Fantastic Cooking for Your Everyday Life
(note: this is only the first few pages of a short story I wrote for one of my fall class, I’ll post the rest if anyone else wants to read it! also, it’s not completely edited for sentence structure and grammar, so ignore my bad grammar)
Ever since his wife passed away George was left to the task of preparing his own meals. The first year after Alice had passed George refused to even eat breakfast since that was Alice’s specialty. His favorite meal that she had always made was Eggs Benedict. George had thought about trying to make them just the way his wife had, but he had no idea where she kept recipe. Alice had had some cookbooks that had been passed down from her Mother, but he had no idea where those had gone to.
George ran a half-priced bargain bookstore a block from his apartment in Brooklyn. The store was on a side street, where hardly any traffic would pass by in a day’s time. The store was a sort of hole in the wall place. It had been owned by George’s father, and George had always hoped to have someone to pass the store on to when he retired. It was a small store in which he hired a local college kid to help him with minimal tasks around the place. One day the college kid called in sick, so George was left with the entire inventory to do. His store was never really busy, people only came in waves. Most were tourists and others usually needed a gift for a sick relative. George had a lot of downtime. This is when he would take a book from each section and read it all the way through. Most might want to read the Times, but he was over newspapers that only had bad things to report. He indulged himself in fiction, biographies, science fiction and fantasy. There was one time when he had been eager to try the comic section of his store, but he never executed the idea.
While doing inventory that day George observed one section of his bookstore that he always had to re-stock. The cookbooks. There was Betty Crocker, Taste of Home, Paula-what’s-her-face-with-the-big-scary-hair-Dean, Julia Child, and more. But the one book that had been completely sold out was Dahlia DuBois’ “Fantastic Cooking for Your Everyday Life”, and she wasn’t even French. George noticed he only had one copy to re-stock, so he flipped through it himself before placing it on the bookshelf. As he was doing so, a bell chimed; it was only the door. A customer had walked in fifteen minutes to closing, and he still had his nose in the cookbook. He shut the cookbook abruptly and set it on the floor.
“How can I help you, Ma’am?” George asked.
“I’m looking for Ms. DuBois’ ‘Fantastic Cooking for Your Everyday Life’ do you have it in stock?” The lady asked.
“Well,” George said; he looked to the side of the store and saw the book on the floor in front of the book cart. “No, actually, we’re all sold out of it at the moment. But if you’d like I can write down your name and number and give you a ring once we get it in stock?”
“Oh, that’s all right. I’ll just look at the other cookbooks, thank you though,” she said, smiling at George with an obnoxious grin.
George realized in an instant that the DuBois cookbook was on the floor right next to the rest of the other cookbooks, and that’s where the lady was headed. He tried to run over and get past her, but he wasn’t as fast as he used to be.
“Ma’am,” George interjected as the lady was about a foot away from the cooking section. “Have you heard about our new biography section? It even has the new one about Michael Jackson.”
“Oh?” she said; her mouth was dragged down in a frown. “No, I hadn’t realized that. Isn’t it just plain awful he had to die so young? What is it with that generation these days, and all those drugs. Good heavens!”
George shrugged his shoulders and casually went around her as she paused at the biography section. He then slipped the DuBois cookbook back onto the inventory cart and wheeled it to the back of the store. After the lady left the store George came out of the back room and purchased the last copy of the DuBois cookbook for himself.
Once he got home George sat down in his leather recliner and popped open his new treasure. The recliner was directly in front of his television, which was usually on at this time of night. Instead, the glow of the evening sun consumed George’s living room as he continued to read the cookbook. That was only the second time he had bought a book from his own store. The first time he bought Gone with the Wind for a young lady named Alice who came in his store every Sunday afternoon just to read it. She said the library’s copy didn’t smell as nice, since her favorite smell had always been a new book smell. George flipped through the different categories of foods– breakfasts, lunches, dinners, desserts, and festive drinks. He went to get his grocery list off the fridge to see if he had any ingredients to make anything. Nothing for dinner sounded any good; neither did lunch… but breakfast. That was his favorite. George doubted the DuBois cookbook could have Eggs Benedict. Alice would always make it in the traditional way with English muffins, Canadian bacon, cheese, eggs and salt and pepper, but she had a trick. Alice would put a slice of tomato on the muffin along with a few pieces of asparagus. It was a southwestern taste she had either made up or received from a family member. Either way, it was his favorite and he had never had it any other way.
While flipping through the last pages of the breakfast section in the DuBois cookbook, George found the eggs section. This is it! George thought, hoping he would find a recipe similar to Alice’s. He held one finger in the pages so he wouldn’t lose his place. With his left hand he flipped back to the table of contents where he saw ‘Eggs’ in bold underneath the ‘Breakfast’ header. His followed the list with his anxious eyes and saw it. Southwestern Eggs Benedict…. Page 45. He eagerly flipped the pages back over to where his finger still held his place and carefully skimmed to find the page number. Once he found 44 he looked to the next page- it read 47. There were tear marks. George had to flip back and forth about six times before realizing the one page he needed wasn’t in the book! Still not believing it, he carefully read every page under the breakfast section, hoping to find something, but had no luck. With that he slammed the book down, and turned on the television. He had only hoped to find that same recipe Alice used, even if it wasn’t the same he just wanted to know how to recreate something that she had made for him. George ended up falling asleep in his recliner to Wheel of Fortune.
