Free Comfort Food by Kate Jacobs

in the Meatpacking District. He made a point to spend time with the Simpson ladies, enjoying lazy Sundays up at Gus’s house in Westchester while she tossed together a sumptuous roast beef dinner, even going so far to ingratiate himself as to set up an ill-fated double date between his business partner and Sabrina’s sister. In Troy’s mind, Aimee was the anti-Sabrina, all dourness and disgruntlement. To his surprise, his business partner dated Aimee for several weeks before they parted ways amicably.Some people had strange taste, that was for sure.
    But all of that was mere detail in Troy’s quest to make himself indispensableto Sabrina. He wanted her to need him. But for all of her cheeriness and laughter, Sabrina remained mysteriously unlike any of the girls he’d known before. She was remarkably unperturbed if he failed to call on time, for example. Or he could spend an entire long weekend with her and then not get a reply to his “had a great time with you” email until Wednesday. It was maddening.
    Of course, they’d had all the proper conversations in due course—just the nuts-and-bolts sexual history, no need for the hows and how-was-its—and Troy, so convinced of their particular and unique bond, hadn’t even been alarmed to learn that Sabrina had been engaged to more than one man in the preceding three years. It made perfect sense when she told Troy that those relationships just didn’t feel right and that she’d brokenthem off; perfect sense, of course, because clearly she’d been waiting for Troy.
    So, to his way of thinking, he hadn’t had any warning on the day Sabrina called him from Gus’s house and said she would be taking the train back to the city and would he meet her at their favorite brunch spot? He remained confused when she told him she’d stopped off at her apartment to collect his toothbrush and his clothes. He felt numb as she handed over a paper Whole Foods bag with his shirts, neatly folded one atop the other, and his toothbrush,wrapped in tissues, sitting on top of the pile. The bag still had a faint scent of fruit. Then she said it.
    “You’re a great guy, Troy. Let’s be friends.”
    And she didn’t stop smiling the entire time.
    After that, Troy was more than ready to say goodbye to the whole lot of Simpsons. He’d never, in all his thirty-four years, been dumped before. (Eleni Dicoupolous from eleventh grade did not actually count, in his opinion.) It’s not that Troy had been a player; he’d had a number of perfectly nice girlfriends with whom he’d had perfectly nice relationships. They all pretty much ran their course. But with Sabrina it had been completely, inspiringly different. Somehow all those stupidly popular song lyrics finally made some sense.
    But there was a teeny little glitch in his quest to cut all ties with Sabrina. Because Gus Simpson believed a fresh fruit vending business—with machines in airports, in schools, in workplaces—was a thing of brilliance. And a few months before the breakup, back when he imagined Sabrina was going to become Mrs. Park soon enough, it hadn’t seemed unusual at all when Gus approached him to buy a stake. After all, she’d simply been investing in her daughter’s future, and what entrepreneur couldn’t use extra funding and the backing of a popular CookingChannel TV host?
    Exactly.
    Now he was stuck with regular inquiries from Gus—and she was on her way over for yet another visit. He’d never expected her to take such an interestin how things were going. And not merely with his company.
    Troy opened his bottom left drawer and pulled out a yellow nerf ball, one of several nesting in his desk. With precision he tossed the ball high into the air, up and on its way across the room, waiting to see it swoosh through the small net. Once Sabrina had taken herself out of the picture, Troy went out the very next morning and put basketball hoops in every office and a pool table in the conference room. With a wooden board on