Good Enough to Eat Read Online Free Page A

a little silly. “Sisterfriend,” she says to me at least once a day, “at my house, it is going to be fried chicken like the good lord intended. None of this oven-baked-skinless nonsense.”
    All week long there is work to do from sunup till way past sundown, and lovely people to help. There are regular customers to catch up with, and new customers to convert, and bills to pay, and products to order, and precise cleaning to do to keep within sanitation regulations. Occasionally on Wednesday nights there are cooking classes to teach, and on Friday nights there are special events. The other nights there are new recipes to test and perfect.
    But Mondays. Mondays are long. Do the laundry. Change the sheets on the dream bed. Clean the condo that never gets very dirty since I’m at the store six days a week for sixteen hours a day. Go to the grocery store and make sure that the fridge is filled with washed and cut-up veggies, fresh fruit, yogurts, and cottage cheese and easy makings for salads and healthy snacks. Try not to think about what Andrew and Charlene might be doing. What sort of plans they are making, if they are talking about me, wondering if they have spent these last three months in a haze of sex and food and happiness while I have uprooted my entire life. Or rather, while they have uprooted it.
    When Andrew finally confessed that it was Charlene he had fallen in love with, Charlene he had been sleeping with, it doubled the betrayal, made the humiliation exponentially worse. Charlene is the managing partner at the law firm where I worked in my former life as a medical malpractice attorney. The life where I made a substantial six-figure income, was married to the man I thought was my soul mate, and lived in a gorgeous brick house in Lincoln Park that was built in 1872, right after the Great Chicago Fire. The life where I leased a new BMW every two years, put fabulous designer shoes on my feet, and ate whatever my 289-pound self desired. The life where I had ridiculous amounts of energetic sex with a man who reveled in every soft curve of my ample frame.
    Charlene was more than my boss; she was a friend. At about 275 pounds herself, she was my partner in crime, quick with a midday candy bar or cookie, the first to suggest an order of onion rings to accompany the after-work martinis. The one who celebrated every one of our wins and commiserated about our losses by taking us to lunch somewhere decadent, where we would order half the menu on the firm’s generous expense account.
    But when I decided to take control of my eating, to try to reverse the diabetes I had acquired, to ease the pain in my joints, to prevent further health issues and hopefully ward off a heart attack, Charlene pulled away from me. And when I left the firm to go to culinary school, she essentially dropped off the face of my earth. I tried to maintain the friendship, never preaching about my program or even suggesting she make changes herself, knowing firsthand that there is nothing more irritating than someone currently successfully managing her weight trying to get a fat person to drink whatever Kool-Aid is the flavor of the day.
    I even tried to get together with her at nonmeal times so that she never had to listen to me order something healthy and feel pressure to do so herself. Because you know what sucks? Sitting across from little Miss Egg White Omelet with Tomato Slices Instead of Potatoes, when what you want is a stack of pancakes dripping with butter and syrup and a side of sausage. If you order what you want, you feel judged, and if you order something healthy, you feel like a phony, not to mention disappointed. I suggested spa dates instead, afternoon shopping, theater matinees. She found a million excuses to avoid me, and eventually I stopped trying.
    You’d have thought that as I started to shrink, Andrew’s ardor would have increased. After all, while there was less and less of me to love, what was there was more and more strong