Eating With the Angels Read Online Free Page B

through a crack in the curtains, one hand clutching the telephone. You sure as hell didn’t do it out loud in public with your name attached in capital letters.
    My younger brother Emmet got mildly excited when he put together in his pot-addled head that I might one day meet big rock stars with fantastic drug connections, but my dad merely smiled and said, ‘Ah, good on you, darling,’ like he did when I brought in the newspaper or told him I’d pooped the dog, Frankie the first, second, third — briefly — and fourth. (They’d always had dachshunds and they’d always called them Frankie, which I personally thought was a poor choice of name given the typical dimensions of the breed.)
    Even Tom neglected to get wildly enthusiastic about my chosen career path, which was perhaps my fault as I had failed to mention in the decade or so we’d known each other that I wanted to be a journalist.
    ‘But babe,’ he said, worriedly, ‘do you really think you have the killer instinct for all that?’
    ‘For all what?’ I wanted to know. To be honest, I had not thought much further than wearing power suits and going to the Four Seasons to interview important people. Did Leeza Gibbons need killer instinct, for heck’s sake?
    ‘For chasing ambulances and fingering crooks and flushing out mafia goons,’ Tom answered. ‘You do realise that’s what journalists do, don’t you?’
    ‘Of course,’ I answered. When he put it like that, though, I started to wonder if I did have what it took. A crack developed that day in the pitcher of my faith in my professional ability and I’m not sure I ever completely plugged the ensuing leak. Tom sometimes did that, my mom too. Tapped into tiny hidden pockets of doubt that rocked my foundations. ‘I’ll be fine,’ I told him back then, trying to keep the uncertainty out of my voice.
    I suppose I was. Fine, I mean. So, I wasn’t at the top of the class, or even in the middle, but I got by and even managed to put a little bit of money away pulling shifts at Il Secondo, where my boyfriend continued to impress his employer by being more Italian than the Italians.
    Then I got the gig doing restaurant reviews for a giveaway downtown newspaper. The eating-out editor (also the fashion/decorating/automobile editor and advertising sales manager) was an Il Secondo regular and after ’Cesca showed off about me a couple dozen times, he got me to review a slightly unsavoury collection of Thai restaurants in the Village. Next thing you knew, I had a regular job. Of course at $20 a shot, plus expenses, I wasn’t exactly about to retire to a Soho loft but the glow of seeing my name on the pages of a tatty little tome other people were going to pick up and read or wrap their potato peelings in, well, that was worth all the tea in India (the world’s biggest tea-producing nation, by the way, not China).
    ‘Here she comes, our own Lois Lane,’ Pippo would crow when I came into work after that, blowing his basil and oregano breath all over me. ‘Whatcha gonna do with her, Thomas. Whatcha gonna do?’
    I’d smile, slip on my black apron and start chopping scallions, grating Parmesan, doing whatever was needed, even if it meant helping ’Cesca out front of house or stepping in to assist her special-needs nephew Mikey with the dishes. We had fun, back then, in thathot, noisy kitchen, Pippo and Tom floating around the grill and the pizza oven, glowing with heat and happiness at doing what they both loved best.
    Me, I was there because my schoolbooks cost money and other than the guy from the giveaway newspaper, nobody else had offered me a job. And I felt safe with Tom there. And Pippo and ’Cesca watching out for me. College was hard. I felt poorer and dumber and less ambitious than everyone else. I didn’t know exactly what it was I wanted to do and it drove my teachers almost as mad as it drove me. After I graduated and put in a few years doing reviews and other rats and mice, though, I found