Cherries in Winter: My Family's Recipe for Hope in Hard Times by Suzan Colón Read Free Book Online Page A

cheeks and my hair on crooked.
    “Well,
somebody
had a good night,” said one of the editors.
    On a summer evening two years ago, we drove into the city for dinner at Lombardi’s, a pizza joint that’s been serving crispy, thin-crust pies in Little Italy since 1905. We were having a deep discussion about what toppings we were going to get on our pizza when Nathan shut the driver’s side door of the truck and said, “Oh, crap.”
    “What?”
    He sighed. “I just locked the keys in the truck.”
    While we waited for the triple-A guy to come with a slim jim, I had a brainstorm. “Be right back,” I said. Twenty minutes later I returned with a mushroom and olive pizza and a large bottle of soda. We ate one of the most romantic dinners we’ve ever had in the flatbed of the truck, watching the line for tables at Lombardi’s snake around the block.
    For some people, a truck is a convenience forloading groceries and those bales of toilet paper from the box store. To me, our truck was a two-ton metal scrapbook full of our memories and stories. Last fall, after I got laid off, we drove it to my brother-in-law’s house and came home with six thousand dollars to put toward our new health insurance bills. The money we’d save on gas, the garage fee, and having the truck insured and maintained would help out as well.
    “It’s okay,” Nathan said. “You do what you have to do. Besides, the memories aren’t in the truck. They’re in us.”



7

SOUTHERN COMFORT

German Potato Salad
    4 slices bacon
    1 cup diluted vinegar [½ cup vinegar plus ½ cup water]
    ¼ cup sugar
    6 good-size cooked potatoes, diced
    3 onions, diced
    Cut bacon into small pieces and brown in frying pan. Add vinegar and sugar and allow to cook together until heated and sugar is dissolved. Add to cooked diced potatoes and diced onions and allow to heat through
.
    • • •
    AUGUST 1989
    MIAMI, FLORIDA
    “My wife and I don’t get along too well,” the barfly slurred at me.
    I took his empty glass away but didn’t refill it. “You might get along with her better if you spent more time at home instead of here,” I said tartly.
    I was a terrible bartender. The beers I pulled were all foam, the local strippers hated me because I didn’t know they drank two-for-one when they brought in “dates,” and I clearly didn’t have the sympathetic bartender schtick down. Considering that I was tending bar to make extra money, I was obviously in the wrong business.
    But this was during my first recession as an adult, when any job—even the kind I was woefully, horribly unsuited for—was better than none. There was little or no work in my industry, so when my parents announced that they were moving to Miami, I went with them, figuring that I might as well be unemployed in good weather.
    There was even less demand for writers in Florida, so I worked as the receptionist in myparents’ carpet showroom. Each morning I’d get in my car—the one I’d gotten cheap because the A/C was busted—and arrive at the Miami Design Center a few minutes before nine, just enough time to air out the clothes I’d sweated through and get a café con leche. I catalogued berbers and sisals and answered the phone until five o’clock, when I got back in the Schvitzmobile and drove to the fish shack where I tended bar until midnight. Then I’d drive home, occasionally getting pulled over in ritzy Bal Harbour for going over the 35-mile-per-hour limit. I’d explain to the officers that it was because I was falling asleep and that it was a choice between speeding and a collision. They let me go either because I made sense or they felt sorry for me in my Bloody Mary–stained T-shirt and shorts. At home, I’d make a bowl of spaghetti and pour Cardini’s Caesar salad dressing over it, the poor girl’s version of fettuccine Alfredo. And I’d fall across my pull-out couch, which I was too tired to pull out, for four or five hours before getting up to do it all over