Recipe for Disaster Read Online Free PDF

project, and I’ll probably have to do some quickie cheapo job for one of the cheesy flippers that Mac and Murph always seem to have in their back pocket waiting for me. Barbies at every turn mocking me with their perfect bodies and imperfect grasp of the English language.
    This is my safe place. Everything else goes fuzzy, and my entire focus is on laying this tile. Getting it perfect. Every piece lined up. For three blissful hours my whole life is this floor, and when I lay the final little trim pieces just inside the doorway, I can feel my heart get bigger. I stand, stretch my back, aching from the meticulous work, and pull off my padded knee guards. I’ll come back this weekend to grout once the thinset has cured fully. I take one last look, and then shut down the lights, and head for home.

2

    S omeone isn’t happy with me.
    “I know, I know, I’m sorry, I just got caught up at work,” I say, on the receiving end of a glare that can only be described as steely. “C’mon, don’t be like that.” I reach out my hand for a comforting caress.
    And get it nipped. Not enough to break skin, but enough to send a message.
    “Stupid dog, do you realize you have actually LITERALLY bitten the hand that feeds you?”
    Schatzi looks at me with a withering stare, arching her bushy eyebrows haughtily, and then turns her back to me. I stick out my tongue at her back, and go to the kitchen to freshen her water bowl. Damnable creature requires fresh water a zillion times a day. God forbid a fleck of dust is dancing on the surface, or it has gone two degrees beyond cool, I get the laser look of death. Once there was a dead fly in it, and she looked in the bowl, crossed the room, looked me dead in the eye, and squatted and peed on my shoes. I usually call her Shitzi or Nazi. I suppose I’m lucky she deigns to drink tap water. Our bare tolerance of each other is mutual, and affection between us is nil. The haughty little hellbeast was my sole inheritance from my grandmother who passed away two years ago. A cold, exacting woman who raised me in my mother’s near-complete absence, Annelyn Stroudt insisted on my calling her Grand-mère, despite the fact that she put the manic in Germanic, ancestry-wise. But apparently when her grandparents schlepped her mother from Berlin to Chicago, they took a year in Paris first, and adopted many things
Française
. So Grand-mère it was.
    Grand-mère Annelyn also insisted on dressing for dinner, formal manners in every situation, letterpress stationary, and physical affection saved for the endless string of purebred miniature schnauzers she bought one after the other, and never offered to the granddaughter who also lived under her roof. Her clear disappointment in me must have rubbed off on Schatzi, who, despite having lived with me since Grand-mère died neatly and quietly in her sleep at the respectable age of eighty-nine, has never seen me as anything but a source of food, and a firm hand at the end of the leash. She dotes on Grant, but he sneaks her nibbles when he cooks, and coos to her in flawless French. Sometimes I wonder if the spirit of Grand-mère transferred into the dog upon death, and if the chilly indifference to me is just a manifestation of my grandmother’s continued disapproval from beyond the grave.
    Schatzi wanders over to her bowl, sniffs it, sneers at me one last time for good measure, shakes her head to ensure her ears are in place, like a society matron checking her coif, and settles down to drink. I jump in a hot shower to get the grit off me. I keep my thick, wavy dark auburn hair just above my shoulders, long enough to pull into a short ponytail or messy bun when I’m working, but short enough to not require too much fussing. I’m twisting it up into a towel turban when I hear joyful yipping.
    “Hello, my darling. How are you, sweet girl?” I wander into the living room, where Grant is snuggling the dog, who is submitting to his attentions with clear