Free How to Bake a Perfect Life by Barbara O'Neal Page A

all she wanted, no matter what, was more crank.
    Katie realizes she is biting on the inside of her cheek again and makes herself stop. Her mom will get better. She’s cleaned up before. Katie can remember how pretty she used to be, when she did her hair and put on lipstick, or even when she was in her dress uniform.
    She lets go of the fists she made and turns around to look for Merlin to bring him inside. He’s sniffing around in the garden.
    Ramona had asked how Katie found him, but Merlin had found her. He just appeared on her front porch a couple of hours after her mom got arrested. Katie saw the police coming and ran out the back door to hide in the alley so they wouldn’t put her in a foster home. When she came back to the house, everybody was gone. She was scared by herself with no electricity,and all she had to eat was a loaf of white bread and a can of Vienna sausages she’d bought with pennies and dimes she scrounged in the gutters. She had no idea what to do. Where to go.
    Then, like an angel or something, Merlin wandered onto the porch and came over to her and licked the tears off her face. She opened the sausages and he ate one, very, very politely, and ate some of the bread, then drank water out of the toilet. She thought he would go then, back to the homeless camps near the railroad tracks, but he didn’t. With a sigh, he curled up next to her and went to sleep. He didn’t even mind that she wanted to hold on to him.
    Now he’s digging a little in the flower beds, and Katie is pretty sure Ramona won’t like that very much, so she walks over and tugs on his collar. “Come on, Merlin. I want to go back to bed.”
    He snorts and sneezes, planting his feet in the dirt so he can keep smelling. “Merlin!” she cries. “Come on!”
    He doesn’t move.
    Behind her, the back door opens. “Katie?” Ramona calls. “Is everything okay?”
    “No! He won’t come in!”
    “It’s all right. I’ll watch him and bring him up when he’s done. You go on back to bed.”
    “That’s okay. I said I would take care of him.”
    Ramona comes outside, wiping her hands on a cloth attached to her belt. “It’s really okay, I promise. We’ve started baking, so I’m awake. You’re a growing girl. You need your sleep.”
    Katie is afraid Ramona will put an arm around her, but she doesn’t. “Okay,” Katie says. “I’ll leave my door open.”

Ramona
      I go back inside to my baking, peeking through the window every so often to keep an eye on Merlin. He wanders the perimeter, noses through the garden, and finally sits with his paws crisscrossed in front of him in the very center of the small square of grass. Moonlight illuminates his white patches.
    “When did you get a dog?” asks Jimmy, an earnest young woman who loves baking bread nearly as much as I do.
    “He belongs to Sofia’s stepdaughter.”
    “Cute.”
    “Yeah,” I say, and oil the loaves on the table, then set them aside to rise one more time. Automatically I glance at the big clock on the wall. “These should go in the oven at five.”
    “Got it. Extra steam?”
    I nod and glance out the window again, but Merlin isn’t sitting in the grass anymore. I lean to one side to see if I can see him along the fence, but he’s not there, either. Frowning, I untie my apron. “I’d better check on the dog.”
    In chef’s clogs, I clump through the back door and down the old wooden steps. “Merlin!” I call, but he probably doesn’t even know that’s his name yet. I whistle, hands on my hips. There are deep shadows under the lilac bushes, and I think I see him inone. “Come on, baby,” I call quietly, mindful of neighbors asleep all around.
    Nothing. The first ripple of concern moves down my spine. “Here, puppy! Come on, Merlin. Where’s a good dog?”
    When he doesn’t come out of his hiding place, I go back inside and get a piece of cheese. All dogs love cheese, according to my sister who doesn’t speak to me anymore. I am the cat