Too Many Cooks Read Free Page B

don’t like it, the sandwich is on me. Sound like a plan?”
    He smirked, his eyes sparkling. “Sounds like a plan.”
    Long story short: He liked the sandwich.
    But more than the sandwich, he liked me. And I liked him. He had a gentle touch and an easy smile, and he was studying to become a doctor. Some of my friends heard the word “doctor” and saw dollar signs, but that wasn’t the main attraction for me. What I saw was someone with discipline, diligence, and drive, three attributes neither of my parents had ever had. Anyone who could study hard enough to get into medical school and then survive four years of exams and overnight shifts—not to mention cut open a living person and sew her back up—was probably someone who wouldn’t flake out and leave me standing on the side of the road.
    And I was right. Sam is as steady as a metronome. He pays his bills on time. He never runs out of toilet paper. He does his own laundry and stacks his T-shirts with the folded side facing out. I never have to worry that I’ll come home like I did in the fifth grade and find a lake-size puddle in the middle of the living room because there was a thunderstorm and he left all of the windows open. He is dependable. Consistent. Predictable.
    That also means he has never booked a last-minute trip to Barbados or played hooky from work so that we could catch a movie or have a picnic in the park. We’ve never dropped everything because we were suddenly craving tacos from a Mexican joint on Chicago’s South Side or bought a new TV on a whim. We never have sex on a Tuesday. Everything in our lives is planned and steady and.. . well, after six years, a little boring. Boring, just like my mother said, which is why her words gnaw at me the entire three-and-a-half-hour drive back to Chicago, stirring up doubts I’ve tried to silence.
    I shake off those doubts as I park the car beneath our apartment building, a twenty-six-story tower of glass and steel perched on Chicago’s famed Lake Shore Drive. The building was designed by Mies van der Rohe, which had appealed to my inner art history nerd when Sam showed me the apartment two summers ago. We’d been living in Chicago since he started his residency at Northwestern four years earlier, but now that he was doing his fellowship there as well, he wanted something closer to the hospital. I couldn’t believe I was seeing the work of one of the architects I’d studied in college and, improbably, might also call that building my home. The lease was only for two years, but Sam said that was fine because in two years we might be ready to buy a place of our own. The idea scared me a little, but I told myself I had more than 730 days to get comfortable with it. Well, here we are, two years later, and I still haven’t set up a time to meet with a realtor. Buying seems so . . . permanent. Technically we have until July to find a place, but given that it’s already mid-April, I’m not sure how much longer I can stall.
    I take the elevator to the eighth floor, and when the elevator doors open, I toddle with my suitcase toward our apartment at the end of the hallway and let myself inside, knowing Sam will still be at work until at least eight tonight.
    As soon as I open the door, I take a whiff: Pine-Sol. Sam must have cleaned the apartment last night before going to bed. Because he knew I would be emotionally drained when I got home and wouldn’t want to do it myself. Because he thinks of things like that. Because he’s perfect.
    I dump my suitcase in our bedroom and make my way to the kitchen, a small galley lined with gray-and-white granite countertops, espresso-colored cabinets, and stainless-steel appliances. As much as I was attracted to a building designed by a famous architect, the kitchen is what sold me on the apartment. It isn’t big—with only one bedroom and a small living room, neither is the apartment—but