Comfort Food by Kate Jacobs Read Free Book Online Page A

continue their fight.
    With a sigh of exasperation, Aimee pointed to her closet. Sabrina turned her head; there, against the open door, lay her black microfiber portfolio case. Aimee nodded. Quickly Sabrina picked up the case by the handles and walked out of the room, then made a concerted effort to slam the apartment door. Nearly impossible with a door that had a hydraulic cylinder but Aimee gave her mental points for effort.
    She waited until the door had closed, locked it, then headed to the bathroommirror.
    “You’re kinda rotten as a big sister, you know that?” Aimee told herself. Her reflection stuck out its tongue in reply.
    It had been a miracle to get a cab and Sabrina knew it. As soon as a few drops of rain or snow fell, New Yorkers rushed to hail the nearest yellow taxi and gloat through their car windows at the suckers still on the street. And that morning’s sprinkling of snow had resulted in a veritable cab desert. But Sabrina lucked out when a patron pulled up to her regular corner. A lot of New Yorkers work the corners, of course, sticking day to day with a location they believed, based mainly on gut instinct and experience, worked best to get a taxi. And if Sabrina had a religion, its main belief was to avoid publictransportation at all costs. (“I don’t believe in being underground,” she’d explained to Aimee about a thousand times.) On the mornings she woke up at the Tudor City apartment she shared with Aimee, she walked up three blocks and crossed the street to her lucky corner. If she found herself at Billy’s Upper East Side condo, then she went to Ninety-sixth and Second; the year before, when she’d been dating Troy, she would stroll over from his NoLita walk-up to flag at Mercer and Houston. That had been a good spot, near Troy’s place.
    Taking taxis was one of the reasons she shared an apartment with Aimee instead of getting a studio of her own: Sabrina needed the disposable income to make sure she had cab money. After all, in the first few years after college, when she was interning and working as an assistant, there had been barely enough money for her MetroCard. But there was no going back once she’d landed a few interior design gigs of her own and savored how good it could be to be driven around. Her not-so-secret goal was to eventually work her way to having her own car and driver. A lofty ambition, to be sure, but one well worth the hours she was putting in. Her boyfriend of four months, Billy, had been complaining about how much she worked, in fact. Sabrina could just imagine Aimee’s reaction.
    “You?” Aimee would say. “Someone thinks you’re working too much?” And she’d laugh in that superior way of hers.
    Had it always been like this? She had a memory, more a gut feeling than anything else, of happier days. And certainly her mother, Gus, insisted there had been a time when the two of them were as thick as thieves. Generally, though, Sabrina could only remember arguments and hair pulling and being ignored at school. Even though she’d had a large circle of friends, it bothered her then—and it bothered her now—that Aimee seemed to find it a burden to be around her when other people were present. The simplest thing could set her off on a tear, such as the time Aimee mulched her history paper in the garbage disposal. Queen Isabella of Spain down the drain. That’s what Aimee had said: Queen Isabella of Spain down the drain.
    Their mother hadn’t done anything about it, either. Just tried to smooth it over as she always did. Making things just so was very important to Gus. She expected a lot from her girls.
    Sabrina quickly unzipped her portfolio case, just to reassure herself that it was all there. That Aimee hadn’t actually thrown away her work or tried to put it in the blender or the oven. She felt around with her fingers, peeled back the cover a few inches. Everything was in its right place. With a few extra pens tucked into a pocket that had been empty