How to Bake a Perfect Life - Barbara O'Neal [88]
When the computer comes up, she opens the email from her mother and reads it again. When she first read it, she felt her throat get all clogged up with tears, and it was just depressing—how her mom doesn’t know how to spell, and how she writes everything in capital letters as if she’s yelling. Which is kind of how she is. Noisy. Like a hurricane or a tornado.
What Katie didn’t get until she came here is how nice it can be to have everything all calm and ordinary—reliable. Like right now she could open the cupboard and there would be cereal, and on the counter are some bananas and oranges, and there’s milk in the fridge. A long time ago life was like that, when Katie’s mom and dad were still married, but even before Lacey came back from Iraq as a different person, she didn’t always have that much food in the house. She liked to be skinny and she wanted Katie to be skinny, too, so they would practice going without food for lunch or sometimes dinner.
Katie never liked it. She got too hungry. Even thinking about it now, she gets up and takes a banana off the counter and peels it and eats it just because she can. While she eats, she reads the email over and over.
Her dad is awake, which is a good thing, but Sofia made it sound as if it could be a super-long time before he’s well, which only makes sense.
That made Katie think about where she would be living. It’s one thing to be here with Ramona for the summer, but how can Katie stay here? She thinks again of Lily volunteering to go down to Texas, and the same stupid pang goes through her chest. She is my granddaughter, Lily said. Until then Katie had been thinking maybe she finally had a grandmother of her own, but that was dumb. Why would any grandmother care more about a strange kid than about her own blood?
Katie’s only true blood are her mom and dad. She has to take care of those relationships. This won’t last. She has to keep remembering that.
This. Will. Not. Last.
Clicking the email reply, she writes:
TO: laceymomsoldier@prt.com
FROM: katiewilson09872@nomecast.com
SUBJECT: It’s all good here, too.
Dear Mom,
I loved getting an email from you. It sounds like you’re doing really well, and I hope you can keep getting better and better. I’m working in the bakery, just little stuff, running things from the front to the back, and I get paid for it. It’s not like a real job, because I’m too young, but I like it a lot.
I’ve been learning all about flowers. Dahlias have hundreds of different species, did you know that? And they are so beautiful! Lily, who is Sofia’s grandmother, has a lot of different kinds in her garden. Some have little curled petals and some have spiky petals and they come in every color you can think of. I really like gardening. We have a vegetable garden in the backyard here, too, but I like the flowers best.
I have saved up $20 and can send that to you first thing tomorrow. Please quit smoking! I know it’s hard, but it’s not good for you. Write soon.
Love,
Katie
PS—Dad woke up from his coma, so he’s going to be okay.
Ramona
I’m ready to go way too early on Sunday evening, even after changing my clothes four times and then putting on makeup and changing again. Katie, sitting at the kitchen table to cut out pictures of flowers from a gardening magazine, finally says, “Why are you so jumpy?”
I halt in my tracks, looking down at the fourth shirt I’ve put on, a simple V-neck T-shirt, dark blue to maybe hide the little tummy that pushes over the top of my jeans. “Does this make me look too fat?”
She narrows her eyes. “Kinda. What about the green one you had on first?”
“I like it, but it seems kind of hippie-ish?”
“It’s a good color.”
I inhale and exhale