Comfort Food Read Free Page A

comprehend the bad that could come. Would come.
    The tiny place had been home with their two little girls, and Gus had tried out a variety of careers—taking photographs for the local paper, doing part-time camera work for the local cable station, and making a line of homemade candles—while baking cupcakes for Sabrina and Aimee’s school and carpooling the neighborhood kids. Still enjoying the luxury of figuring out what she wanted to do.
    Christopher’s accident had changed things, of course, spurred her to open The Luncheonette, which attracted the attention of Alan Holt and his cable network. Gus’s little restaurant, in Westchester County, just north of New York City, specialized in quick bites and tea parties and the like. She was close enough to the station that commuters popped in for beverages and snacks before catching a train. The decor—bright and light with distressed off-white tables and comfy Parsons chairs upholstered in a wide red-and-creamstripe—had been spruced up to lure in the soccer moms with time between errands and school’s end. The small but thoughtful selection of gourmet groceries was selected to entice the adventurous home cooks, both the commuter and soccer mom variety.
    It had been a gamble when she opened, a chunk of her late husband’s life insurance money dwindling in a bank account and her two young daughters.It seemed as though running her own business would provide her the type of flexibility she needed with two young girls, and she’d always loved to cook. Loved to experiment with flavors and cuisines and making things look pretty. Her friends, though well meaning, disapproved, encouraging her instead to invest and live off the interest. But there wasn’t really enough to quite do that, and besides, Gus had wanted the risk. She needed the jolt.
    However, taking chances did not translate into being sloppy. No, indeed. And meeting with Alan Holt was a tremendous opportunity she couldn’t afford to screw up. She had, in fact, served him several pastries and more than a few sandwiches, never knowing him as more than a regular customer. Until the day he handed her his card and suggested he wouldn’t be averse to a home-cooked meal over which they could discuss a business proposal. Gus’s fervent hope had been that he was interested in showcasing The Luncheonettein an episode or two.
    She remembered vividly when Alan came for dinner in the spring of 1994, when Aimee and Sabrina were both young teens and she was a harriedsingle mom, still keenly missing Christopher though he’d been gone six years by then. It was as though she’d hit the “hold” button on her life when he died, waiting for something she couldn’t quite place her finger on that might make it somewhat better, and had instead filled up her days with working and organizing her girls. She hadn’t much energy left over, which had been her intention. Just enough to wish for the ability to provide her daughters with the life their father would have wanted for them.
    All Gus had asked the day Alan Holt came for dinner was to be left alone in the kitchen and for her girls to go out and cut some flowers. Somethingbright and cheery they could bring to her so she could do up a vase. Her oldest daughter, Aimee, had promptly walked outside to the back patio and flopped into a wicker chair, arms crossed, while Sabrina slowly wanderedoff through the front door, with a look Gus couldn’t discern between sulking and concentration.
    In fact, Gus had been quite prepared for the girls to come back empty-handedfrom the garden and had put together her own centerpiece hours earlier, working efficiently while her just-turned-into-teenagers slept away a gorgeous sunny Saturday morning. She’d tucked her arrangement onto a shelf above the washing machine, knowing her girls were hardly about to go near anything that seemed like a chore. Her request about gathering flowershad really been a mother’s trick to get the kids out of her