One Day at a Time Read Online Free PDF Page A

interesting question, to which she had not yet found the answer. Maybe because she didn't want to. It was easier to just do what she was asked, especially without Ian to protect her anymore.
    Coco fed both dogs and turned on the TV. She lay back against the white mohair couch and put her feet on the white lacquered coffee table. The carpeting was white too, and made from the hair of some rare beast in South America, Coco vaguely remembered. They had used a famous architect from Mexico City, and the house was beautiful, but made to live in with perfectly combed hair, clean hands, and brand-new shoes. Coco felt sometimes as though if she breathed, she would leave a mark on something, which her sister would then see. It was a lot of pressure living there, and infinitely less cozy and comfortable than being in Bolinas in her “shack.”
    She went out to the kitchen eventually to find something to eat. Since they had left earlier than planned, neither Elizabeth nor Jane had had time to stock the refrigerator for the house-sitter. All she found in it were a head of lettuce, two lemons, and a bottle of white wine. There was pasta and olive oil in the cupboard, and Coco made herself a bowl of plain pasta and a salad, and poured herself a glass of white wine while she was cooking. Both dogs started barking insanely, standing at the windows, while she was tossing the salad, and when she went to see what was happening, she saw two raccoons strolling across the garden. It was another fifteen minutes before the raccoons finally disappeared as she tried to calm the dogs, and by then Coco could smell something burning. It smelled like an electrical fire somewhere in the house, and she ran all over, upstairs and down, trying to find it, and saw nothing. Her nose finally led her back to the kitchen, where the water in the pasta pot had burned away, with the pasta in a thick black crust at the bottom of the pan, and the handle of the pot partially melted, hence the evil odor.
    “Shit!” Coco muttered, as she got the pot into the sink and poured cold water on it, and an alarm sounded somewhere. The smoke alarm had gone off, and before she could call the alarm company, she could hear sirens, and two fire trucks were at the front door. She was explaining what had happened, somewhat sheepishly, as her cell phone rang, and both dogs were barking at the firemen. When she answered, it was Jane.
    “What's happening? The alarm company just called me. Is there a fire in the house?” She sounded panicked.
    “It's nothing,” Coco said, thanking the firemen as they got back on the truck and she closed the front door. She had to reset the alarm and wasn't sure she remembered how to do it, but didn't want to admit that to Jane. “It's no big deal. I burned the pasta. There were two raccoons in the garden and the dogs went crazy. I forgot I was cooking.”
    “Christ, you could have burned the house down.” It was after midnight in New York, and the strike had been averted, but Jane sounded exhausted.
    “I can always go back to Bolinas,” Coco volunteered.
    “Never mind. Just try not to kill yourself, or set the house on fire.” She reminded Coco how to reset the alarm, and a minute later, Coco sat down at the island in the center of the pristine black granite kitchen and ate the salad. She was hungry, tired, and homesick for her own house.
    She put the bowl in the dishwasher, threw away the pot with the melted handle, turned off the lights, and only when she got upstairs to the bedroom with both dogs following her did she notice that one of the lettuce leaves had stuck to the bottom of her running shoe. She lay on the floor of her sister's bedroom, feeling like a bull in a china shop, just as she did every time she came here, as inept as she always had whenever she was in her sister's orbit. She didn't belong here. Finally she got up, took her shoes off, and collapsed on the bed. As soon as she did, both dogs leaped onto it with her. Coco laughed