Read Georgia's Kitchen for Free Online Page B

figure out my life. I have a date with a white dress and a judge in nine weeks, with a guy I’m neither sleeping with nor, as it turns out, talking to.”
    Clem put her arm over her friend’s shoulder. “Cheer up, George. Everything will work out the way you want it to. You just have to figure out which way that is.”
    Georgia ate her omelet and left the Dakota, turning down Clem’s invitations for a shopping trip on Columbus or a bad teen movie on Vudu. Walking through Central Park, she settled in front of the William Shakespeare statue on Poets’ Walk. The crocuses had come and gone, grape hyacinths and daffodils pushed through the dirt, the tulips would soon follow. Anything could happen in springtime in New York.
    Fishing through her bag, she pulled out a red leather Smyth-son journal, a Valentine’s gift from Glenn. Thanks to his mother, who basically shopped for a living, Glenn was privy to all thefiner things a girl could want, and generous as well. As Mrs. Tavert said, almost everything worth buying could be purchased at the four Bees: Bergdorfs, Barneys, and Bendels, in that order. Bloomingdale’s, the last of the Bees, was a distant fourth, unless you happened to be on the hunt for an electric toothbrush.
    She scrawled
Pros
and
Cons
across the top of a page and drew a line down the middle. When in doubt, her father, the physics professor, always said, make a list. This was one of the few points on which she wholeheartedly agreed with him.
    Under
Pros
she wrote:
    Smart
    Sexy
    Good hair
    Good in bed
    She crossed out
Good
before
in bed
and wrote
Great,
then added an arrow indicating it should sit before
Good hair.
Still not satisfied, she added, (
when available/in the mood, i.e., never
). Which was actually a con. She crossed it all out, rewrote
Good in bed,
and moved on.
    Successful
    Funny
    Plays guitar
    Athletic
    Good taste (gifts)
    Makes great burger (and steak)
    Loves good wine
    And cocaine, she thought. Which brought her to
Cons:
    Cokehead
    Not trustworthy
    Workaholic
    Sketchy clients
    Doesn’t like my hair/offered to pay for crazy expensive Japanese
    straightening.
    She stopped writing. He sounded like a white-collar criminal who might or might not knock her socks off in bed, feed her a postcoital steak au poivre, then take off for a game of pickup basketball, but not before strumming a ditty on his gee-tar, snorting cocaine from the glass coffee table in her living room, and leaving behind a wad of cash for an overpriced beauty treatment. So much for lists.
    Maybe the coke was just a passing phase. Maybe, as he said, it really wasn’t a big deal. She’d get home and he’d be waiting, and before she could even ask him to stop, he’d say he already had. Then they’d kiss and he’d tell her she was way more important than the coke, or his clients or even his career. She’d believe him… wouldn’t she?
    A sax player wearing dark shades and a tweed newsboy cap played “From This Moment On” and Georgia looked up, taking note of all the happy-looking couples strolling and laughing. Euro tourists, she thought, eyeing one especially stylish couple. Lousy with love, the pockets of their his-and-her Helmut Lang jeans lined with euros just waiting to be spent on fabulous clothes, meals, and shows. She was suddenly desperate for a trip to the Italian countryside she loved, for the rolling, green vistas, the quaint hill towns, the alfresco meals. In between her two years at the Culinary Institute, she’d done an externship in Florence with Claudia Cavalli, the famous chef, unearthing a love of all things Italy. Her last visit there was with Glenn, to the weddingof American friends who were married at the former villa of Dante Alighieri. The couple recited their vows in a garden overlooking the Duomo, and she and Glenn had squeezed hands thinking, next time, maybe us.
    Her eyes grew heavy and she felt a knot in her throat. Do not cry, she told herself. Do not do it. She stared at the elm trees looming