Italian for Beginners Read Online Free PDF

else, as usual.
    “Why, Miss Connelly!” exclaimed the building’s security guard, Miles, who greeted me each morning. “Didn’t your sister get
     married this weekend? I thought for sure you’d be late getting in today, for once.”
    “Why, Mr. Parker,” I said back, refusing, as usual, to address him by his first name until he addressed me by mine. “I would
     have thought you’d know me better than that by now.”
    He smiled. “That’s true, Miss Connelly,” he said. “I can set my watch by your comings and goings!”
    I laughed, but it sounded hollow to me as I stepped onto the elevator and wished Miles a good day. I knew he was joking, but
     he was right, wasn’t he?
    As I settled down behind my desk in my cubicle on the deserted forty-second floor, his words rattled around in my head.
    Consistent Cat Connelly.
    Consistent.
    Consistent means boring. No surprises. No taking chances. Not a second spent living on the edge
.
    But consistent was good, wasn’t it? It was safe, reliable, predictable. I had always been proud of being that person everyone
     could count on, the one who would always be there, who security guards could set their watches by, who arrived at work early
     and stayed late, who held everything together while everyone around her fell apart.
    I hadn’t always been that way. But after my mother left the first time, it had been survival. The mortgage and the bills still
     had to be paid, food still had to be on the dinner table, the house still needed to be cleaned.
    Becky was too young. Dad was too broken.
    There was only me.
    And there had been solace in the routine and consistency I’d found after my mother left. It was harder to feel sad when I
     had a list of twenty chores and a timetable everyone had to stick to.
    Not that there was anything wrong with that. Indeed, I think it was that attention to detail, that consistent reliability
     that propelled me to straight A’s in high school, a scholarship to NYU, and a stable job as an accountant at Puffer & Hamlin,
     one of the foremost firms in Manhattan. I’d been here for a dozen years now, and every six months, like clockwork, I earned
     reliable performance reviews and a steady raise.
    I supposed that the only flaw in my carefully laid-out life was that I hadn’t seemed to be able to quite figure out dating.
    “That’s because you can’t control people’s reactions and feelings the way you control numbers,” Becky told me once. Easy for
     her to say. She was a giggly, scatterbrained part-time nanny, part-time dog walker who lived paycheck to paycheck but never
     seemed to worry about it. She didn’t exert an ounce of control over her life, and yet things
always
fell into place for her. Her apartment, a dirt-cheap Village walk-up, had practically fallen into her lap, thanks to an elderly
     client whose unit became available the exact week Becky was being evicted from her old place. Every time she lost one nannying
     job because the family moved or the kids outgrew her, another one magically materialized within a few weeks. She’d never gone
     more than two months without a serious boyfriend since she first started dating Jamie Allen in the eighth grade.
    Becky broke all the rules and seemed to be living in a fairy tale.
    I lived by the rules and seemed to be barreling toward a dead end.
    By eleven thirty that morning, I’d hardly gotten any work done, which was unusual for me. Even Kris, who sat in the cubicle
     beside me and had, in the past six years, become my best friend at work, had noticed.
    “Head in the clouds over there?” she asked me with an arched eyebrow as I once again sighed at the computer screen. As usual,
     she was decked out in a brightly colored outfit that looked as if it had dropped straight out of 1969. Before settling down,
     getting married, having two kids, and going into accounting, she had spent the latter part of the nineties waving peace signs
     and doing silent sit-ins in San Francisco.
    I felt