Driving Lessons: A Novel Read Online Free Page B

with one hand while patting his pant pockets with the other.
    “They’re in your shirt pocket,” I said, peeking out from behind a paper bag filled with ears of corn.
    “What are?”
    “Your keys.”
    “Oh right, thanks.” He grinned. “Okay, I gotta dash or I’m going to be late for class. Your mom gets in at five thirty, right? Delta?”
    “Last time we spoke, yes.”
    “She’s flying out of Newark?”
    “Yep.”
    “Got it. Text me if anything changes.”
    “Will do. Go! You’re going to be late.”
    “Thanks, Sar. Love you.”
    “Love you too.”
    The door closed behind him and I slowly spun around, surveying my bounty of both space and product. While cooking had held about as much appeal for me as driving stick shift in Brooklyn, here in Farmwood it was a different story. You could have fit six of my former kitchens in this magazine-ready one. It practically screamed for cutting boards and bubbling pots, wine decanters and bowls of gleaming fruit.
    In the middle of it stood an island carved from some beautiful amber-and-mahogany-swirled wood whose name I couldn’t begin to guess, and above it were hooks from which copper pots were supposed to hang. At the moment, our decidedly noncopper pots hung there instead, embarrassed by their own inadequacy. Granite counters and glass-paned cabinets hugged the walls, which were tiled in varying soothing shades of blue, as the appliances quietly hummed in all of their stainless-steel efficiency. Here, I would cook. Or, at the very least, try.
    I began to unpack the bags, marveling at the picture-book perfection of each piece of produce. At my old grocery store in Brooklyn, you’d fight over the one tomato that didn’t appear to have been mauled by cats and were lucky if your lettuce made it home without going limp. To even hope to eat a salad at home, I’d had to either trek to a produce stand a mile away with my trusty grandma cart in tow or fork over a sizable chunk of my paycheck at Whole Foods. Not the case in Farmwood, where the aisles were wide enough to lie down in and the vegetables misted at five-minute intervals without fail. Sure, I was friendless and borderline agoraphobic here thanks to my crippling driving fear, but on the plus side, I was getting all of my daily vitamins and minerals.
    Tonight, my mom was stopping over on her way to Sarasota, which was technically her winter home but was becoming more like her late-summer, fall, and winter home as the years passed. She spent the rest of the time in South Orange, New Jersey, in the home where I had grown up. She and my father had divorced when I was three, and so, save for the occasional summer trip to Los Angeles to visit him, it had just been she and I, bless her poor, battle-scarred heart. I had not been an easy kid. Then again, she had not exactly been an easy mom either.
    Nevertheless, our love ran deep, and it was my master plan to have a delicious meal in the oven when she walked in. I smiled, imagining her reaction. Her version of a home-cooked meal for me growing up was Kraft mac ’n’ cheese with cut-up hot dogs riding its orange waves like tiny pink sailboats.
    I pulled my just-purchased cookbook off the top of the refrigerator and flipped to the recipes I had chosen to tackle for the occasion, losing confidence in my ability to pull them off as I looked through them. What happened to all of this food after it was styled for these shoots? I wondered. In New York, we had done a shoot with avocados for an organic line of moisturizers that we were touting, and by the end of the first hour, each one had turned an aggressive shade of brown. The brisket I was currently admiring seemed a lot less appetizing suddenly. I turned the page to reveal a glistening bowl of spaghetti and meatballs and thought of Mona immediately.
    Mona was a good cook because of course she was. She claimed that it was part of her genetic makeup. When we lived together, she would trot to the farmer’s market on a