’t you learned one single thing about men all these years, Ramona?”
In a rush, I think of her driving me to Poppy’s house, of her storming into the record store, of a dozen other times she thought the worst of me without giving me a chance to explain. Putting my knife on the counter, I face her, unaware that I am mimicking her posture until I feel my hand on my hip. “Has it ever occurred to you that you could give me the benefit of the doubt?”
She makes a noise that would be a snort in anyone else. “You are going to stand there and tell me that you are not having an affair with Cat Spinuzzi?”