Comfort Food Read Online Free

hovered.
    “Mom? The table?” her daughter had said.
    Ah, yes, the table. Sabrina’s display had been the one element of discord in a perfectly arranged tableau: it was clearly unacceptable.
    Gus had opened her mouth to tell Sabrina to clean up the mess she’d created. To go upstairs, change out of the clothes she was wearing and put on something decent. To go find her sister and tell her to get ready.
    The words had been all ready to tumble out. Even without seeing herselfshe could feel the frown, her furrowed brow. How many times had Gus criticized Sabrina and Aimee? Change your clothes, turn down that music, tidy up your room, don’t leave wet towels on the floor. She, like all mothers of teenagers, had keenly felt her transformation into a walking cliché, as so many of the little issues that had seemed trivial and fuddy-duddy when she was young had stretched to matters of tremendous importance. A widow with two daughters, no less. Turning lights out when she left a room. Wearinga sweater instead of turning up the heat. Using a coaster on the coffee table. Eating leftovers. It was paying the bills that did it. Changed her perspective.Suddenly everything had mattered.
    Every thing mattered. Even the table setting. She knew it had to be fixed.
    But then she had caught the look of anticipation on her youngest daughter’s face. The wide eyes, the mouth slightly open, just enough to catch the glimmer of her metal braces. Her heart caught in her throat: Gus had assumed the sad little decoration on her table was a way for Sabrina to make clear how little she cared about Gus’s career. But could her daughter have been trying to help? she’d wondered.
    At precisely that moment, Aimee had slouched into the room, alerted, no doubt, by the radar all kids have when they sense—hope—their sibling is about to get in trouble. What is it about family that makes them close ranks to outsiders but attack one another with impunity in private? Thinnerand two inches taller than Sabrina, her light brown bangs dyed pink from Kool-Aid, fifteen-year-old Aimee grinned slyly as she saw her mother frowning at the table.
    “Nice!” Aimee said, catching her sister’s eye, gesturing toward the stone-feathercombo. “Mom’s totally going to throw that away. It’s not perfect. And Gus Simpson doesn’t do anything that’s not perfect. Right, Mom?” Then Aimee shifted all her weight to one hip, as though standing up straight would take too much effort. She waited.
    Sabrina waited.
    Gus hesitated as her mom side duked it out with her career side.
    “I think Sabrina’s arrangement is lovely,” Gus declared. “It’s very modern,very sleek. It stays on the table.”
    Aimee rolled her eyes.
    “Shut up, Aimee, it’s a very karma design,” shouted Sabrina.
    “I think you mean Zen, dear.” Gus smiled, recalling Sabrina’s huge ear-to-ear smile, the silver braces gleaming on her teeth, her sweet blue eyes wide and shining. It was the right choice, even though she’d felt a twist in her stomach when Mr. Holt, the CookingChannel president, had looked questioningly at the table as he sat down. But Gus had made no apologies, aware of Sabrina hanging on her every word, and in fact praised her daughter’s creativity.
    “Part of being a good host is to let everyone feel they’ve played a part,” she’d told him with confidence that spring day long ago.
    Mr. Holt, a divorced father, had nodded thoughtfully. “You’re just the type of person I’m looking for,” he announced. And by the end of cake, Gus Simpson—an unknown gourmet-shop owner without a cookbook to her name—had been asked to host a few episodes on the fledging cable channel.
    Sabrina’s display, it turned out, had been karma after all.
    And voilà! A few years on TV’s CookingChannel and she became an overnight sensation. That was the thing with all that “overnight” business: it typically took a lot of work beforehand.
    And now here she was in 2006, the very heart