He lowered the blinds and drank the wine, and brought himself off again and again, and ate two more cupcakes, detecting peppermint in them, a faint buttery peppermint, before he slept.

[...] he suspected that the minimum price of further conversation with her would be an overpriced lunch of mesquite-grilled autumn vegetables and a bottle of Sancerre for which he had no conceivable way of paying.

In Denise's kitchen, after shopping, she peeled potatoes immaculately or rolled out simple doughs while the cook contrived lagniappes for a child's palate: wedges of pear, strips of homemade mortadella, elderberry sorbet in a doll-size bowl of elderberry soup, lambsmeat ravioli Xed with mint-charged olice oil, cubes of fried polenta.

She'd quit school and worked to save money for a year, had taken six months in France and Italy, and had returned to Philly to cook at a thronged fish-and-pasta place off Catharine Street.

She taught them how to make spinach pasta and how to tango.

"There's a poached salmon in the fridge. A crème fraîche with sorrel. A salad with green beans and hazelnuts. You'll se the wine and baguette and the butter. It's good fresh butter from Vermont."

The first lie Julio told Emilia was that he had read Marcel Proust. He didn't usually lie about reading, but that second night, when they both knew they were starting something, and that that something, however long it lasted, was going to be important, that night Julio made hos voice resonant and feigned intimacy, and said that yes, he had read Proust, at the age of seventeen, one summer, in Quintero. At that time no one spent their summers in Quintero anymore, not even Julio's parents, who had met on the beach at El Durazno, who went to Quintero, a pretty beach town now invaded by slum dwellers, where Julio, at seventeen, got his hands on his grandparents' house and locked himself up to read In Search of Lost Time. It was a lie, of course: ha had gone to Quintero that summer, and he had read a lot, but he had read Jack Kerouac, Heinrich Böll, Vladimir Nabokov, Truman Capote, and Enrique Lihn, and not Marcel Proust.

That same night Emilia lied to Juliofor the first time, and the lie was, also, that she had read Marcel Proust.

Lucille: Vladimir, it's the owner! She wants us to come eat! Vladimir: Well, sure. Of course. We paid for meals! Lucille: But don't you see! I can't! Did you see how fat she was? Her food has to be loaded with calories! Vladimir: Just eat however much you want. No one's forcing you to clean your plate. Lucille: But she'll be offended! Cooking must be her whole life! She's a mom... and Italian mom, get it?

I stayed for two weeks but I missed Monroe and my city and my mom and so even though I was sad to leave Charlie I was ready. I had started counting off the time until my return on the second day when the garbage smells rose up like monsters while we went to buy oranges, milk, and conrflakes at the corner market. My father's appartment felt cramped and hot and I longed for Los Angeles with its smog and flowers.

We had gnocchi and ravioli, Indian curries and samosas, pork buns and chow mein.

I wanted to make pancakes, bacon, and scrambled eggs for dinner. Sometimes it cheered me up to eat meals at the "wrong times." Maybe my mom would eat some, too.

In the morning I went to the grocery store to make pasta with pesto sauce and a spinach salad with walnuts and dried cranberries and balsamic vinegar from a recipe I'd found in the one old cookbook that hadn't been totally ruined in the fire when I was a kid. I found an old damask tablecloth and set the table with roses and candles and our best dishes. Then I put on a waiter jacket I had found in a thrift store and invited my mom to dinner.

Bobby didn't say anything. He went into the kitchen and came back with a large green apple and a cup of peppermint tea with lemon and honey.

To cheer myself up about not owning a dog, I went to Will Wright's and got a pistachio, chocolate, and strawberry ice-cream-cone – my own Neapolitan mix.

I thought at the time that the ocean was the best backyard anyone could ever have – so vast and alive and musical, always changing colors, always singing different songs. We ate little pieces of raw fish and candied ginger and my parents had cocktails and wine.

In the same way I ate a double-scoop pistachio-and-cherry ice-cream cone and then had popcorn and a large Sprite at the movie theater where we saw Young Frankenstein for the second time. My dad guffawed but I just sat there chomping on popcorn and rolling my eyes along with Igor. But still I wanted more. [...] After the movie we went to Café Figaro for dinner. It was dark and there was sawdust on the floors and we ate bread and soup and the waiters were very beautiful young men in white button-down shirts.

Charlie escorted me inside and we sat down under the wooden birds and ate the ornage sticky buns the rastaurant was famous for, as well as turkey dinners with pressed turkey and cranberry jelly and mashed potatoes.

Going out to eat was one of our favorite things to do together. When I was a little he liked to take me to Norms Coffee Shop for hamburgers and vanilla shakes that we ate in the vinyl booths, or we went to Ships where you could make your own toast in the toasters at your table. We had ice-cream cones at Wil Wright's ice-cream parlor in Hollywood, with the striped awning and the parquet floor. We drove all the way out to the Valley to Farrell's where they made a huge ice-cream birthday concoction called the Zoo that was covered with little plastic animals. The waiters, dressed in boater hats, striped shirts, and suspenders, ran around the restaurant honking horns until they arrived at your table to sing "Happy Birthday." There was also something called a Through that was so big you became an honorary pig for the night if you ate it all by yourself.

Butterfield's was a sunken garden at the bottom of the stair, like someone's run-down mansion where you could have elegant brunches with quiche, fresh fruit, and champagne among lacy trees.

When I checked on my mom she was asleep, breathing normally in the bed with the blue satin quilted headbord, so I got myself a bowl of Lucky Charms. The pink hearts, yellow moons, orange stars, and green clovers ached my molars as the milk turned rainbow colors. I made my lunch, brushed my teeth, and put on my roller skates. The pavement rumbled, rough under my feet and up through to my heart, as I skated to school past the palm trees that my dad said looked like stupid birds, under i smog-filled Los Angeles.