Eating Heaven Read Online Free PDF Page A

foursquare with a remodeled kitchen, not living alone in a one-bedroom apartment that masquerades as a condo. I was supposed to be writing sumptuous cookbooks, throwing lavish dinner parties for intellectual friends, not churning out lighten-up-your-favorite-dish-until-it-tastes-like-cardboard recipes and eating family-size chocolate bars while watching Cooking with Caprial on OPB.
    Our family has disintegrated. My sisters never came home after college. Mom sold our house in Lake Grove when she remarried last year. She and John moved to the bucolic wine country of the Dundee Hills, an hour southwest of the city, full of empty nesters in McMansions, telling themselves that this is living, all right. No kids, no neighbors, no messes to contend with—just the rolling vineyard hills, echoing rooms, and Mount Hood framed perfectly in the picture window.
    Lying in the dark, more alone than I know how to cope with, I feel a shrinking sensation I remember from childhood fevers. I have to open my eyes and draw a deep breath to keep from disappearing, touch my skin to make sure I experience sensation.
    Then I conjure a man in my bed, one who can comfort me with kind eyes and a body large enough to cover mine, and creep my hand into my flannel boxers to make sure I won’t forget pleasure.
     
    Early in the afternoon, my eyes blur with fatigue from staring at the computer screen for three hours straight. I stand to stretch and look out the window, gasping to see the steady rain has turned to snow, covering the grass and bending the daffodils. It figures. We’ve made it all the way through winter without one flake, but now nature has decided that spring is just out of the question.
    I sigh and gather my frizz of hair in two handfuls to tie a knot on topof my head. Then I take a deep breath and pick up the phone to call my editor at Cooking for Life to explain there is no such thing as fat-free Brie. I dial, but nothing happens. “Hello?” I say.
    “Beep, de-goddamn beep. I thought you’d never quit punching those buttons,” Benny says cheerfully.
    “But I didn’t call you, I—”
    “I called you.”
    “Ah. That would explain it.” I settle back. “What are you doing?”
    “Watching it snow. It’s something, isn’t it? I don’t believe it’s ever even sleeted here after the first week of March.”
    “Yeah, it’s pretty strange. Maybe it’s the new Ice Age. Maybe they have that whole global warming thing backwards.”
    “Say, Miss Roosevelt, do you know where I put my reading glasses? I’ve been looking all over for them.”
    Like I’m in the same room instead of a good twenty-minute drive up I-5. “How would I know? Did you look on top of your head?”
    He chuckles. I shake my head. It’s become another of our routines, these phone calls to discuss the minutiae of life. The weather. His neighbors. Local gossip. The weather. These days, my closest relationship is with him, and as much as he means to me, this thought does little to make me feel better about my life. The lack thereof.
    “Heard from your mother?” He slips it into the conversation so neatly that I almost miss the shift in his voice. He hasn’t asked about her in months.
    “Um, no, not in a while,” I lie. It would hurt him even more than me that she’s been sneaking into town. “She’s busy decorating their place. You know how she is—always up to something.”
    I never say the new husband’s name to Benny. The vague “they” and “their” seem kinder somehow. “She’s into that whole French-country thing now, florals and chickens everywhere. God, remember when she made our house all yellow and green?”
    “It was cheerful,” he says, defending her as he always does.
    “Dad hated it.”
    “Yeah, well . . .” Benny says. “May he rest in peace.”
    Or not, I don’t say. I’m not nearly as generous as Benny is.
    “Sure you want to come over today?” he asks. “The roads could get pretty slick.”
    “Of course I’m