Comfort Food by Kate Jacobs Read Free Book Online

have to go to the gym in the snow. Sometimes, thought Aimee, there were wonderful benefits to living in New York in February.
    She pulled her fluffy duvet up and over her thick, short sandy hair stickingout every which way, and pretended the alarm had never gone off. But just as Aimee was drifting back to much-desired sleep, the loud banging from the hall brought her to wakefulness abruptly.
    Sabrina. It had to be Sabrina.
    Aimee padded out of her bedroom to see her black-haired younger sister scooping up illustrated sketches from atop the dining room table and tryingto stack them in a neat pile. As usual, Sabrina was impeccably dressed, this morning in a lilac suit with a fluted skirt, a sharp contrast to Aimee’s stretched-out and faded pajamas.
    “I thought you stayed over at Billy’s last night,” Aimee said, her face in a practiced neutral expression, as she leaned in her doorway. The best thing about sharing an apartment with a sister who was always playing house with her boyfriend-of-the-moment was that it was almost as though she had a place of her very own. Right now she could feel the tug of her bed, empty but warm, so warm, encouraging her by its very fluffiness to lie down again. Her pillow still had the dent from where her head had been.
    “I did. But I’ve got a meeting in a half hour and I had to come all this way downtown because I forgot my drawings!” Sabrina stopped moving for a millisecond and scowled. “Think you could help me here?”
    “Uh, no,” drawled Aimee. “I’m in economics, remember? More into averting global disaster, not so much the individual issues.”
    “Aimee! If I don’t get this job I’m not going to come up with my share of the rent.” Sabrina didn’t move, confident in the knowledge that money—or lack thereof—always spurred Aimee into action.
    “Do you want some tips about getting it together, little sis?”
    “No, I don’t need you to tell me how to live, Aimee. I need you to help me, right now, for half a minute, to find my design board.”
    “Right.”
    “Have you seen it?”
    “Yes. I left you a message last night telling you it had been abandoned on the living room sofa and that I was going to throw it away.”
    “What?! I haven’t had time to dial my voice mail,” screeched Sabrina. “I can’t believe you chucked my presentation!”
    Once, a long time ago, in the hazy time after their father had passed away and before their mother had a television program, Aimee became so enraged with Sabrina’s side of the room being messy that she stuffed her sister’s European history report down the garbage disposal and turned it on. Bye-bye, Queen Isabella of Spain. Some manner of punishment had resulted—a grounding, or a week without television. Nothing that made the destruction any less worth it, that was for sure.
    Aimee later wondered why it hadn’t occurred to Gus to penalize her where it would have counted. To mess up her tidy side or prevent her from eating her vegetables in alphabetical order. Something that would have had an impact.
    At any rate, the mulching of the paper was one of those instances that immediately became a core family story. The kind that lived on in frequent telling, getting bigger over time, establishing Aimee as the cool cucumber and Sabrina as ... what? The easily crushed tomato? Something that needed special care and attention. A peach.
    Yes, that was Sabrina. A peach.
    Now Aimee watched her sister with an air of detachment, but in her heart she was thoroughly enjoying herself. It doesn’t matter how old one becomes—there remains something splendidly fun about tormenting a sibling.A certain inexplicable rush of power. Enhanced, to be sure, when a parent is nearby, but satisfying all the same. “You should really take bettercare of your things,” drawled Aimee, walking back into her bedroom as Sabrina worked herself into a frenzy.
    “Oh, go save someone who wants it,” yelled Sabrina, following Aimee into her room to