Good Enough to Eat Read Online Free

addiction to live with. If you were an alcoholic and someone said to you that you were required to have a single drink three to five times a day every day, but were not supposed to ever drink to excess, or a drug addict who was required to take just one pill several times a day every day, but you’re not supposed to ever take more than that . . . no one would ever make it through rehab.
    “You’re doing great,” Carey says. “I’ll send you an e-mail about our major stuff from today. Keep up the good work, and don’t forget to call or e-mail me if you have any questions.”
    “Thanks, honey.”
    “Thank you! Great session today. I’ll talk to you in a couple of weeks.”
    “Okay, Carey. Talk to you later.”
    I hang up the phone and stretch my arms above my head. I head to the bathroom, where I throw my thick, straight chestnut hair into a ponytail to get it out of my way. I wash my face carefully, my skin being my one vanity, and slide a lightly tinted moisturizer on, surprised as I am every day to find that I own cheekbones, and have only one chin. A coat of mascara on my lashes, making my slightly close-set gold-flecked hazel eyes look bigger. This is as cute as I intend to get today. I check my watch. Eleven a.m. A long day stretches ahead of me. I know I should love Mondays, my one day off, but they always scare me a little bit. Especially since Andrew left me on a Monday. I always wake up feeling like something bad is going to happen, like a Vietnam flashback. Tuesday through Sunday I’m up at five for a forty-five-minute workout, and am in the store by six thirty. By the time I open the doors at eleven, Kai and I have cooked in a frenetic burst of energy, and the cases are full of delectables.
    Half Japanese, half African American, and only twenty-two years old, Kai was the star of our graduating class from culinary school. He has better knife skills than anyone I have ever seen, and a cutting wit to match. And along with Carey has kept me sane and functioning these past weeks. Not only did he come sit with me that horrible day, which he refers to as our Abominable Snow Day, but he also essentially did all the heavy lifting at the store for the first week while I walked around in a numb haze, burning things and giving people the wrong items. At the end of that week he came over after work, made me pack a bag, and forced me to move in with him and his boyfriend, Phil, a successful trader. Phil pays the bills, but is out of the house from about five in the morning till about three in the afternoon, which was why Kai could afford to take the job with me for essentially minimum wage, since it is only six hours a day, and only four days a week. On Tuesdays and Saturdays I have an extern from the culinary institute: every other month a new fresh-faced budding chef to train, currently a slightly dim thirty-year-old former dental assistant named Ashley who thought cooking would be more fun than poking around people’s mouths all day, and forgot to find out if she had any real passion for food.
    In the afternoons and on Sundays I have Delia, who lives in the women’s shelter up the block. It’s part of a job-training program they started with the local business owners. Delia escaped her abusive husband in Columbus, and a sort of Underground Railroad for battered women moved her to Chicago for her own safety. New in town, with no contacts, she has been living in the shelter for the past nine months. When she started taking over in their kitchen, the shelter volunteers recognized her love of cooking, and approached me about the program. I pay her minimum wage on weekdays and time and a half for the Sunday hours. She’s a homegrown soul-food goddess who learned at her grandmother’s knee, and it’s been a struggle to hamper her desire to cook things in bacon fat, but she works like a dog and is a fast learner, and reluctantly admits that the food tastes good, even if she thinks the whole idea of cooking healthy is