Free In Her Shoes by Jennifer Weiner

meatballs, because I thought Irving would eat that. Sure enough, the chicken was hard for him to chew, so he had my meatballs, which were soft.' " Lewis looked at Mrs. Sobel, who was leaning forward, eyes bright. "See, here's the thing," he said, wondering whether Ben Bradlee and William Shawn had ever had problems like this. "What we're trying to do is be objective." "Objective," Mrs. Sobel repeated. "We're trying to give a snapshot of what it's like to eat at Mangiamo's." She nodded again, confusion replacing the eagerness in her eyes. "So when you talk about the left-hand turn, and how it was difficult to make, or how the way they make their soup isn't the way you make yours . . ." Be careful, Lewis, he told himself, picking up
     
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his pencil and tucking it securely behind his ear again. "Well, those are interesting things, and very nicely written, but they might not be exactly helpful to other people who are going to be reading this and using it to decide whether they want to go there." Now Mrs. Sobel drew herself up straight, a trembling reed of indignation. "But those things are true!" she said. "Of course they're true," Lewis soothed her. "I'm just wondering whether they're useful. Like, the air-conditioning, and telling people to bring a sweater. That's a very, very useful detail. But the section on the soup . . . not every reader needs to see the restaurant's soup placed in the context of your soup." And then he smiled, and hoped the smile would work. He thought it probably would. His wife, Sharla—Sharla of blessed memory, dead for two years—had always told him he could get away with anything because of his smile. He wasn't a handsome man, he knew. He had a mirror, and while his eyes weren't so great anymore, he could still tell that he was much more Walter Matthau than Paul Newman. Even his earlobes had wrinkles. But the smile was still working. "I'm sure that any soup would suffer, being compared to your soup." Mrs. Sobel sniffed. But she was looking decidedly less offended. "Why don't you take this home with you, take another look at it, and try to ask yourself, with everything you're writing, whether it's going to help"—he thought for a minute, then pulled a name out of the air—"Mr. and Mrs. Rabinowitz decide whether to go there for dinner." "Oh, the Rabinowitzes would never go there," said Mrs. Sobel. "He's very cheap." And then, when Lewis was still sitting behind his desk, utterly nonplussed, she gathered her purse and cardigan and the copy of her story and marched grandly out the door, past Ella Hirsch, who was on her way in. Ella, Lewis noticed with great relief, neither trembled or nodded. She wasn't nearly as ancient, or fragile, as Mrs. Sobel. She had clear brown eyes and reddish hair that she wore pulled back in a twist, and he'd never once seen her in polyester pants, which were preferred by most of the Acres's female residents.
     
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"How are you?" she asked. Lewis shook his head. "Honestly, I'm not quite sure," he told her. "That doesn't sound good," she said, handing him her neatly typed poem. Would he have had a little bit of a crush on Ella even if she wasn't the best writer at the Golden Acres Gazette? Probably, Lewis decided. Except he didn't think she was interested. The times he'd invited her for coffee to talk about story ideas, she'd seemed happy to come along, and just as happy when the coffee was gone and she could tell him goodbye. "Thanks," he said, setting her papers in his in box. "So what are you up to this weekend?" he asked, trying to sound casual. "I'm at the soup kitchen tomorrow night, and then I've got two books for the blind to read," she said. It was polite, Lewis thought, but it was still a refusal. Had she read that book that all the women were passing around the pool a couple years ago, the one that talked about playing hard to get and had caused eighty-six-year-old Mrs. Asher to hang up on him, mid-edit, after declaring that