The Love Wars Read Online Free PDF

one understands what it takes to make it except those of us going through it.” Lillian grabs a roll from the middle of the table, tears off a bite-sized piece and dabs it in the sterling silver bowl to soak up the remains of the dressing. “This dressing is delicious. Don’t you think? I taste—a cheese? Parmesan? Pecorino? Can you tell?”
    I dab a piece of lettuce in the dressing and put it in my mouth thoughtfully.
    Lillian grabs my arm. “Molly, I’m so glad you’re on my team. You’re going to fit right in, I can tell.”

3
    ____
a forced chance meeting
    T wo months after starting in the matrimonial group, I’ve taken my first Saturday out of the office. After sleeping in, I meet my best friend, Duck (née Caroline Duckworth), and her husband, Holt, at a Chinatown restaurant that’s equally inconvenient to their home in Brooklyn and my Hell’s Kitchen apartment.
    “I can’t help it. It looks so bad but it tastes so good,” Holt says, reaching for the gelatinous pumpkin custard. He successfully spears a rectangular piece with his chopsticks, bringing the quivering mass up to his mouth and chomping off half.
    “So, Molly,” Duck says, “our Aspen trip is definitely on. We rented a house.”
    “A sick house.” Holt’s mouth is full of food. “You should come out.”
    “Thanks, but no way I can take time off now.”
    “Not now. In February. Who goes to Aspen in November?”
    I let out a low whistle. “You rented a whole house in prime ski season? How much does
that
cost?”
    Holt, a bond trader at Goldman Sachs, does his best impression of a discreet smile. “A fair amount. But it’ll be totally worth it.”
    “Is Duck planning on skiing?” I laugh. “Because it might be worth it just to see that show.”
    When Duck and I met during freshman orientation at college, she was probably the thirtieth person that asked where I was from. She was definitely the first who hugged me after I told her, though. “Oh, me too, me too, fellow Tar Heel,” she had said, “and between you and me, it makes me a little nervous to be surrounded by all of these Yankees.”
    Of course Duck, whose daddy was a banker in Charlotte, was from what I thought of as the Real South, where they actually used terms like Yankee. In Duck’s North Carolina, the girls were butter blond, giggly and befrocked; the guys were tall and broad, with perfectly broken-in baseball caps. There were debutante parties, gently twanged
y’all
s, large stately homes, beach houses and sweeping magnolia trees. My North Carolina was much less frilly: vacations working at Cheddar and Better, the kitchen shop that my parents own; uniforms of jeans, sweats and hoodies; drives into Chapel Hill to hang out at a record shop or on the UNC campus; and sneaking into Cat’s Cradle to hear an under-the-radar hipster band.
    But there was something comforting about our common roots when compared to the East Coast kids at our tiny college in western Massachusetts who knew nothing about hush puppies, real barbecue or the art of superficial courtesy.
    Duck smiles. “The beauty of Aspen is that you don’t need to ski. There’s plenty to buy there.”
    “You said you’d take a lesson.” Holt points his chopstick at her.
    “I said I
admire
people who take lessons,” says Duck.
    As they discuss the finer points of ski instruction, I look at the table next to us. Six couples are enjoying a rowdy meal, all of them in their late twenties or early thirties. Before the others had joined them, one couple—she with short red hair and dangly earrings and he with an eggplant-colored shirt—was alone at the table, sipping tea and arguing intensely. As I waited for Duck and Holt to arrive, I’d caught snippets of their fight, which,based on how many times I heard the terms “shopping addiction” and “cheapskate assholery,” was about finances.
    When their friends arrived, Eggplant and Dangly Earrings both pasted smiles on their faces, but now midway through the