A Second Bite at the Apple Read Online Free PDF

we’re calling in the troops,” she says. “Bar Pilar is running some sort of blizzard special on beers for happy hour. Meet me there in twenty minutes.”
    â€œBut I . . .”
    â€œAh, ah, ah—no objections. You’re coming. End of story.”
    I contemplate interjecting with one more halfhearted protest, but I realize there is no point. Heidi will come to my apartment and physically drag me to the bar if necessary—probably by my hair, as she has done before—and in one day, there is only so much humiliation a girl can take.
    Before I leave, I poke my head into the refrigerator to see if there is anything I can eat before I meet Heidi, since continuing to drink on an empty stomach will surely end in disaster. My choices consist of the following: a container of two-week-old Chinese leftovers, some bottles of mustard and ketchup, and several half-eaten containers of fruit preserves. I’m not sure what I expected to find. Ever since I landed a job on The Morning Show, work has consumed most of my waking hours, and I barely have time to do laundry, much less cook.
    I haven’t cooked much since Zach and I broke up, anyway. Cooking was our thing. Even if it was just a bowl of spaghetti and box-mix brownies, we would try to make dinner together every weekend in high school. Zach’s mom, Alaine Pullman, is a famous Philadelphia caterer who regularly put on events for the mayor and other local celebrities, so while she was out on Saturday nights preparing filet mignon and arugula salads for Philadelphia’s finest, Zach and I would raid her well-stocked pantry and whip up our own mini feasts. I developed an early fondness for candied walnuts and a definitive aversion to stinky cheese and learned there is, in fact, such a thing as too much cheesecake and that amount is equal to three slices. We made our own fun, even when that fun involved breaking a bottle of his mom’s truffle oil from Piedmont, an incident that was not without consequences.
    Once we left for college, seeing each other became more difficult, with him in New Jersey and me in Illinois, and our dorm kitchens lacked the swanky equipment and ingredients of his parents’ kitchen. But we tried our best to make it work, even toward the end, when his heart wasn’t in it anymore. The last meal we cooked together, on the night everything went wrong, was spaghetti carbonara, and to this day the smell of crisping bacon makes my stomach turn.
    I slam the refrigerator door shut and decide I’ll buy something at Bar Pilar, where the offerings will be more appealing than Chinese leftovers that smell like roadkill. I throw back one more airplane miniature of gin, pull on my coat and boots, and stumble woozily down the front steps, where once again I run into Simon, who is now beating our bushes with a meat mallet.
    â€œUm . . . Simon?” I watch as he thrusts the tenderizer into the bushes again and again. “What are you doing?”
    Simon whips his head in my direction, his vaguely rodent-like eyes glassy and pink. “Saving them.”
    â€œSaving . . . whom?”
    â€œThe bushes,” he says. “This snow and ice will kill them. There’s too much of it.”
    â€œOh. Right. Do you need my help?”
    He turns away from me and rattles the mallet around in one of the bushes. “No.”
    I wait for him to add a “thank you” or a “thanks for the offer,” but he doesn’t. “Well . . . have a nice night,” I say.
    And as I push past him onto Swann Street—me unemployed and soaked in gin, him beating at a bunch of shrubs with a meat mallet—I wonder which of us is the sadder case and how the contest ever got this close.

CHAPTER 5
    The one-block walk to Bar Pilar requires the physical exertion of a two-mile hike, mostly because I am slightly buzzed from the gin and the sidewalks are covered with about four feet of snow. I have no idea how I’ll